a case study in language revival failure

Corpus ID: 155449874

Modern Irish: A Case Study in Language Revival Failure *

Published 1995
Linguistics, Political Science

22 Citations

The 23rd language: official eu status for irish as portrayed in the republic of ireland's english-language press, irish language and public broadcasting (特集海外の語学教育事情), language maintenace in the malozi community of caprivi, learning a strange native language, novel approaches to contemporary minority language revitalization, revitalization “handbook”: mapping language classifications, goals, and methodologies, re-inventing hawaiian identity conception of ethnicity and language in the language revitalisation movement, language vitality: the weak theoretical underpinnings of what can be an exciting research area, the use of irish in networked communications: a study of schoolchildren in different language settings, the dynamics of language minorities: evidence from an agent-based model of language contact, 11 references, modern irish: grammatical structure and dialectal variation, buried alive: a reply to (reg hindley's) 'the death of the irish language', the death of the irish language, a view of the irish language, the irish language, related papers.

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Language Shift and Language Revival in Ireland

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a case study in language revival failure

Regina Uí Chollatáin

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Revivalists faced a momentous challenge to achieve the aims of a bilingual Ireland, reinstating the spoken Irish language, and adapting it to urban structures of ‘the worlds of commerce, politics, official religion, the professions and printed word’, from which it had been banished ‘as a result of complex socio-economic and political circumstances’ (Daly and Dickson 1990: 12). The use of the public sphere of the media was important in creating a forum for public discourse in Irish while many campaigns within the movement brought issues to light which helped to reinstate the language to some degree. Despite the success of these endeavours, the aims of a bilingual Ireland were not fully realised. Scholarly research on the Gaeltacht areas and on new speakers has brought both encouraging issues and some concerns to light, 1 while much important work has also been undertaken to give an overall view of the successes and failures of the revival movement. 2 It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully assess all these issues conclusively and indeed to fully evaluate the results of the Irish language revival. However, an examination of the revivalist ideology and the forums and methods used to promote that ideology are helpful in an analysis of linguistic change in Ireland.

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Structural Approach to Language Revitalisation: Revival of Aanaar Saami

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Chollatáin, R.U. (2016). Language Shift and Language Revival in Ireland. In: Hickey, R. (eds) Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453471_8

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Language revitalization.

Aidan Pine Aidan Pine University of British Columbia
, and Mark Turin Mark Turin University of British Columbia
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.8
Published online: 29 March 2017

The world is home to an extraordinary level of linguistic diversity, with roughly 7,000 languages currently spoken and signed. Yet this diversity is highly unstable and is being rapidly eroded through a series of complex and interrelated processes that result in or lead to language loss. The combination of monolingualism and networks of global trade languages that are increasingly technologized have led to over half of the world’s population speaking one of only 13 languages. Such linguistic homogenization leaves in its wake a linguistic landscape that is increasingly endangered.

A wide range of factors contribute to language loss and attrition. While some—such as natural disasters—are unique to particular language communities and specific geographical regions, many have similar origins and are common across endangered language communities around the globe. The harmful legacy of colonization and the enduring impact of disenfranchising policies relating to Indigenous and minority languages are at the heart of language attrition from New Zealand to Hawai’i, and from Canada to Nepal.

Language loss does not occur in isolation, nor is it inevitable or in any way “natural.” The process also has wide-ranging social and economic repercussions for the language communities in question. Language is so heavily intertwined with cultural knowledge and political identity that speech forms often serve as meaningful indicators of a community’s vitality and social well-being. More than ever before, there are vigorous and collaborative efforts underway to reverse the trend of language loss and to reclaim and revitalize endangered languages. Such approaches vary significantly, from making use of digital technologies in order to engage individual and younger learners to community-oriented language nests and immersion programs. Drawing on diverse techniques and communities, the question of measuring the success of language revitalization programs has driven research forward in the areas of statistical assessments of linguistic diversity, endangerment, and vulnerability. Current efforts are re-evaluating the established triad of documentation-conservation-revitalization in favor of more unified, holistic, and community-led approaches.

revitalization
colonization
globalization
British Columbia

1 Introduction

To make sense of the many varied paths that language revitalization is taking across the globe, it is necessary to first contextualize the root causes of language endangerment. The very use of the prefix ‘re’ in words such as revitalization, rejuvenation, revival, and resurgence points to the undoing of some past action or deed (Glass, 2004 ). Namely, if the world’s linguistic diversity had not been “devitalized” to begin with—through colonization, imperial adventure, war, and forced migration—there would be less need for historically marginalized languages with ever-dwindling numbers of speakers to be “revitalized” today. The work of language revitalization is inherently multidisciplinary and very often political, with long-range cultural and social goals that extend beyond the immediate task of generating more speakers. Through illustrative examples and case studies from British Columbia, Hawai’i, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), this contribution demonstrates that language revitalization programs are as much focused on decolonizing education and plotting a path toward self-determination as they are directed at reclaiming grammar and speech forms.

More nuanced techniques for evaluating progress and success in language revitalization efforts have emerged from a deeper understanding of the distinct goals of individual revitalization projects. Methods include quantitative scales backed by international non-governmental organizations, tracking and status reports on linguistic vitality and speaker numbers from governmental organizations as well as broader social scientific investigations into correlations between community health, well-being, and language vitality. The next steps will involve developing evaluative criteria that are grounded in local understandings of impact and success, rooted in the lived experiences and aspirations of Indigenous communities. Language revitalization, driven by the crisis of language endangerment, is a dynamic subfield experiencing rapid growth, with the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders in considerable flux. Through an inclusive understanding of the sociopolitical, historical, Indigenous, 1 and academic contexts that shape language revitalization projects, collaborative and productive relationships between language communities, governments, and academics are emerging, breathing renewed life into historically marginalized languages across the globe.

2 Marginalization and Devitalization of Language

2.1 sociopolitical context and colonial policy.

Statistics and enumeration aside, endangered languages and the communities that speak them are under extreme stress. Even conservative estimates paint a picture of near-catastrophic endangerment levels, with half of the world’s remaining speech forms ceasing to be used as everyday vernaculars by the end of the 21st century (Krauss, 1992 ). The pressures facing endangered languages are as severe as those recorded by conservation biologists for flora and fauna, and in many cases more acute (Sutherland, 2003 ). Yet linguistic endangerment is by no means a natural or inevitable process, the unfortunate by-product of modernization. Rather, the marginalization and erosion of local and Indigenous languages is the direct result of colonization and the racist policies that accompanied it. Across the world and through a variety of efforts that have included education initiatives, punitive legislation, and intentional neglect, colonial authorities have instituted language policies that sought to weaken traditional cultural ways, assimilate Indigenous populations, and gain access to their land and resources.

Conscious that “language is the perfect instrument of empire” (Morris, 2003 , p. 103), the architects of colonial advancement were highly effective in using language to underwrite the success of their imperial ventures. Although Indian residential schools in Canada, American Indian boarding schools in the United States, native schools for Māori in New Zealand, and Christian missionary schools in Hawai’i were governed and shaped by diverse motivations, they were united by a prejudiced belief that Indigenous languages were backward, primitive, and incompatible with modernity and Western values. Richard Henry Pratt ( 1840–1924 ), founder and long-time superintendent of the influential Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, summed up this prevailing sentiment when he pugnaciously proposed that the government must “kill the Indian … to save the man.” In such schools, the goal was for English (or another colonizing language such as French, Spanish, or Portuguese) to overwrite local languages and for Western Christianity to supplant Indigenous belief systems and traditional ways, thus forcing the dislocation of Indigenous peoples from their land, territories, and systems of traditional knowledge and governance. Colonization did not always come from the outside or lead to permanent settlement; some nations were internally colonized and then subjugated by their own elites, who then advanced, as in the case of Nepal, a single state-sponsored language and religion in the name of unification and nation building (Turin, 2006 ).

Colonial authorities used the power of language and the language of power to further their own strategic ends. In some cases, and seemingly paradoxically, this involved supporting Indigenous languages; in most cases, however, they sought to erode them. In the first instance, believing in the inherent superiority of Christian theology, many missionary linguists focused on translating scripture into Indigenous languages. In Papua New Guinea and other regions of the Asia Pacific, scholars and administrators actively strengthened Indigenous languages through standardization programs that involved grammatical descriptions and the compilation of dictionaries and other pedagogical tools (Wurm, Muehlheausler, & Laycock, 1977 ). The goal—in many cases—was for local languages to be harnessed to transmit and disseminate an imagined Christian modernity. In other instances, as in Canada, settler-colonial authorities observed the unique relationship that existed between a language and the land on which it was spoken and focused their attention on breaking this apart by destroying the language and forcibly relocating communities far away from their traditional territories.

To this day, Indigenous communities around the world make use of traditional place names to ascribe current or historical meaning to places and spaces that are locally resonant and historically important. Such toponyms often encode lived experience and traditional ecological knowledge in an ancestral language in a way that is almost impossible to translate into a more dominant national or international language. By disconnecting the language traditionally used to refer to a specific site, and by introducing new place names in a colonial language (the terms “New Zealand” and “British Columbia” serve as enduring examples), the relationship that local peoples have with their land was rendered more opaque and attenuated. Having weakened this connection to land, the colonial goal of relocating communities in order to extract resources from their territories became more achievable.

In the 1800s, a range of legislative provisions were introduced throughout the colonized world that sought to justify colonial expansion through the advancement of colonial languages. Passed in 1835 , the English Education Act required that all government funding for education and literature in British India be dedicated to the development of the English language, diverting resources away from critical and widely used languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, which had been previously supported. The tabling of this Act reflects a wider imperial linguistic agenda that would have long-lasting implications across the world. Politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay ( 1800–1859 ) lent his name to the now infamous “Macaulay Minute” in which he asserted that it was “no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England” (Macaulay, 1835 ). By the middle of the 19th century , the educational goals of the British empire had solidified: an education administered in English was understood to be inherently superior to any training, understanding or knowledge that could be derived from another language, particularly languages spoken beyond the boundaries of Western Europe. The formalization of this formulation had an immediate and devastating impact on Indigenous languages across the colonized globe: the Canadian residential school system was established soon after, in the 1840s, while in New Zealand, the Native Schools Act mandated an English-only approach to education starting in 1867 (Simon & Smith, 2001 ). Beneath the thin veil of education and “civilization,” such schools were a means to eliminate Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation building (Woolford, 2015 ).

