Everybody knows the Celtic languages exist out there in some
hidden place, mountainous or seaside, not really part of the ordinary world.
Same with the people who speak them” both are really part of some romantic,
mystical other realm. Or something like that.
That is maybe accurate in 2026, in an odd way, but also obviously
inaccurate and silly,
Most of the Celtic languages are/were old-fashioned and
rooted in the earth because they were spoken in places that are/were “out there”
on geographical or social margins until recently. They are ordinary languages
for all that, and the people who speak/spoke them are/were ordinary people
trying to get along in an often difficult world. The languages are about to die
not because they are too fine or mystical for this crass time, but because the
modern world (post maybe 1540?) has ground them out, like it has ground out
many other things.
People in absolutely boring unmystical, unromantic but
definitely Irish county Offaly only stopped speaking Irish in the 1830s, most
often because they had been incorporated in an English-owned and administered
estate and big farm system that had no place for Irish or for anything old or in the way. The Famine removed probably a million Irish-speaking people from
the island in the 1840s in a
five-year-long living Hell. but a lot of southern and western Ireland spoke
Irish until the 1880s. (For more details, see the post Irish, the Inside Story
on the blog Irish Love Songs, Irish Language,
(on Blogger).
Most of the geographic Scottish Highlands spoke Gaelic until
the 1880s/1890s, but only parts of the western seaboard, and the Outer Hebrides
had large enough concentrations of people still to make it a viable language
there and to outweigh the fact that Highland communities also existed within an estate system that
offered very limited opportunities for making a living: a system that despised
Gaelic. (The Clearances of the late 18th and then 19th
centuries had already removed the majority of people from everywhere else and
sent them to Glasgow or Canada etc.) See Scottish Gaelic, the Inside Story on Irish
Love Songs, Irish Language for details.
All Wales (except Gower south Pembroke (English-settled):
far east Gwent: a border strip of
Brecknock and Montgomeryshire: and Maelor Saesneg) spoke Welsh until the 1930s
when the effects of the English-language industrial system in the
heavily-populated Valleys combined with English and Irish in-migration there and
the Depression broke apart communities in the Valleys and removed the basis of
a separate Welsh national society. English society absorbed increasing areas on the borders, and then in
the 1950s , with increasing economic, educational and media integration with England, areas of
the rural south and touristy north east coast turned to English. (There is a
Welsh, and also Breton Inside Story on Blogger too.)
There were parts of central and eastern Brittany that were
mixed Breton and French (Breton mostly in the nobility?) until the Middle Ages,
then monoglot French, but after this, the Breton/French border was stable for
many hundred of years after until really the 1950s, when greatly increased
economic and media integration with France, combined with many years of
French-only schooling, and then the post-WWII Patriotic French orgy and casting
out of all things not patriotic French, and the destruction of peasant
agriculture and shift to Big Farming, meant that parents in many places started
speaking French to their children.
Manx lost ground for similar reasons to Scottish Gaelic in
the late 19th century. Cornish…Well, Cornish is really the only
Celtic language that fits the Mystical Celtic model, and only then because the
language was lost in the 16th and 17th centuries when
nobody much was paying attention, so not a lot is known about anything.
Today, things are bleak. The 1950s, then again the late
1970s, saw most remaining Celtic-speaking communities turn to English, often
because of closer and closer integration into larger societies, the end of old
ways of life and because of TV and radio.
What’s left? Where are Celtic languages spoken as community
languages?
In Ireland, it’s mostly Tory Island and a small strip of
mainland opposite (though a lot of that is summer houses now), maybe Inis Meain
(though that is losing its native Irish-speaking population), maybe a small
area around Screeb etc.
In the Highlands, it’s Grimsay island with less than 200
people, and that will go eventually.
In Wales, it’s the area west of Caernarfon town (Eifionydd,
Lleyn, etc.), plus bits of Meirionydd, maybe Llanbrynmair, maybe a few tiny
bits of Cardiganshire: the upper Gwaun valley in Pembrokeshire, and the
semi-industrial highland area on the borders of Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan.
