Language Death and Revival in the British Isles: Two Case Studies
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Language Death and Revival in the British Isles: Two Case Studies Tesis doctoral presentada por Christopher Langmuir Thomson en el Departamento de Lengua Inglesa de la Universidad de Sevilla 2015 1 Table of Contents 0.0 Introduction 5 0.1 Summary, objectives, methods 14 Chapter 1: Language Death 23 1. 0. Introduction 23 1. 1. Language death as a constant in history 23 1. 2. The world’s languages in jeopardy 27 1. 3. Typologies of language death 30 1. 4. Structural consequences of language death 33 1. 5. The Celtic languagesin jeopardy 37 1. 5. 1. Scottish Gaelic 38 Chapter 2: Language Revitalization 42 2. 1. Terminology 44 2 .2. Language vitality 45 2. 3. Domains of Use 51 2. 4. Two Celtic case studies 55 2. 4. 1. The Gaeltacht in The Republic of Ireland 55 2. 4. 2. Scottish Gaelic in a Lewis Community 62 Chapter 3: The Demise of The Cornish Language 68 3. 0. Introduction 68 3. 1. Early History 69 3. 2. The Expansion of Wessex 72 3. 3. Competing Chronologies of Retreat 76 3. 4. The Middle Cornish Period 78 3. 4. 1. Middle Cornish Literature 80 3. 5. The Tudor Period 83 3. 6. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 87 2 Chapter 4: The Revival of The Cornish Language 4. 0. Introduction 92 4. 1. Henry Jenner and the Cornish Revival 92 4. 2. Problems of language revival in Cornwall. 97 4. 2. 1. Old Cornwall Societies and Gorseth Kernow 98 4. 2. 2. Tyr ha Tavas 101 4. 2. 3. Morton Nance and Unified Cornish 102 4. 2. 4. The debate over sources and orthography for revived 104 Cornish 4. 2. 5. The Unified Spelling System 105 4. 2. 6. Common Cornish or Kernewek Kemmyn 108 4. 2. 7. The Role of Official Policy Documents 110 4. 2. 8. A Late Cornish Challenge. 111 4. 2. 9. The Unified System Revised 112 4. 2. 10. The Problem of Authenticity 113 4. 2. 11. Orthographic Authenticity 116 4. 2. 12 The divisive effects of revivalist antagonisms 117 4. 3. Standardization achieved: the Standard Written Form (2008) 118 Chapter 5: Language Death on the Isle of Man 124 5. 0. Introduction 124 5.1. The Norse Occupation 124 5. 2. Anglicisation 127 5. 3. The Eighteenth Century 129 5. 4. The Nineteenth Century: ‘an iceberg floating in southern 132 latitudes’ 5. 5. The Twentieth Century: Nil by mouth 136 5. 6. Language Attitudes and Language Use 138 5. 7. Causes of Decline 141 3 Chapter 6: The Revitalization of Manx 145 6. 0. Introduction 145 6. 1. The Nineteenth-Century Origins 145 6. 2. The Manx Language Society 147 6. 3. Recording the language 152 6. 4. Reawakening 153 6. 5. The vitality of Manx as a spoken language 155 6. 6. Official status of Manx 158 6. 7. 1. Bilingual Signage 162 6. 7. 2. Commercial exploitation of Manx 167 6. 7. 3. Media 169 6. 8. Manx in the education system 171 6. 8 .1. The Scope of Manx-medium education 176 6. 9. Attitudes to Manx 178 6. 10. Language change 175 6.11. Conclusion 184 Chapter 7: Overview and Reflection 183 7. 1. The Cornish Revival 186 7. 2. The Manx Revival 188 References 196 Appendices 209 4 0. 0. Introduction It is a widely acknowledged and sobering truth among linguists working in the field of endangerment that the last speakers of probably half the world’s languages are alive today. The unspoken corollary is that they will be dead tomorrow; inventories and estimates of vitality need constantly to be revised as age takes its toll on already decimated communities and the‘critically endangered’fade intothe category of ‘extinct’. In 2007, one of the leading scholars in the field, Suzanne Romaine, lamented that ‘only two fluent speakers remain of the Warrwa language traditionally spoken in the Derby region of West Kimberley in Western Australia … Marie Smith Jones is the last person who still speaks Eyak, one of Alaska’s 20 some native languages’(2007: 116). The eight years that have elapsed since the publication of her article, ‘Preserving Endangered Languages’,have witnessed the exequies of all three speakers and their languages. It is an alarmingly recurrent phenomenon.The Ethnologue estimates that there are 204 languages with fewer than 10 speakers, 344 languages with 10 to 99, and 548 languages with fewer than 99 speakers. There is a general consensus that most of the 6000 languages spoken in the world in 2015 will not survive until the end of the century.1 1Ethnologue, founded by the missionary organization SIL International, is the most comprehensive source for speaker numbers of all known languages. According