Yet, for as long as efforts have existed to impose colonial languages on Indigenous peoples as a means of reshaping their identity, these same processes have been vigorously opposed by speakers of these languages. Anti-colonial opposition to externally imposed language policy takes many forms, from active resistance to passive non-compliance. Everyday forms of resistance have included the direct avoidance of colonial education programs by concealing children and evading census enumerators to more contemporary and structured efforts at language revitalization and reclamation. The emergence of the Caribbean linguistic mosaic can be seen as an anti-colonial response predicated on “the need to speak and not be understood by the downpressors (slave masters, elite of society)” (Barcant, 2013 , p. 51). Viewed in this light, the creation of a patois/patwah or creole/kweyol can be read as a linguistic manifestation of a moral objection to the imposition of a hegemonic identity advanced by an imperial state, a perspective further substantiated by the Métis of Canada, who “moulded the aboriginal and settler languages into coherent patterns which reflected their own cultural and historical circumstances” (Michif Languages Conference, 1985 ).

The long march toward decolonization continues. In 2015 , the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released its report detailing the history of Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences through the nation’s residential school period that lasted from 1883 to the late 1990s. The TRC heard over 6,000 testimonies and affirmed that “[t]hese residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015 ). Noting the many brutal and dehumanizing mechanisms that supported, funded, and sanctioned the institutionalized neglect of Aboriginal children, the TRC proposed a list of recommendations and calls to action that would set Canada on a path to reconciliation for the terrible wrongs committed during this period. Relevant to language revitalization are clear suggestions and proposals on how to shape a national language policy in a manner that would address the impact of over 100 years of language policy that prohibited and punished the use of Indigenous languages in residential schools. The TRC report offers five tangible recommendations that include the creation of an Aboriginal Languages Act, the introduction of an Aboriginal Languages Commissioner at the federal level of government, and an acknowledgment that Aboriginal rights include rights to speak and preserve Indigenous languages. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the government of Canada has pledged to implement each point in the TRC’s Calls to Action (Statement by Prime Minister, 2015 ). While Canada is internationally celebrated for its official language policy in which French and English—both languages introduced by colonial settlers—are placed on an equal footing, it is worth noting that not a single language Indigenous to Canada has “received” national recognition.

Overall, to make sense of contemporary efforts to revitalize Indigenous languages, it is essential to understand the political and historical context that has shaped their marginalization. Revitalization would not be needed had these languages not been asphyxiated to begin with. The growing recognition of the legacy of colonial oppression of Indigenous languages has also motivated a realignment of the discourse around language endangerment. The majority of languages spoken across the world have endured punitive policies that actively sought to eradicate them. Their continued use to this day—even if only by a handful of speakers in some cases—is indicative of the resilience of communities in the face of continued oppression. Commonly used terms that highlight the “endangered-ness” of a language—we may think of words such as “weak,” “loss,” and even the word “endangered” itself—overrepresent diminishment and underrepresent the resurgent strength of communities of speakers who have never stopped using their ancestral languages. Furthermore, the currency of terms such as “vanishing” and “disappearing” not only forecloses the possibility of revival and renewal but communicates an apparently agentless process in which language loss is both inevitable and naturally occurring. Such terminology both effaces the intentionality of colonial policies that legislated marginalization and undermines the efforts of those working to reclaim their languages. When speaking and writing of “endangered languages,” then, it is crucial to remain attentive to the words that are used and to seek balance in highlighting ongoing community revitalization efforts on the one hand, while historically contextualizing the increasingly vulnerable state of most Indigenous languages on the other.

2.2 Measuring Language Endangerment, Revitalization, and the Effects of Language Loss

As strategies for language revitalization deepen and widen, the techniques used to evaluate success and impact must become both more grounded in community goals and better informed by analytical rigor. The urgency of the work of language revitalization further requires that communities be expedient and efficient in their application and choices, a process that can be aided through robust and comparative data. Language communities are in the best position to identify the language revitalization-related questions that they need research to answer, and care must be taken to avoid positioning them as competitors with universities for funding resources and visibility.

A widely used and highly regarded method for gauging the status and prospects of a language is the UNESCO Language Vitality Assessment (Figure 1 ; Brenzinger et al., 2003 ). This tool advances a holistic approach for measuring linguistic vitality that draws on multiple elements, since “no single factor alone can be used to assess a language’s vitality or its need for documentation” (Brenzinger et al., 2003 , p. 7).

Figure 1. A visual representation based on the UNESCO Language Vitality Assessment (from Brenzinger et al., 2003 ).

In this assessment, nine factors are evaluated on a 5-point scale, with the exception of the second component, which records the absolute number of speakers. The UNESCO approach does not advocate an even weighting across all indicators and rather proposes that elements should be weighted according to local community norms. While this assessment tool provides an accurate snapshot of the overall health of a language, its adjustable framework makes it harder to compare vitality—and in turn language revitalization programs—cross-linguistically.

The 13-stage Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) (Lewis & Simons, 2010 ), used by the popular if historically problematic Ethnologue (Dobrin, 2009 ), offers a standardized approach for evaluating the vitality of a language that allows for simple comparisons with other languages spoken and signed around the world. The scale ranges from 0 (International) to 10 (Extinct) and is often portrayed as in Figure 2 , where the x -axis represents the EGIDS level, the y -axis represents native speaker population, and the plotted points represent individual languages. Through a search function on the Ethnologue website, individual languages can be highlighted on the graph.

Figure 2. An EGIDS graph with the yellow dot showing Gitksan (Tsimshianic) (from Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2016 ).

Too often, however, metrics such as the EGIDS are used to represent the absolute success (or failure) of a revitalization program, failing to capture the significance of the additional cultural goals that such an intervention might carry. While the primary aim of most language revitalization programs is to increase the number of fluent speakers, as well as the proportion of semi- or partial speakers within the greater population, these are not the only goals of community-led language reclamation programs. Bearing in mind the historical context described in section 2.1, and recalling the central relevance of language to many other aspects of community well-being, the transformative healing nature and holistic benefits of language revitalization have much wider impact and relevance than linguistic vitality alone (Whalen, Moss, & Baldwin, 2016 ). Underscoring the interrelatedness of language and community well-being, a recent Canadian study showed a compelling correlation between Indigenous language use and a decrease in Aboriginal youth suicide rates in British Columbia (Hallet, Chandler, & Lalonde, 2007 ). Such statistical research helps to highlight the multidimensional nature of language revitalization and its cross-sector impact on the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous communities.

Accordingly, the question of what constitutes “successful” language revitalization may need to be re-evaluated (Hinton, 2015 ). Conventionally, the absolute number of fluent speakers of a language remains the most discernible factor that is tracked and measured, but language revitalization projects that focus on creating a cultural context for more semi-speakers can have equally important and lasting impact. Community-led language revitalization projects that prioritize youth engagement with traditional cultural and environmental knowledge may be as much focussed on sustainable well-being as they are on grammar, words, and orthographies.

Honesty about what counts as success and how it can be measured is an important aspect of planning a language revitalization project and can also help to guide curricular decisions in the classroom. The structure of any language revitalization program must be driven by the goals of the language community in question. Only once these are discussed and articulated, through a process of community-directed planning and consultation, can appropriate evaluative metrics be developed. The Mentor-Apprentice program focuses on bringing dedicated individual learners to a high level of fluency through intensive exposure to their ancestral language in whatever way is most culturally salient and appropriate. This effective and intentionally small-scale, personalized, and grassroots approach embodies the belief that language revitalization happens one speaker at a time (Hinton, 2001b ). Since its inception in 1992 by the Native California Network (Hinton, 2001b , p. 219), the Master-Apprentice (and later Mentor-Apprentice) program has spread across the United States as well as internationally in Australia (Olawsky, 2013 ) and Finland (Olthuis, Kivelä, & Skutnabb-Kangas, 2013 ).

Inspired by the Mentor-Apprentice program and by accessible handbooks such as Bringing Our Languages Home: Language Revitalization for Families (Hinton, 2013 ), written for a community audience, speakers and learners have felt empowered to bring ancestral languages back into their lives. Organizations such as the First People’s Cultural Council (FPCC) in British Columbia provide funding and administrative support for Mentor-Apprentice partnerships, helping to alleviate some of the financial burden associated with the substantial commitment of time and resources that such partnerships require. Whether highly structured and systematic, or informal and community-directed, Mentor-Apprentice programs assume a definition of success that is predicated on an individual learner’s ability to become proficient and ultimately fluent in a language. It should be noted that resource intensive Mentor-Apprentice programs focussed on individual partnerships can be antithetical to the mandates of policy makers and governmental granting bodies, whose funding modalities are usually driven by a conviction that impact can be maximized by ensuring the widest possible access.

With language revitalization increasingly situated as an expression of self-determination and political empowerment, some language communities are developing a terminology for discussing endangerment and revitalization that is in itself empowering. One example is a movement to refer to languages without any current L1 (native or first-language) speakers as “sleeping” rather than “extinct” (Hinton, 2001a ). While the distinction might appear unnecessary or even naively aspirational to researchers not closely involved in such work, all terminology has both symbolic value and political impact. The biological extinction of a species has a mono-directional finality that linguistic “extinction” does not. As Indigenous linguist Wesley Leonard poignantly notes, “the paradox of speaking an extinct language is not imaginary” ( 2008 , p. 28). The designation “sleeping” rather than “extinct” points to the potential of a language to be reclaimed and revived after it has lost its remaining L1 speakers—an opportunity that is not available to the dodo or a dinosaur. While bringing a language back from sleeping to having a community of fluent speakers is a phenomenon that has been uncommon in human history, there are recent examples, such as the remarkable and compelling case of the Wampanoag (Algonquin) language, which was sleeping from the late 19th century until revitalization efforts resulted in fluent child speakers of the language in the 21st century (Makepeace, 2010 ).

When active language planning and restoration is effective, as in the case of the development of modern spoken Hebrew following the establishment of the state of Israel, it is often the result of a combination of historical motivation, political self-determination, cultural revival, and community mobilization. Even so, there are notable characteristics that appear unique to languages that undergo a successful transition from sleeping to awake. This is certainly the case with modern spoken Hebrew, which “is based simultaneously on ‘sleeping beauty’ / ‘walking dead’ Hebrew and ‘máme lóshn’ (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to Israeli, and a plethora of other tongues spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s, e.g. Russian, Polish, Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Turkish, German, French and English” (Zuckermann & Walsh, 2011 , p. 114). Even in the event that a language is effectively revitalized, the resulting speech form will inevitably have been shaped by language contact and by the mother tongue of the revitalizers themselves. In some cases there is resistance to such adaptation within speech communities: elders may find it hard to accept a new and changed linguistic reality, perceiving the revived language to be a hybrid amalgam or simply incorrect. Linguistic authenticity remains a pervasive notion in which “the supposed ideal is intergenerational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained, thus creating unrealistic expectations among the Aboriginal community” (Zuckermann & Walsh, 2011 , p. 113). While the achievement of establishing modern Hebrew is beyond doubt (Spolsky, 1995 ), it is by no means the only effective language revitalization effort. For peoples like the Myaamia (Algonquin), who have no first language speakers left, “the ultimate goal of this work is to eventually be able to raise our children with the beliefs and values that draw from our traditional foundation and to utilize our language as a means of preserving and expressing these elements” (Baldwin, 2003 , p. 28). Rather than some ideal, end-state fluency, it is the sustained effort of communities that shape and determine the goal and success of any language revitalization project. As all who are engaged in language revitalization can attest, the work is never complete: success starts when revitalization efforts begin and doesn’t end until efforts themselves cease (Hinton, 2015 ).