In Brittany, it’s the village of Plounevez-Moedac and to a
much lesser extent, Sein island.
In Ireland in former Gaeltacht, there are small networks of
families that still speak Irish to each other. There are people in lots of
places like Belfast, Rennes, Cardiff and Glasgow who have learned the language,
but they often speak an impoverished version that is really based on English.
Wait…So am I just some elitist yearning for some distant, idealized past, and dumping on the
vigorous living language of the people who are actually doing the work?
One of the things about the Celtic languages, besides the
old stuff, is the fact that they are/were very rich and earthy languages that reflected
two thousand years of human and natural interaction. Someone described them as
“Medieval.” Given the contemporary associations of that word, that is neither
accurate or useful, but the languages do rise from another world.
On the other hand, modern English and French are pretty much
Standard Official and Media languages that reflect…something else.
People who’ve learnt a Celtic language in classes or books
or online usually do not have access to the traditional language and are often
not even aware of it, or even care that there is such a thing. They often speak
a Celtic language that is a translation of their English or French, and I’m not
referring to word order
Last week, an online discussion of an Irish grammatical
feature produced some sample sentences (“an duine ab eagraithe etc.) that while
not formally incorrect, struck me as awkward. In the end, I think that the
problem is not that the grammatical structures are “wrong”, but that an Irish
speaker would not use that construction to express the thought. She would not
even start from that same place.
She could say , for example, something like “an duine ab fhearr” (the best person), but might also come at that
from an entirely different direction. And just because in English you use the
same approach and thus construction to say “the best person” and “the most
organized person” (“an duine ab
eagraithe”) doesn’t mean that this is how you do it in Irish.
I think that a
traditional Irish speaker would approach the utterance differently, using other
structures that reflect other ways of looking at people and experience: other
ways of categorizing, organizing and expressing experience: structures that
reflect maybe older, less “theoretical”
analyses of experience: structures that arise from thousands of years of
face-to-face experience.
That is very vague, isn’t it, and it doesn’t really make
sense. Hadn’t I better approach this in a more logical, precise way?
Let me try.
Irish would not start with a concept of “organized” that is
good across all types of experience. Books might be “curtha i dtoll a chéile.” Another
group of objects (with moving parts etc.)might be “ar inneall”, or “i ngleas,
as might metaphorically, a person. A person might be said to “have everything (needed)
“under his hand”, and so on. The word “eagar” suggests “things in a row or
arrangement” (according to Dineen’s (old) dictionary.
So Irish acknowledges that different situations and types of
objects arise out of different contexts. They have different trajectories and
natures, and the language acknowledges that in conceptualizing how they might
be made ready to be used or put in “order”,
you don’t start from the same place. The specifics must be seen, and they
cannot cannot be subsumed in one abstract concept of order that is good no
matter if you’re referring to tools or houses or cows or people or businesses.
Irish and the other languages acknowledge the way the
physical world actually is. It perceives more truly and accurately in this way.
The languages are “softer” ad more “human” and I would argue that they offer
people in our abstract, machine-driven, space capsule life something valuable.
They offer a wild apple with, each one, its own indescribable complex taste
that tells about time and place and circumstance: and this in place of the
modern standard “fizzy soda” apple.
You can hear (very near) Plounevez Breton on Youtube by
looking for Maurice Prigent or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdi54Zhl-4A . Probably better if you don’t understand him.
It’s a little, um, risque.
You can hear a whole hour of a Grimsay storyteller if you
buy Peter Morrison’s recording from The School of Scottish Studies or look for
him on Tobar a’ Dualchais. Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGgk70mtyew#ddg-play
I don’t know where you can hear Tory Island Irish, but
probably Youtube somewhere. Well, here,
but the people the film maker chose of course don’t have teeth… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkl1jxheGs Or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcuxN8_dbks These people, when the narrator, shuts up, do
have teeth.
East Carmarthen/west Glamorgan Welsh (as mentioned above) is
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hPg-SkVcE.
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