3 Language Revitalization: Goals and Examples

As a practice, language revitalization takes many shapes. Some of the earliest language activists were the children and students who, risking corporal or psychological punishment, continued to speak their languages in residential and boarding schools and at home with their families. Since the retraction of explicit bans on speaking Indigenous languages in public in many countries, some of which have only been lifted within the last few decades (Anchimbe, 2006 ; Bulcha, 1997 ), language revitalization has become noticeably less subversive. Many language revitalization programs now receive support from band councils, non-governmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, and even governmental bodies and programs.

Much of the language activism witnessed in the mid-to-late 20th century in Anglo settler-colonial contexts such as Canada, the United States, and Australia focused on the development of orthographies (writing systems) and lexicography (dictionary compilation) projects. While the latter continues, the former—at least in Canada and the United States—is now mostly complete, although substantial disagreements exist within speech communities who may be divided by competing writing systems (see Hinton, 2014 ). There are notable exceptions to the historical trajectory outlined above. The Māori have made good use of a practical orthography since the early 19th century ; the Canadian syllabary for Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan languages was in active use from the mid- 18th century ; and the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah (ca. 1770–1843 ) has been used from the very early 19th century . Developing and standardizing practical writing systems continues to be a central focus for many recent language revitalization projects across South Asia, Africa, and Oceania, where a vast number of Indigenous languages are still spoken and the structures and patterns of colonial government were quite different from North America and Australia, leading to distinct post-colonial legacies.

In continental North America, following the development of orthographies, beginner dictionaries became the focus for many language revitalization initiatives, alongside the introduction of teaching curriculum for a number of languages including Gitksan (Tsimshianic), Kwak’wala (Wakashan), Inuktitut (Inuit), and Cree (Algonquin) (Barnett, Seymour, & Raine, 1975 ; Cree Productions, 1973 ; Jensen & Powell, 1979 ; Kativik School Board, 1979 ; Powell, Cook, Cranmer, & Jensen, 1981 ). In parallel, immersion schools and language nests were becoming the focus of Indigenous revitalization movements elsewhere, including the pūnana leo in Hawai’i (Watson-Gegeo, 1989 ) and kōhanga reo in Aotearoa (also known as New Zealand) (Hohepa, 1984 ), from which the English term “language nest” derives. Since the 1980s, the visibility and impact of the Hawaiian and Māori initiatives have inspired other language nest–style immersive language programs around the world.

Initiated as a response to concerns that Māori youth had inadequate exposure to their language through the growing dominance of English, the kōhanga reo program sought to provide an immersive environment for Māori children to gain early exposure to, and receive education in, Māori. Over 450 kōhanga reo programs have been established throughout Aotearoa serving children from birth to age six. There has been a significant drop in enrollment since a peak in the 1990s. In 1996 , 46.3% of Maori children were enrolled in kōhanga reo as compared to only 20.4% in 2009 (Statistics New Zealand “Maori : Growth in early childhood education,” 1996 ; New Zealand Childcare Survey, 2010 ). While this drop is of concern to many language activists in Aotearoa and beyond, it still represents an unparalleled level of access that Māori children have to immersive Māori language early childhood education as compared with the opportunities available for speakers of other endangered languages.

Building on the success of the pre-school kōhanga reo programs, primary ( kura kaupapa Māori) , secondary ( kura tuarua ), and post-secondary ( wananga ) Māori immersion school programs were developed, all of which support Māori community members in accessing a comprehensive education shaped by Indigenous Māori cultural and linguistic values (Hingangaroa Smith, 2003 ). Part of the success in implementing this integrated program for so many students across all ages, aside from the unflagging dedication and commitment of the Māori people themselves, can be attributed to the wider geographical and linguistic landscape of the region in which Māori is spoken. Māori is the principal Indigenous language of Aotearoa (a number of other languages are spoken outside of the main islands, such as Penrhyn [Tahitic]), and standardization occurred relatively early. The result is that curricula and legislative efforts have been concentrated in a way that is hard to imagine in linguistically diverse regions like California or British Columbia, let alone resource-strapped Nepal or Papua New Guinea. The reduced linguistic diversity that is more common in island-states appears to provide a strategic advantage for revitalization efforts in terms of resource allocation and perceived impact.

In some language communities where orthographies have either not been standardized or remain in dispute, revitalization strategies prioritize spoken competence and oral transmission over classroom instruction that focuses on writing and texts. The Accelerated Second Language Acquisition (ASLA) method, developed by Dr. Stephen Greymorning, encourages learners to rely on visual and pragmatic cues to learn language and is particularly popular among Indigenous communities in North America. Similarly, the Where Are Your Keys (WAYK) method has been used widely and combines various gestures and techniques to keep learners communicative without relying on using English or their mother tongue. The WAYK technique has been used by Indigenous language communities across Canada and the United States, including Unangam Tunuu (Aleut), and even for spoken Latin.

Influenced by the success of kōhanga reo in Aotearoa, the Secwepmec (Salish) community of Adams Lake founded the Chief Atahm Immersion School in 1991 . The school offers immersion programs for children (birth to age five), part-time language classes for grades four to nine, and community language classes for adults. The Chief Atahm Immersion School makes use of a technique known as Total Physical Response (TPR), which relies heavily on somatosensory stimulation to promote language learning. Chief Atahm Immersion School is the first Indigenous language immersion school in British Columbia, but not the first in Canada, with the Mohawk (Iroquoian) language immersion program in Kahnawake, Quebec, dating to 1979 . The Mohawk program took its cue from French language immersion programs which were gaining momentum in the 1970s as a part of Quebec’s assertion of a Francophone identity. While impressive and certainly effective, immersion programs are not one-way tickets to native levels of fluency. Immersion programs operate best when there are sufficient extracurricular environments in which students can interact in and use the language during play and everyday communication. The dominance of English in the wider environment that surrounds many immersion programs often affects a learner’s ability and desire to speak the language outside of the immersion setting and can even influence a learner’s acquisition of the immersion language. Preliminary research demonstrated that a learner at Chief Atahm School was overregularizing her use of independent pronouns in Secwepemctsin (a polysynthetic language) under the influence of her extracurricular exposure to English (Lai & Ignace, 1998 ).

Other grassroots language reclamation programs have few resources and no formal support. Every day, across the world, informal classes and gatherings at homes, community halls, churches, and schools bring together people who are interested in learning or relearning their languages. Sometimes these programs are taught by L1 speakers, while other times they are led by very committed student learners or semi-fluent speakers. Combining a mixture of curriculum developed by the Paul Creek Language Association and Darrell Kipp’s controversial advice about language revitalization, 2 language activist and educator Michelle K. Johnson, together with four dedicated students, created their own immersion class. For five months, located at a remote site along the Canada/U.S. border, they spent a strict eight hours per day immersed in the Nsylxcin language (Salish), including 20 hours a week of active curriculum learning (Johnson, 2012 ). According to levels set by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, after emerging from this intense and intensive form of immersion, each of the learners had progressed from being a complete non-speaker to attaining a low-intermediate conversational level. While the Nsylxcin immersion program was intentionally more vigorous than most grassroots community language revitalization initiatives can afford to be, it represents what can be achieved with little formal or institutional support.

Increasingly, universities and colleges are offering courses in Indigenous languages, often in collaboration with the Indigenous communities on whose territory the institution is located. Across North America, language activists and teachers are developing curricula that adhere to the second-language requirements of their respective school districts. By developing curricula within these guidelines, courses may be eligible for second-language accreditation toward high school students’ graduation language requirements. A case in point is the long-standing partnership between the Musqueam Indian Band and the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program (formerly the First Nations Languages Program) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Initiated in 1997 as part of the university’s commitment to community-based collaboration with First Nations peoples, the primary purpose of the partnership has been to promote the development and use of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the Musqueam Central Coast Salish language, through collaborative research and teaching initiatives. In the nearly two decades since it began, this collaboration has produced several formal research papers, a series of elementary resource books, and a full complement of text and interactive online materials that support four levels of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language courses for post-secondary credit. These courses are open to both university and Musqueam students and serve as a powerful model for reconciliation. Another example is Six Nations Polytechnic, an Aboriginal-owned and -controlled post-secondary institution at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation. The Polytechnic offers a three-year Bachelor of Arts in Ogwehoweh Languages in which Mohawk or Cayuga language and grammar are the core area of study, supplemented by courses in Indigenous history, culture and tradition, translation, ethno-astronomy, and ethno-botany. The strategic goal of the Bachelor of Arts in Ogwehoweh Languages is one of decolonization and self-determination: to further the continued development of Ogwehoweh cultural understanding within an Ogwehoweh language context.

In the United States, the first Indigenous language immersion school was founded in Hawai’i in 1983 by the non-profit ‘Aha Pūnana Leo. The program offers early childhood education in Hawaiian and is the result of a sustained collaboration between the University of Hawai’i and the wider community. The University of Hawai’i also offers graduate degree programs for students that are entirely in Hawaiian, and Hawaiian language theses are increasing in popularity in disciplines ranging from linguistics to history and literature. The impressive range of kindergarten to post-secondary graduate instruction makes the Hawaiian language revitalization effort one of the most comprehensive programs in the world and also ensures that the alumni of pūnana leo early childhood education programs have more advanced programs through which they can further scaffold their education in Hawaiian should they choose to do so. The lack of such laddering plagues many other language revitalization programs: while there are often many resources available for beginner-level language learning, there is a dearth of material to engage more advanced speakers and adults. Ulukau , the Hawaiian Electronic Library, offers a creative solution. The online database and archive serves as a repository for a wide variety of materials designed for Hawaiian speakers of all levels, from beginner to advanced language competency. Along with dictionaries, curricula, and a collection of fiction and non-fiction literature, the site also hosts a compendium of Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948 . This remarkable online resource has many uses: it functions as a memory bank for over a century of Indigenous Hawaiian intellectual work and artistic creation, a way of supporting advanced speakers of Hawaiian who wish to further hone their reading skills, and a platform for engaging the now sizable Hawaiian diaspora who are looking for opportunities to connect with content in the Hawaiian language.

Initiatives like Ulukau fuse language revitalization with language documentation and cultural preservation. Documentation and revitalization have traditionally been thought of as quite separate and distinct endeavors, each with distinct goals that only occasionally intersect. Revitalization projects are usually defined as seeking to (re-)create fluency within a language community through the kinds of initiatives outlined above. Documentation, however, aims to describe a language in as much detail as possible for any number of different reasons, including future revitalization, curriculum development, cross-linguistic analysis, or simply for generating more complete scientific knowledge of humanity’s linguistic diversity. A key element that helps to blur the line and bridge the divide between documentation and revitalization is the notion of access. Making documentation available via the Internet ensures that living speakers are afforded a way of engaging with the material that contributes to the goals of language revitalization. This blending of revitalization and documentation through digital availability is evidenced in many endangered language dictionary projects which make lexicographic materials available online or through mobile devices.

Mobile device applications have experienced massive growth in popularity over the past decade in tandem with the increasing ubiquity of smartphones. Apps vary considerably in terms of their functionality, accessibility, and stability. There are many bare-bones mobile phone apps offering minimal functionality (simply the option to browse through various words, for example), while others serve primarily as prestige tools—platforms without significant practical language learning or reference functionality that have been developed to engage younger people in the community and combat damaging stereotypes of Indigenous languages being “antiquated” or incompatible with modern technology. There are also, however, many apps that make use of audio, video, and sophisticated search algorithms to deliver a powerful and portable learning environment for language reclamation (Littell, Pine, & Davis, 2017 ). While some apps are created as isolated projects by a specific language community, the Miromaa Aboriginal Language & Technology Centre (MALTC) in Australia and the First People’s Cultural Council (FPCC) in Canada are organizations committed to developing and maintaining apps for many different language communities around a common code base and shared technical infrastructure.

The FPCC, which also supports Mentor-Apprentice partnerships and produces regular reports on the status of First Nations languages in the province of British Columbia, released a keyboard app in May 2016 that supports unique language-specific characters to be typed on smartphones for over 100 languages, providing users with a way to text and search the web using their own orthography. Funded by the FPCC since 2000 , a project entitled FirstVoices has developed a suite of web-based tools and services to support Aboriginal people engaged in language archiving, language teaching, and culture revitalization. The FirstVoices Language Archive contains thousands of text entries in many diverse Aboriginal writing systems, enhanced with sounds, pictures, and videos. A companion set of interactive online games was designed to present the archived FirstVoices language data in creative learning activities, and dictionary language apps have been developed for 13 First Nations language communities across the province of British Columbia. New platforms for digital dissemination such as these can help to enhance the quality and scope of more traditional language documentation work. For example, rather than situating the responsibility for adding missing words, making corrections and checking dialectal variation with the technical (and often non-Indigenous) “creators” of a dictionary, the community’s involvement with and immediate use of digital resources for purposes of revitalization provides essential user feedback and community perspectives that improve both the accuracy and the utility of a lexicography project. Overall, new digital technologies are helping to foster increasingly collaborative forms of research that have the potential to be less hierarchical, more democratic, and better positioned to mobilize language resources within communities in multimodal ways that engage youth and elders alike.

While new technology has been leveraged to disseminate and democratize access to archives and collections, other efforts seek to achieve a similar impact in contexts where archival materials and historical collections are not so easily mobilized or transcoded. The U.S.-based National Breath of Life initiative facilitates informed community access to important documentary and archival resources. The project pairs community members with trained linguists who come together in Washington, D.C., to investigate and explore collections related to specific languages in some of the capital’s most extensive libraries, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. Alongside promoting physical access to these unique collections, the involvement of a linguist as a partner can expedite the deciphering of heritage collections and support capacity development within the Indigenous research community. Based on the success of the National Breath of Life, a number of regional workshops across North America have been organized to help endangered language communities locate and mobilize language resources held in local archives and libraries.

The role of linguists in language documentation and revitalization projects has become more complex, contested, and political over time. Increasingly, partnerships between linguists and communities are founded and maintained on notions of mutual benefit, ethical engagement, respect, reciprocity, and trust. Yet there are also examples of partnerships that are far more controversial. Disagreements over the goals of the partnership (whether academic or community focussed, for example), intellectual property rights, authorship, accreditation, and compensation have resulted in strained and occasionally broken relationships between outside scholars and language communities. This tension has led to the suggestion that “sometimes no fieldwork on an endangered language is better than some” (Grinevald, 2003 , p. 9), a statement that is antithetical to the established and conventional wisdom of standard documentary (what some scholars unapologetically refer to as “salvage”) linguistics.

Explicitly addressing the skillset that a particular linguist brings to a community and what communities stand to gain from such a relationship are central to avoiding future conflict. Importantly, “good intentions are not sufficient to give good and useful results, and we must be self-reflective and self-critical about the sort of practices we engage in that unwittingly exacerbate rather than alleviate the problem” (Wilkins, 2000 , p. 63). In some cases, communities have felt that their knowledge and voices have been used to advance the career of an outsider and caution others against inviting a linguist into their community. It has been poignantly noted that that there is a good chance an “outside linguist will learn your language, but your children won’t.” If language revitalization is to be a positive experience for all involved in the work—scholars from the outside and Indigenous scholars and knowledge keepers within language communities—deliberate and sometimes difficult discussions must be had which address the specific sociohistorical context that has resulted in the marginalization and endangerment of the language, the desired outcomes and tools for measuring success in revitalization, and the expectations that each party has of the other’s involvement. Candor in such matters, as well as transparency in budgeting, remuneration, and ownership of resulting data, can help to establish a more equitable and ethical baseline for collaborative work in language revitalization.

While the alarms bells have sounded and the threat of languages ceasing to be spoken remains a reality for increasing numbers of communities, the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity should not be underestimated. Language communities across the globe have proven throughout history that the odds can be beaten and that the effects of colonization are surmountable. Indigenous communities must be supported and resourced to design and implement their own research agendas, funding needs, and success criteria for language revitalization and reclamation work. Through engaging in collaborative linguistic and cultural revitalization work, building partnerships, communities of practice and resources at academic, governmental, and grassroots levels, the tide can be turned and more languages will join the ranks of Hawaiian, Māori, Myaamia, and Wampanoag.

The 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language and the Irish Speaking Communities: an Ethnographic Investigation

November 2017
ABEI Journal 19(1):123-130
19(1):123-130

University of Galway
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> Language in Society
> Volume 51 Issue 4
> Continuity and hybridity in language revival: The case...

Article contents

Introduction, language ideology and linguistic forms, substratal features, features reflecting dominant language ideology, maintenance of traditional features, internal language-specific factors, continuity and hybridity in language revival: the case of manx.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2021

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's ( 2009 , 2020 ) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact) *

This article presents a brief description and analysis of some of the categories of linguistic features found in contemporary Manx, by which present-day usage may diverge from the norms of the traditional language. Manx today is a revived Celtic language with no traditional native speakers. According to Zuckermann ( Reference Zuckermann 2009 , Reference Zuckermann 2020 ) and Zuckerman & Walsh ( Reference Zuckermann and Walsh 2011 ), languages revived initially as an L2, such as Israeli Hebrew, inevitably have a permanent ‘hybrid’ character, blending the substrate of the L1 of the ‘founder generation’ of revivalists with forms and patterns incompletely assimilated from the target language—even if they then become a fully vernacularized mother tongue of subsequent generations. We may compare the observation of Hinton & Ahlers ( Reference Hinton and Ahlers 1999 :61) with regard to indigenous Californian languages now moribund as L1s:

In the situation of language revitalization in small speech communities, the new learners will one day be the sole bearers of the language, and therefore all of the patterns of simplification, interference, and incomplete learning that remain extant in the learners’ speech will be a permanent part of that language. (Hinton & Ahlers Reference Hinton and Ahlers 1999 :61)

Such blending of the features of the target language with new patterns introduced through the process of L2 language revival can clearly be seen in the case of Revived Manx. The present case study also illustrates how the particular historically contingent idiosyncrasies of a given pair of linguistic systems and traditions can have a significant impact—for example, the complexities of the Manx orthography and how these are interpreted in relation to English. Language ideology is also shown to be an important variable, although a significant degree of commonality between language revitalization scenarios can be observed, as discussed below.

Zuckermann's ( Reference Zuckermann 2009 , Reference Zuckermann 2020 ) work stresses the centrality of Hebrew (or ‘Israeli’) as the natural focus and prototype for his proposed field and paradigm of ‘revival linguistics’ or ‘revivalistics’, given that it is undoubtedly the most successful and best documented revival in terms of achieving large numbers of speakers and full sociolinguistic vitality as a community and subsequently state language (Blanc Reference Blanc 1957 ; Nahir Reference Nahir 1998 ). It may be argued, however, that revived minority languages such as Manx are in fact more typical, and in some ways more instructive, cases of language revival. Unlike Hebrew, but like most, perhaps all, other revived languages, Manx remains largely an L2, moulded by conscious learning by relatively small numbers of adults in each generation, rather than being subject to the usual unconscious processes of language change during intergenerational transmission of natively spoken languages. Even in the rare cases of L1 acquisition, English is likely to remain, or become, the speaker's cognitively and socially dominant language. Similarly, language immersion pupils, whose degree of future continued participation in the language movement is uncertain and subject to great variation between individuals (Sallabank Reference Sallabank 2013 :219; Wilson Reference Wilson 2009 :24–25), are by no means guaranteed to have a decisive role in developing the linguistic norms of the future, which remain contested. In these respects the Manx situation is perhaps a more typical example of what to expect when a second language is maintained over the long term in small networks of enthusiasts and activists who are mostly adult learners, rather than the process of rapid and complete language shift from Yiddish (and other languages) to Revived Hebrew, followed by ‘normal’ L1 language transmission in subsequent generations (and assimilation to this L1 norm of subsequent generations of immigrants), which characterizes the Israeli experience.

Manx: Historical background

Manx is the autochthonous heritage language of the Isle of Man, a self-governing British crown dependency in the Irish Sea with a population of c. 83,000. It is closely related to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, although mutual intelligibility is low without prior familiarization or study (Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :114–15). In its revived variety (or varieties), Manx is spoken by several hundred people, Footnote 1 predominantly as a second language acquired either in adolescence or adulthood, or since 2001 through immersion primary school education (Clague Reference Clague 2009 ). Some cases of family intergenerational transmission have been reported (Sallabank Reference Sallabank 2013 :146; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :47), but remain rare. Manx is today a network language used predominantly at formal and informal language-focused events, in certain friendship and acquaintance circles, a handful of households and workplaces, and in online digital environments. The language in its historical vernacular form was already moribund by the mid-nineteenth century (Broderick Reference Broderick 1999 ; Miller Reference Miller 2007 ). Ned Maddrell (b. 1878), generally reported to be the last native speaker (or semi-speaker; Lewin Reference Lewin 2017a :191–93), died in 1974, and language revitalization efforts in the mid-twentieth century centred on documenting and emulating the Manx of Maddrell and a number of other elderly speakers, as well as the study of written texts, most notably the eighteenth-century Bible translation. A significant degree of continuity between the traditional and revived varieties is thus generally claimed by those involved in the language movement (Sallabank Reference Sallabank and Spolsky 2012 :101; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :48).

There is now a considerable literature on Manx language policy and planning, predominantly from historical, sociological, linguistic anthropological, and ethnographic perspectives (e.g. Broderick Reference Broderick 1999 :173–87, Reference Broderick 2013b ; Gawne Reference Gawne, McCoy and Scott 2000 , Reference Gawne, Davey and Finlayson 2002 , Reference Gawne, Scott and Bhaoill 2003 ; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin, Eloy and Ó hIfearnáin 2007 , Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a , Reference Ó hIfearnáin b ; Wilson Reference Wilson and Novacek 2008 , Reference Wilson 2009 , Reference Wilson 2011 ; Ager Reference Ager 2009 ; Clague Reference Clague 2009 ; George & Broderick Reference George, Broderick, Ball and Müller 2009 ; Mannette Reference Mannette 2012 ; Sallabank Reference Sallabank and Spolsky 2012 , Reference Sallabank 2013 ; Lewin Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 , Reference Lewin 2017b ; McCooey-Heap Reference McCooey-Heap 2015 ; Wilson, Johnson, & Sallabank Reference Wilson, Johnson; and Sallabank 2015 ; Ó Murchadha & Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó Murchadha and Ó hIfearnáin 2018 ), covering areas such as the institutional developments in immersion education, adult learning, the linguistic landscape, and the experiences, aspirations, and ideologies of those engaged in the language movement.

However, there has been relatively little published research on the formal linguistic features of Revived Manx varieties, or on the processes of corpus planning, pedagogy, and second language acquisition by which the language has been and is being ‘revived’, including the degree of continuity or disjuncture between the natively spoken and revived varieties. More consideration is also needed of the ways in which linguistic features interact with factors external to the linguistic code, especially the ideological stances of speakers. A small number of studies have examined specific linguistic features of the revived variety of Manx: for example, Clague ( Reference Clague 2004–2005 ) on discourse markers, Kewley Draskau ( Reference Kewley Draskau 2005 ) on verbal inflection and periphrasis, Broderick ( Reference Broderick 2013a ) and Lewin ( Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 ) predominantly on lexis, and McNulty ( Reference McNulty 2019 ) on certain morphosyntactic features. The dissertation (Lewin Reference Lewin 2016a ) on which the present article is based was the first work to attempt a general overview or classification of the linguistic features of the revived language.

In this article, we shall consider a variety of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features whereby Revived Manx usage may diverge from the traditional variety. These can often be shown to reflect various factors including:

• substratal influence from the societally dominant language, and L1 of most Revived Manx speakers, English;

• the impact of prominent ideological stances within the revival movement throughout its history;

• internal factors specific to the linguistic structure and orthographic tradition of Manx, both independently and with regard to their similarity to or divergence from English structures and orthography;

• inaccuracies or omissions (from the perspective of the traditional language) in key pedagogical and reference works.

The coining of new terminology is not discussed in detail in the present article, as this has been covered to a certain extent elsewhere (Broderick Reference Broderick 2013a ; Lewin Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 , Reference Lewin 2017b ). We also consider briefly countervailing tendencies towards maintenance of traditional features.

Sources and representativeness

Examples of the features discussed are taken primarily from a corpus of written sources dating from the mid-twentieth century onwards, as well as videos and audio recordings of interviews with Revived Manx speakers which have been published as learning resources on YouTube and Culture Vannin's learnmanx.com website; a full list of sources is given in Appendix B. More extensive analysis of this dataset is provided in Lewin ( Reference Lewin 2016a ). I have also drawn on my own experience as a member of the Revived Manx community over the past two decades. The speakers of Revived Manx from whom the examples are derived all learnt Manx in adolescence or adulthood, and may vary in proficiency, but all can express themselves reasonably fluently and confidently and would generally be regarded within the community as ‘speakers’ rather than ‘learners’ (cf. Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :57–58).

It is difficult to say how representative the speakers are, and how widespread the features highlighted are. The revival community is small, and speakers’ pathways in terms of acquiring and using the language, as well as their current language ideologies and practices, are markedly varied, and at present there is probably not a sufficient density of speakers, especially of L1 speakers, to facilitate systematic levelling or koineization comparable to the processes of new dialect formation described by Trudgill ( Reference Trudgill 1986 ). It has been noted that networks of L2 speakers of minority languages in non-traditional environments display a high degree of variation and heterogeneity in their linguistic practices, such that it is difficult to make any straightforward generalizations about features that are characteristic of the variety (e.g. Moal, Ó Murchadha, & Walsh Reference Moal, Murchadha, Walsh, Smith-Christmas, Murchadha, Hornsby and Moriarty 2018 ; Nance Reference Nance, Smith-Christmas, Murchadha, Hornsby and Moriarty 2018 ). The following description of the situation of new speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Glasgow is likely to be typical of situations of this kind:

a growing community of adult new speakers plays an important role in what can be considered as the Glasgow Gaelic-speaking community. Analysis of their phonetic behaviour… suggests that, so far, there is little evidence of a consistent group variety developing. Instead, there is substantial individual variation which can be linked to explicit and implicit aims of what it means to be a new Gaelic speaker. (Nance Reference Nance, Smith-Christmas, Murchadha, Hornsby and Moriarty 2018 :224–25)

In a similar vein, Ó hIfearnáin ( Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :116, Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :57) describes how the lack of a clearly defined target variety for Manx results in a situation where the usage of the most fluent speakers constitutes a ‘moving target’. Notwithstanding the difficulty of generalizing about the characteristics of Revived Manx, I would judge from my own experience that all of the features described here are reasonably frequently encountered in contemporary Manx speech or writing, or are at least illustrative of wider trends. Quantitative research into specific linguistic features has the potential to shed further light on the prevalence of different variants, and on the relationship between subgroups of speakers (cf. McNulty Reference McNulty 2019 ). However, a broad-based introduction of the kind offered here may be considered a helpful initial orientation.

Before proceeding to examine the linguistic features, it is useful to sketch some aspects of the ideological stances towards linguistic forms prevalent within the Revived Manx community, drawing on previous discussion in the literature. There have been differences of opinion as to the aims of the Manx language movement from the beginning. Early figures in the late nineteenth century took a largely ‘preservationist’ view (Stowell Reference Stowell and Ó Néill 2005 :400, 406): they aimed to preserve Manx literature as an antiquarian pursuit, but saw little hope of practical revival of the language as an everyday vernacular, and in some cases were actively opposed to such an objective. Towards the end of the 1890s, pan-Celtic enthusiasm reached the island and a more radical approach was taken to teaching the language, including to children, but initial hopes in some quarters for a dramatic revival were soon frustrated as public interest waned and the realities of already advanced language shift were recognized (Broderick Reference Broderick 1999 :174–75; Maddrell Reference Maddrell 2001 :89–96).

In more recent times the ‘preservationist’ view, strictly speaking, has hardly been in evidence, with most of those involved in the language movement being committed to practical revernacularization in some form. There have, however, always been different opinions as to the appropriate degree of adherence to traditional models deriving from the native speakers and writers of the past, and the degree to which revival should entail the ‘correction’ of (real or perceived) English influence on Traditional Manx, or accept such features as part of the fabric of the language. I have described a spectrum between ‘purist’ and ‘authenticist’ (or ‘reverse purist’) stances (Lewin Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 , Reference Lewin 2017b ), which is further discussed by Ó hIfearnáin ( Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a ):

Lewin ( Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 ) describes the most active Manx speakers as falling into two broad currents with regard to the nature and standard of the language. He calls them ‘purists’ and ‘authenticists’. Those who take a purist stance tend to perceive Manx as having decayed in vocabulary and grammar, particularly under the influence of English. Taking a pan-Gaelic stance, they prefer to use native words and expressions or Gaelic-derived equivalents rather than ones that display English influence, even if they are well attested in the literature and recordings of the native speakers. … Lewin ( Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 ) also highlights examples of current Manx usage which are based on Irish and Scottish models but which were not attested in Manx and a purist tendency to reject English-derived forms that might be in use in Ireland or Scotland in favour of newly-coined Manx neologisms.

In Lewin's view ( Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 ) the ‘authenticist’ stance is a form of reverse purism, minimising aspects of neology creation and pan-Gaelicism in speech and writing, instead striving to use a form of language that draws as much as possible on native classical Manx. This stance may be gaining ground as electronic access to the Bible and other classical Manx texts has facilitated access to those forms of the language. (Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :112–13)

Stowell ( Reference Stowell and Ó Néill 2005 :406) refers to a similar dichotomy with reference to ‘preservationist’ and ‘revivalist’ wings in the membership of Coonceil ny Gaelgey (the official Manx translation and terminology committee), although these labels are perhaps not entirely accurate, as discussed above. Recently, the two currents have come to be recognized and labelled by some within the language community as ‘revivalist’ (≈ ‘purist’, Stowell's ‘revivalist’) and ‘revisionist’ (≈ ‘authenticist’, ‘preservationist’), since the latter tendency is perceived as seeking to revise established norms of the revived language in light of corpus evidence from traditional sources.

However, these ideological differences have not led to significant open conflicts or the emergence of explicit factions or named linguistic varieties (Lewin Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 :30; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :113; Ó Murchadha & Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó Murchadha and Ó hIfearnáin 2018 :465), unlike in the case of Cornish, for example (Davies-Deacon Reference Davies-Deacon 2017 ). Indeed, many Manx revivalists are aware of the conflicts within the Cornish movement, and tend to regard them as a cautionary tale (Gawne Reference Gawne, McCoy and Scott 2000 :141; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :116).

What I have labelled ‘purism’ has long been a predominant ideological strand within the Manx movement, as reflected notably by Fargher's influential English–Manx dictionary (Fargher Reference Fargher 1979 ) in his lexicographical choices and in the preface of the work (Lewin Reference Lewin 2017b ), and can be traced to early figures in the revival such as J. J. Kneen in the early twentieth century (Maddrell Reference Maddrell 2001 :96–97). Lexical purism in Revived Manx is also discussed by Broderick ( Reference Broderick 2013a :8–26, Reference Broderick 2013b :142–61) and Ó hIfearnáin ( Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015a :107–09). Indeed, the dominance of this ideology is asserted without caveat by Gawne ( Reference Gawne, McCoy and Scott 2000 :142), who was a language development officer at the time of writing:

Our lack of a native-speaking community has some advantages and many other disadvantages. The advantages include a general improvement on the grammar which was used by the native speakers and a re-instatement of Gaelic words where English words had been substituted in later spoken Manx, the most famous example being corran buigh (‘yellow crescent’) instead of banana. … We also strongly believe in using Gaelic neologisms rather than English loan-words. In creating new words we endeavour to generate words from within the Manx language, however, Manxifying Irish and Scottish Gaelic loan words comes a close second. (Gawne Reference Gawne, McCoy and Scott 2000 :142)

Nonetheless, an ‘authenticist’ current has long existed within the language movement, notably represented in the second half of the twentieth century by the Celtic scholar and long-term member of Coonceil ny Gaelgey, Robert L. Thomson. ‘Authenticist’ stances are characterized by a concern not to depart too far from the traditional language, and are accepting of well-established English-derived lexis or constructions, rather than ‘native’ replacements or pan-Gaelic borrowings, especially if the latter are felt to depart from the ‘character of the language’ (Thomson's words, quoted in Lewin Reference Lewin 2017b :103). As noted above, such ‘authenticist’ perspectives appear to have had a new lease of life in recent years, as online publication of traditional texts in digital format as well as audio recordings of native speakers, now available on YouTube (Manx National Heritage 2017 ), have made such sources more accessible, and the divergences of the revived language from native usage more apparent. The long-established dominant ‘purist’ stances appear to remain widespread in the broader Revived Manx community, although there are now a number of prominent younger ‘authenticist’ voices in Coonceil ny Gaelgey and other positions of influence.

Details of the range of ideological positions both in the Manx community and elsewhere are undoubtedly considerably more complex than the simple bipolar spectrum described in the present brief discussion. Nonetheless, in broad terms, dichotomies of the kind described here have been widely observed in situations of language endangerment and revitalization including such cases as Breton (Jones Reference Jones 1995 ; Hornsby & Quentel Reference Hornsby and Quentel 2013 ), Cornish (Davies-Deacon Reference Davies-Deacon 2017 ), Occitan (Costa Reference Costa 2015 ), Corsican (Jaffe Reference Jaffe 1999 ), Galician (Alvarez Reference Alvarez 1990 ), Basque (Urla Reference Urla 2015 ), Irish (Ní Ghearáin Reference Ní Ghearáin 2011 ; O'Rourke & Walsh Reference O'Rourke and Walsh 2020 ), and Hawaiian (Wong Reference Wong 1999 ; NeSmith Reference NeSmith 2003 ).

In the case of Breton, for example, most L2 speakers broadly embrace mainstream ‘Neo-Breton’ stances and linguistic practices which have been widely described as being characterized by supradialectal standardization, lexical purism (rejection of French borrowings, even if long-established in the traditional dialects), borrowings from other Celtic languages, alongside pervasive French syntactic and phonological substrate features of which speakers may be largely unaware (Jones Reference Jones 1995 ; Le Pipec Reference Le Pipec 2013 ; Hornsby & Quentel Reference Hornsby and Quentel 2013 ). Some revivalist speakers, however, espouse what Hornsby & Quentel ( Reference Hornsby and Quentel 2013 :78–82) label as a ‘native authenticist’ ideology: they valorize native dialectal varieties, attempting to acquire and use these as far as possible, and reject the conscious lexical purism of mainstream Neo-Breton. This is broadly comparable to the Manx situation, with the main difference that the possibility of direct interaction with native speakers and their linguistic varieties is no longer part of the picture in the case of Manx.

It has been suggested that puristic stances tend to emerge as the default ideology of many language revitalization movements because such assumptions are congruent with the dominant discourses concerning purity, monolingualism, and homogeneity in established standard (European or Western) national languages (Jaffe Reference Jaffe 1999 :146–59, 185–90, 271–85), which are internalized by speakers of the minority language. In Jaffe's ( Reference Jaffe 1999 :23) terms, a ‘resistance of reversal’, which resists the outcomes of language domination but not its underlying ‘structures of value’, arises more readily within revitalization movements—and seems more intuitive to most speakers, immersed as they are in the ideological frames of the dominant culture—than ‘radical models of resistance’ (Jaffe Reference Jaffe 1999 :29) which challenge dominant assumptions around monolingualism, linguistic standardization, and identification of language with nation. Alternative stances are more likely to arise at a subsequent stage among those who begin to perceive and problematize the growing gap between traditional and revitalization varieties, and among those aware of and influenced by the descriptivist assumptions of most contemporary linguistics. Footnote 2 They seem particularly likely to emerge among those engaged in professional or amateur scholarship of the traditional variety of the language in question, that is, individuals with significant metalinguistic awareness of the different varieties, and personal investment in knowledge of the historical vernacular norms. Of course, ideological stances which originate in an intellectual subgroup (a ‘counterelite’, in Hornsby & Quentel's ( Reference Hornsby and Quentel 2013 :78) terms), without necessarily having buy-in from the wider language community, are not unproblematic in terms of power dynamics and potential accusations of elitism, not to mention practical effectiveness and reach, even if, as in the case of the so-called ‘sociolinguistic’ ideology of polynomie in the case of Corsican, they are explicitly intended to be egalitarian and inclusive (Jaffe Reference Jaffe, Creese, Martin and Hornberger 2008 ; Sallabank Reference Sallabank 2010 ).

As discussed by Ó hIfearnáin ( Reference Ó hIfearnáin, Eloy and Ó hIfearnáin 2007 :167), an overarching priority for most Revived Manx speakers—regardless of their particular views on linguistic details—has been pragmatism, and a concern not to let questions of linguistic form get in the way of the expansion and elaboration of the language movement. This kind of pragmatism, however, tends to be most closely allied with the dominant purist ideology—not necessarily because there is a direct or inherent link between the two, but because individuals with relatively little personal interest or investment in formal linguistic questions and metalinguistic debates are likely to gravitate to whatever the majority view on these matters happens to be.

As would be expected from the literature on language contact and second language acquisition, as well as language revitalization and revival more specifically, substratal impacts from English, the first language of most Revived Manx speakers, are widespread.

Loss of syllable-final r , intrusive r

The phenomena of loss of syllable-final /r/ in (1) and intrusive /r/ in (2) are very frequent (the relevant syllables are highlighted in bold). These well-known developments are typical of many varieties of English, including that of the Isle of Man (Jackson Reference Jackson 1955 :118; Hamer Reference Hamer and Britain 2007 :173), but are not otherwise usual in Gaelic varieties.

Both of these phenomena were found to some extent in the Traditional Manx of the last speakers recorded in the mid-twentieth century (see (3) and (5) below), and rhotic deletion is already reported in the nineteenth century (Rhŷs Reference Rhŷs 1894 :148), although the details are somewhat different. In Traditional Manx the loss of /r/ did not necessarily alter the preceding vowel as in (3), whereas in Revived Manx the vowel often corresponds to English pronunciation as in (4) where earlier /ʊr/, /ɛr/, /ɪr/ have all become /ɜː/, and traditional /ʊə/ (</uːr/) (retained in conservative varieties of both Received Pronunciation and Manx English) is increasingly smoothed to a long monophthong. Footnote 5

Interchange of emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns

Some Revived Manx speakers appear not to control fully the pragmatic difference between plain and morphologically marked emphatic pronouns found in Traditional Manx. Footnote 6 Such emphatic pronouns are characteristic of the Gaelic languages and are generally used in contexts where English would employ heavy phonetic stress to indicate an explicit or implied contrast between two or more actors. In (6) the non-emphatic prepositional pronoun oc ‘by them’ (Ir. acu ) is phonetically heavily stressed and is pragmatically contrastive with the speaker's reference to himself, but lacks the expected emphatic suffix ( ocsyn , Ir. acusan ), whereas it appears as expected in aym's ‘at me, my’ (Ir. agamsa ).

In (7), we find the plain form used in an emphatic context in a video from a series of Manx lessons, perhaps because the emphatic forms have not yet been taught at this point in the course. In the exchange, A uses the plain pronoun eh ‘he’ with heavy stress where the emphatic form eshyn would be expected.

The unfamiliarity of the Gaelic plain-emphatic distinction to L1 English speakers is likely to make it difficult to acquire in any case, and the pedagogical choice in (7) may increase the probability of fossilization of the non-traditional usage.

Some Revived Manx speakers seem to have reanalysed the emphatic pronouns as something akin to the disjunctive pronouns of French ( moi , toi , etc.), or the generalized disjunctive use of the historical object pronouns in English (e.g. ‘It's me’), that is, stressed pronominal forms used in syntactic environments other than verbal subject or direct object. For example, the emphatic pronouns are frequently used in circumstantial clauses introduced by subordinating as ‘and’ (G. agus , is ) (see e.g. Ó Siadhail Reference Ó Siadhail 1991 :284–87 and Vennemann Reference Vennemann and Aziz Hanna 2012 :189–93 for descriptions of this clause type in Irish), irrespective of the pragmatic or semantic nuances conveyed by the distinction between plain and emphatic pronouns in Traditional Manx. In (8) the emphatic form ish ‘she’ (Ir. ise ), as opposed to plain ee (Ir. í ), would in Traditional Manx imply contrast with another actor, but no one else is mentioned: the passage concerns the effects of the fact that the character has to look after the baby, not about whether it is she or someone else who is looking after it; nor is there a pragmatic contrast between her and the baby.

Compare the Traditional Manx examples (9a) where there is a plain pronoun and no contrastive sense, and (9b) where there is an emphatic pronoun and an element of contrast between emphatic shiuish ‘you’ and the child.

Certain features may be interpreted as reflective of the dominant ‘purist’, pan-Gaelic language ideology discussed above. It is known that removal of English influence was a priority for revivalists such as the lexicographer Douglas Fargher (Lewin Reference Lewin 2017b ), as the following quotation from the preface of his English-Manx dictionary shows:

It always appalled me to hear the last few native speakers interspersing accounts of their travels in Manx with the anglicised renderings of Gaelic names. This unnecessary dependence upon English cannot be tolerated if the Manx language of the future is to survive in its own right, and has, therefore, been discouraged here. (Fargher Reference Fargher 1979 :vi)

Avoidance of long-standing loanwords

In Traditional Manx, including in the Bible translation, the English loanword back is generally used for the adverb sense of returning to a prior location as in (10a), where a(i)r ais would be usual in other Gaelic varieties. The cognate native adverbial er-ash exists in Traditional Manx, but has developed specialized senses of ‘flourishing, blooming’ or ‘coming to light after being lost’ as in (10b) (Broderick Reference Broderick 2013a :18–20; Lewin Reference Lewin and Sture Ureland 2015 :25).

For many speakers of Revived Manx however, er-ash is used for ‘back’ as in (11) and the Traditional Manx sense of er-ash is unknown. Thus a potentially useful semantic distinction is lost.

Hyper-Gaelicisms

Another type of purism concerns the coining of new constructions which apparently are felt to be closer to the spirit of Gaelic idiom (and less similar to English constructions), even if the exact structure in question, or context of usage, does not exist either in Traditional Manx or other Gaelic varieties. These we term hyper-Gaelicisms .

For example, in Traditional Manx ‘I hope’ was generally expressed by the regular verb treishteil (also ‘trust’) as in (12).

However, many speakers of Revived Manx are more familiar with, and regularly use, a copula and preposition construction s'treisht lhiam (lit. ‘is hope with me’) as in (13), which is unattested in the traditional language. Fargher's ( Reference Fargher 1979 :393–94) dictionary has only jerkal (also ‘expect’, sometimes ‘hope’ in TM) and ta treisht aym lit. ‘I have hope’, suggesting that the construction has become established in the revived language more recently.

An early occurrence, but without the prepositional pronoun, is found in Thomson's preface to his edition of Goodwin's First lessons in Manx , shown in (14).

No construction of the type is X le (copula + noun + experiencer headed by preposition le ‘with’) is in common use for ‘to hope’ in any Gaelic variety (cf. Ir. ta súil agam ‘I have hope’, lit. ‘I have an eye’, or tá mé ag súil ‘I am hoping’; ScG. tha mi an dòchas ‘I am in hope’). The Revived Manx innovation is part of a wider tendency to expand the use of copula structures, which are apparently felt to be more distinctively Gaelic and less English (Lewin Reference Lewin 2016a :64–73).

Hyper-archaisms

Especially in written Revived Manx, there may be attempts to restore older features. For example, Kewley Draskau ( Reference Kewley Draskau 2005 ) has noted a tendency towards increased use of inflected verb tenses (e.g. vrie mee ‘I asked’) as opposed to the semantically interchangeable ‘do’-periphrasis ( ren mee briaght lit. ‘I did ask’), contrary to the diachronic trend in the traditional language.

Forms may be restored to those considered historically ‘correct’, even when these may in fact have been obsolete or ungrammatical in attested periods of the traditional language, as shown by the following case. The progressive proclitic * ag (originally a preposition ‘at’) has been elided entirely in Manx apart from the survival of the consonant /ɡ/ as a prefix on vowel-initial verbal nouns, as in geaishtagh ‘listening’, Ir. ag éisteacht , lit. ‘at listening’. By the eighteenth century it had become usual to prefix this g - to vowel-initial verbal nouns in other constructions besides the progressive as in (15).

I have argued that the g - prefix had been reanalysed as a general marker of non-finite verbs in Classical Manx, to the extent that omission of g - (with a few lexical exceptions) in the non-progressive constructions was probably no longer grammatical (Lewin Reference Lewin 2016b :191–99). In Revived Manx, however, bare forms of the verbal noun without g - are sometimes found, as in (16).

It is likely that this represents conscious restoration of the historical, perceived more ‘logical’ construction, especially in view of the fact these are written sources and Thomson (see (16a)) was a professional scholar of the Gaelic languages.

Although the focus in this article is primarily on ways in which Revived Manx usage diverges from the historical language, it is worth noting that there are also instances of retention of traditional elements, especially of pronunciation, even where these are not indicated in writing. These can be considered part of the oral tradition of the revival, having been acquired by the mid-twentieth-century revivalists who interacted with the final traditional speakers (cf. Ó Murchadha & Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó Murchadha and Ó hIfearnáin 2018 :464).

Preocclusion

Preocclusion is a feature of Traditional Manx involving the insertion of an often weakly articulated homorganic stop before final liquids in stressed syllables (Rhŷs Reference Rhŷs 1894 :142–44; Jackson Reference Jackson 1955 :113–15; Broderick Reference Broderick 1984 –1986:vol. 3, 28–34; Lewin Reference Lewin 2020 :308–36), not found in other Gaelic varieties. Preocclusion has never been written in the standard orthography, but is quite widely encountered in Revived Manx (see (17)). It seems to be especially common in certain words and therefore may be considered to have been lexicalized by revival speakers. The articulation may also be somewhat different from Traditional Manx, being more distinctly articulated and more likely to be realized syllabically (cf. English syllabic liquids in words such as paddle ). Usage is variable; in (17a) the same speaker has the same item with and without preocclusion.

Features such as preocclusion in Revived Manx are likely to represent retention or restoration of particularly salient or iconic linguistic features (i.e. distinctively ‘Manx’ as opposed both to English and other Gaelic varieties), which are seen as a link to the historical language and thus a marker of linguistic authenticity (cf. Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity 2000 ; Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :56–57; McNulty Reference McNulty 2019 :17, 55–56). They can fulfil this iconic function at the same time as other features of the traditional language are disregarded or altered, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Traditional Manx is recognized as having had a primary dialect distinction between north and south (Rhŷs Reference Rhŷs 1894 :160–61; Broderick Reference Broderick 1984 –1986:vol. 3, 160–66), although the differences are relatively slight. Speakers from both regions survived into the mid-twentieth century and were recorded and interacted with the revivalists. Revived Manx speakers today tend to have features historically associated with both southern and northern Manx, although metalinguistic awareness of the traditional dialects seems to be low for the majority of speakers. In some cases, a pronunciation reflecting one dialect has become widespread, even though the spelling better represents the other dialect. It is possible that these represent further cases of iconization of traditional, orthographically non-transparent pronunciations.

For example, a diphthongal pronunciation of the word kione ‘head’ (G. ceann ) and the compound mychione (preposition ‘about, concerning’) is frequent, reflecting the northern form, although the spelling better represents the southern monophthongal realization as in (18).

Similarly, the historically northern pronunciation of shenn ‘old’ (G. sean ) with /a/ is considerably more common in Revived Manx than southern and orthographic /e/ (cf. Broderick Reference Broderick 1984 –1986:vol. 2, 398).

A few speakers make a conscious effort to adopt one dialect or the other. This includes both the handful remaining who had personal contact with particular traditional speakers, as well as newer speakers making use of the recorded and transcribed material. For example, the revival speaker interviewed in (19) uses the northern diphthongal form [ei] for oie ‘night’ (G. oidhche ), rather than the southern form [iː] which is usual in revival speech.

(19) RM ( Crellin )

Interviewer: [kiɹəd te ɡɹɛː son iː vai]

C'red t'ou (?) gra son ‘oie vie’?

what be: prs :you: sg say: vn for night good

‘What do you (?) say for oie vie (goodnight)?’

Interviewee: [ei vai eɹ ə tuːi]

‘[ ei vai ] oie vie ’ er y twoaie

night good on the: sg north

‘[ei vai] in the north’

Internal analogy and overgeneralization

Some divergences from Traditional Manx usage cannot be attributed directly to English influence per se, but rather to internal analogy or overgeneralization. That is, speakers innovate features or patterns that might appear to be logically possible—or even required—in the structure of the traditional language, but which are in fact unattested, or were expressed in other ways, and appear to have been ungrammatical or at least dispreferred in the historical variety. For example, in Manx the concept ‘only’ can be expressed with a negative verb and agh ‘but’ in (20), as in Irish (Ó Siadhail Reference Ó Siadhail 1991 :218).

In Revived Manx the negative copula cha nee is sometimes found in clefting structures followed by agh ‘but, only’ in the sense ‘it is only’ as in (21).

As far as is known, this configuration is unattested in Traditional Manx, Footnote 7 even though clefting is very frequent otherwise. That these two focusing constructions appear to be syntactically incompatible in the traditional language is perhaps related to the fact that clefting locates the focused item to the left edge of the clause, whereas the agh construction favours shifting of the focused constituent rightwards (cf. McCloskey Reference McCloskey 1980 :64–66).

Spelling pronunciations

The Manx orthography, which is based largely on English conventions but with significant innovations to represent distinctive Manx sounds, is notorious both among scholars and revivalists for its complexity and inconsistency (Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin, Eloy and Ó hIfearnáin 2007 ; Lewin Reference Lewin 2020 :59), although no serious replacement has ever been proposed. It is unsurprising that spelling pronunciations are frequent, some of which have become well established.

For example, the digraph <ay> may represent a variety of vowel sounds as in (22). Footnote 8

The adjective maynrey ‘happy’ is expected to have /eː/ (G. méanar , méanra < Early Irish mo-génar ) and is attested thus in Traditional Manx speech as in (23), but frequently has [aː] in revival speech as in (24).

The revival pronunciation may be traced to Kneen's English-Manx pronouncing dictionary ( Reference Kneen 1938 :38) as in (25).

The Manx orthography usually roughly follows the Modern English values of the vowel symbols (i.e. the outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift), but sometimes the latinate values are found, as also in English (cf. combine and machine ). This leads to confusion, for example, in the following pair in (26) and (27), which I have heard confused in RM speech.

Incomplete or erroneous information in reference works

Certain forms attested in Revived Manx can be shown to derive from erroneous or incomplete descriptions of the traditional language in the tradition of the revival, as documented and transmitted in widely used reference works.

In Manx there is a class of complex prepositions formed from an original simple preposition together with a noun, and with pronominal forms involving possessives (analogous to English ‘for my sake’, ‘in his stead’). Sometimes there is elision of the original simple preposition. An example in Traditional Manx is quail ‘towards, meeting’ (G. i gcomhdháil ‘in the meeting (of)’), which as expected has pronominal forms based on the possessives, given in (28).

The preposition quail followed by a noun phrase complement in (28a) is well-attested in Traditional Manx sources. However, a misconception about this has appeared in various reference works in (29), where it is stated or implied that the possessive is required even when there is a non-pronominal complement. According to Fargher ( Reference Fargher 1979 :488), there is agreement with the gender and number of the complement as in ny quail ben ‘to meet a woman’ (29c), cf ny quail ‘towards her’. Such constructions are not found in with any other complex preposition in Manx or in other Gaelic varieties.

Accordingly, the redundant possessive is often used in Revived Manx in (30) (albeit in these examples without number agreement), as well as another innovating variant where it is compounded with the preposition rish ‘to, with’ as in (30c), perhaps reflecting the synonymous construction meeiteil rish ‘to meet (with)’, and a mixed form with both possessive and rish as in (30d). The Traditional Manx construction with simple quail + nominal complement is also found in revival usage as in (30e).

It is clear that the variety of forms in (30) reflects the existence of conflicting models: the usage of the traditional language (and the analogy of other complex prepositions) on the one hand, and the prescriptions of several notable Revived Manx reference works in (29) on the other. The persistence, from the 1930s to the 2000s, of the belief that the preposition quail lacks a non-conjugated form, and that the conjugated forms can be combined with a governed noun phrase, is striking. No other structure in the language behaves like this, so the innovation runs contrary to the rationalizing, analogical tendency discussed above. It is clear testimony to the abiding influence of successions of reference works and the usage of influential individuals in the revival which have been accorded authority within the community.

The present article has presented a typology of characteristic innovating features of contemporary Manx, a postvernacular language in the process of revival within a relatively small network of second language speakers and learners. We have traced a complex set of internal and external factors which are likely to be present in any language revival scenario, as well as particular traits of the linguistic and orthographic relationship between Manx and English, and specific historical developments and ideological trends in the course of the revival.

The kind of ‘hybridization’ noted by Zuckermann ( Reference Zuckermann 2009 ) in the case of Israeli Hebrew is clearly apparent in Revived Manx; however, there is also an ongoing dynamic of malleability whereby features of the target variety remain fluid and variable in the absence of a definitive ‘founder generation’ and subsequent nativization as a dominant L1. Although we have seen that there is clearly a specific oral and written tradition within the Manx revival which has a significant impact, for example, through perpetuating idiosyncrasies from earlier textbooks, or certain traditional phonological features, nevertheless each succeeding generation of revival speakers remains in some sense part of an extended ‘founder generation’, able consciously to reshape the language and introduce or restore features in a non-linear fashion.

This can be regarded as a symptom of the relative weakness of the language revival and its failure to achieve robust intergenerational sociolinguistic vitality; however, the current fluidity of the language's norms can also be viewed more positively as empowering present and future cohorts of Manx speakers. The future development of the language is subject to their conscious reflexive choices in a way not true of ‘natural’ L1s—including, now, Hebrew (cf. Blanc Reference Blanc 1957 :399). In the latter, language change is largely an incremental and unconscious phenomenon, and deliberate manipulation of the linguistic code plays only a small part; whereas in a small network of L2 revival speakers, influential individuals, groups, or publications can potentially have a disproportionate impact in modifying linguistic norms and practices. This has been true over past decades in the Manx revival community, and is likely to remain the case.

The features of Manx which have been noted in this article are thus not necessarily set in stone to the degree they might be had Revived Manx gained a significant cohort of native speakers in the earlier stages of the revival, as occurred in the case of Hebrew. In the present circumstances, it is unclear whether and to what extent the ideological stances discussed above will continue to be as influential in the Revived Manx community as they have been to date, and how far future norms will adhere to or diverge from models derived from the traditional language. These questions are to a significant degree in the hands of Manx speakers themselves as they participate in an ongoing project of creative renewal and reimagining the language they have chosen to (re)claim and make their own. As discussed above, this is likely to be true of many other language revitalization contexts in which adult L2 learners are numerically dominant, and where traditional native speakers are absent, or contact with them is limited.

Appendix A: Abbreviations

G eneral abbreviations :

Gaelic (Irish or Scottish Gaelic)

Revived Manx

Scottish Gaelic

Traditional Manx

G lossing abbreviations :

complementizer

comparative/superlative

conditional

interrogative

pronominal particle

relative (verb form)

verbal noun/verbal noun particle

first, second, third person

Appendix B: Primary sources

R evived M anx sources :

S poken material :

Culture Vannin. Bernard and Joan Caine Interviews . Online: http://www.learnmanx.com/cms/video_collection_79769.html ; accessed January 18, 2021.

Culture Vannin. Juan Crellin [interviews] . Online: http://www.learnmanx.com/cms/video_collection_31498.html ; accessed January 18, 2021.

Culture Vannin. Saase Jeeragh video files . Online: http://www.learnmanx.com/cms/video_collection_74051.html ; accessed January 18, 2021. Reference is to the number of the lesson.

Culture Vannin (2014). Taggloo: Conversational Manx . Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPygOMM8Fk4&list=PLY5y-gRhKs8gmP0sMWYlmp25dl1b0TWeu ; accessed January 18, 2021. YouTube playlist.

W ritten material

Lewin, Christopher (2010). Droghad ny Seihill . Douglas: Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh.

Ó Laighléis, Ré, & Robert W. K. Teare (trans.) (2008). Ecstasy as Skeealyn Elley . St Judes: Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh.

Culture Vannin. Lessoonyn Meanagh . Online: http://www.learnmanx.com/cms/inter_lesson_index.html ; accessed January 18, 2021. References are to the number of the lesson.

y Crellin, Lewis; Juan y Crellin; Colin y Jerree; & Shorys y Creayrie (1976). Skeealaght . Douglas: Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh.

Thomson, Robert L. (1966). Gys y lhaihder [To the reader]. In Edmund Goodwin & Robert L. Thomson, First lessons in Manx. Lessoonyn ayns Chengey ny Mayrey Ellan Vannin . 3rd edn. Douglas: Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh.

Thomson, Robert L. (1969). Gys y lhaihder [To the reader]. In Archibald Cregeen, A dictionary of the Manks language . 3rd edn. Menston: Scolar Press.

T raditional M anx sources :

Bible in Manx, 1819 Bible Society edition. Online: https://www.bible.com/versions/1702-bib1819-yn-vible-casherick-1819 ; accessed January 18, 2021.

All examples of Traditional Manx speech are from George Broderick ( Reference Broderick 1984–1986 ), A handbook of Late Spoken Manx , 3 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Broderick, George (1981). Manx stories and reminiscences of Ned Beg Hom Ruy. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 38:113–78.

Wilson, Thomase (1783). Sharmaneyn liorish Thomase Wilson [Sermons by Thomas Wilson]. Bath: Cruttwell.

The data discussed in this article were originally presented in a master's thesis completed at Aberystwyth University in 2016, and also in a paper delivered at the Celtic Linguistics Conference, Maynooth University, in September 2018. I am grateful to my thesis supervisors William Mahon and Simon Rodway, and my examiners Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh and Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin, as well as to the editors of Language in Society , two anonymous reviewers, and a number of friends and colleagues, who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts.

1 The number of residents able to speak Manx was reported as 1,662 in the 2011 census (Isle of Man Government Treasury 2012 :27), although the number of highly fluent individuals is likely considerably lower (Ó hIfearnáin Reference Ó hIfearnáin 2015b :54).

2 Revivalists may embrace a folk version of the tenet of descriptive linguistics that language change is natural, inevitable, and value-neutral, applying it to the dichotomy between traditional and revived varieties. This ‘permits a naturalised opposition between old and new that resolves the potential ideological tension between the monolingual native speaker and the second language learner by reducing both categories to naturally occurring variation’ (Costa Reference Costa 2015 :142). This is a significant discourse in the Manx language movement, serving to emphasize continuity, despite change, from the traditional language, and downplaying or rejecting the concept of language death (Sallabank Reference Sallabank 2013 :54; Lewin Reference Lewin 2016a :9–12, 23–28).

3 In the examples throughout the article the following labels are used: TM = Traditional Manx, RM = Revived Manx. Glossing generally follows the Leipzig conventions (see https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php/ ), with abbreviations given in Appendix A.

4 Abbreviated titles of the primary sources for the examples are given in parentheses and full references are listed in Appendix B. References are to page numbers unless otherwise stated in the appendix.

5 Cf. conservative Manx English [ʃʊə] ‘sure’, now often [ʃɜː] or [ʃɔː] in more innovating varieties.

6 See Mac Eoin ( Reference Mac Eoin and Watson 1986 ) and Cotter ( Reference Cotter, Gahl, Dolbey and Johnson 1994 ) for descriptions of usage of these constructions in Modern Irish.

7 No cases were found in a search of currently digitized TM texts including the Manx Bible. A search for analogous constructions in Irish ( ní ach … etc.) and Scottish Gaelic ( chan ann ach … etc.) in online text corpora (New Corpus for Ireland; Historical Irish Corpus 1600–1926; Corpas na Gàidhlig) produced a small number of instances. However, use of the construction appears to be marginal and generally alternate constructions are preferred, as in Traditional Manx. According to James McCloskey (p.c.), UC Santa Cruz, at least some subtypes of the ní ach construction are rejected by L1 Gaeltacht Irish speakers.

8 This ambiguity principally reflects a conflict between an older northern Middle English and Scots convention of using <y> (or <i>) to mark vowel length (> Manx /aː/) (Lewin Reference Lewin 2020 :67), and the Modern English use of <ay> to represent /eɪ/ (> Manx /eː/ and /ɛː/).

9 ‘The Blacksmith’, i.e. John Kneen (c. 1852–1958), one of the last native speakers of Manx.

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Volume 51, Issue 4
Christopher Lewin (a1)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404521000580

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Papers on Language Endangerment and the Maintenance of Linguistic Diversity

MIT Working Papers in Linguistics #28

Papers on Language Endangerment and the Maintenance of Linguistic Diversity

Editor: ed. J. Bobaljik, R. Pensalfini, and L. Storto , Year: 1996

Introduction Jonathan Bobaljik and Rob Pensalfini Can Senior Secondary Studies Help to Maintain and Strengthen Australia's Indigenous Languages? Antonio Mercurio and Rob Amery The Ulwa Language Wakes Up Thomas Green A Report on Language Endangerment in Brazil Luciana Storto Modern Irish: A Case Study in Language Revival Failure Andrew Carnie Explaining and Reversing the Failure of the Irish Language Revival Peter Slomanson Universal Grammar and the Roots of Linguistic Diversity Ken Hale Language Endangerment - the Non-indigenous Minority Languages in the UK Mahendra K. Verma Policy Statement: The Need for the Documentation of Linguistic Diversity Linguistic Society of America Preliminary Bibliography on Language Endangerment and Preservation Jonathan Bobalijk, Rob Pensalfini and Luciana Storto

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Faculty of English Studies, Sohar University, Sultanate of Oman

Original language: English

Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

As a case of language maintenance Irish is seen by many as a failing attempt to survive an indigenous language. Irish is not a language which lacks poor support from the authorities; on the contrary Irish has the official status in Ireland. Since the commencement of the home rule movement there has been much effort invested to revive the Irish language; yet there is little chance that Irish would be able to maintain a status as the linguistic capital for Irish people. The fact of the situation is that for many Irish speakers, Irish is viewed as a useless language. This process is broad and complex, but one major factor is negative attitudes to a language, both in government policy and local communities. The paper briefly trances the history of the Irish language and discusses the linguistic behaviour or attitude of Irish people being responsible for the failure in language maintenance and revival efforts and consequently resulting in slow and gradual decline of the Irish language. The paper also presents few facts, figures and the reasons that highlight the fact that people's language attitude has negative impact on the Irish language's revitalization efforts. The present study also offers few suggestions on the change of attitude and the consequent possibility for the Irish language to be alive again in the rapidly changing situations.

Linguistic Attitude, Language Revival, Language Policy..

Inayat Shah, “Linguistic Attitude and the Failure of Irish Language Revival Efforts,” , vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 67–74, May 2014.

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Modern Irish: A Case Study in Language Revival Failure *

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Language Shift and Language Revival in Ireland

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Article contents

1 Introduction

2 Marginalization and Devitalization of Language

2.2 Measuring Language Endangerment, Revitalization, and the Effects of Language Loss

3 Language Revitalization: Goals and Examples

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The 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language and the Irish Speaking Communities: an Ethnographic Investigation

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Article contents

Manx: Historical background

Sources and representativeness

Loss of syllable-final r , intrusive r

Interchange of emphatic and non-emphatic pronouns

Avoidance of long-standing loanwords

Hyper-Gaelicisms

Hyper-archaisms

Preocclusion

Internal analogy and overgeneralization

Spelling pronunciations

Incomplete or erroneous information in reference works

Appendix A: Abbreviations

Appendix B: Primary sources

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