to its scale of endangerment (see Appendix 1), at the Threatened and Shifting levels, intergenerational transmission is in the process of being broken, but the child- bearing generation can still use the language. This is the condition of 1,531 (or 22 percent) of the world’s 7,102 known living languages. In the case of Dying languages, the child-bearing generation is no longer able to transmit the language to the next generation, since the only fluent users (if any remain) are above that age. This is the condition of 916 languages (or 13 percent). Languages that have fallen completely out of (even symbolic) use, and are no longer associated with a sense of ethnic identity are Extinct. Since 1950, 367 such languages have been recorded (www.ethnologue.com, accessed 8 February 2015) 5 The phenomena of language shift, endangerment and loss have been subject of burgeoning academic interest in the last twenty to thirty years. 2 Concomitantly, there has been a growth in awareness and institutional support – from such bodies as UNESCO or the European Union – for the protection of endangered minority languages. Monographs directed at a non-specialist readership have been numerous. The apocalyptic spirit of the millenium was marked by the publication in the year 2000 of no fewer than three: Nettle and Romaine’s Vanishing Voices, David Crystal’s Language Death and Claude Hagège’s Halte à la mort des langues, followed two years later by Andrew Dalby’s Languages in Danger. The monitory tone continues in the title of David Harrison’s 2007 When languages die: the extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge, which also underscores the potential loss to linguistic science posed by such extinction and the urgency of documentation irrespective of revitalization. Linguistic salvage has been addressed by Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley in Saving Languages: an introduction to language revitalization (2006), while both endangerment and revitalization are the subject of Sarah Thomason’s Endangered Languages: An Introduction (2015). The inclusion of the latter in Cambridge University’s Linguistics textbooks series signals the maturity of the field. The drastic diminution of the world’s linguistic diversity has become a cause for widespread concern among linguists and anthropologists. In a seminal article (1992), Michael Krauss attempted to instill a certain amount of guilt in the profession, accusing it of neglecting the vitality of the subject 2Language death as a field of academic research may be said to date from the publication of Ion Coteanu’s Cum dispare o limbă (istroromâna) (Bucharest, 1957). However, it was the extensive fieldwork carried out by Nancy Dorian in the 1980s on East Sutherland Gaelic which consolidated its status as a separate discipline within the broader field of language change. Similar investigations (such as Dressler 1982 and Campbell and Muntzel 1989) followed and demonstrated that linguistic change occurring during language death does not differ essentially from that taking place elsewhere, except in terms of rate, context, and amount of change. 6 matter of their own investigation: languages and the insights into linguistic structure they potentially embody. Less often are the people themselves who belong to a speech community in the process of language shift or who are directly affected by it the object of attention. The impending implosion of the world’s languages is not unconnected with a vertiginous rise in the world’s population during the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. The factors determining language death are typically non- linguistic (Swadesh 1948: 235). These are extensively listed in Campbell (1994: 1963) but the most commonly cited are socioeconomic and sociopolitical. Socioeconomic factors include lack of economic opportunities, rapid economic transformations, ongoing industrialization, work patterns, migrant labour, the destruction of habitats and communities, emigration and displacement, and the omnipresence of dominant languages as unavoidable vehicles for economic emancipation, these diffused through the media, in particular what Kreuss (1992: 6) dubs an ‘incalculably lethal new weapon [the] “cultural nerve gas” of television’. As large language communities expand, others contract. Over the last 500 years, small languages nearly everywhere have come under severe threat, exacerbated in the past fifty years by globalization. Among the sociopolitical factors are official (assimilatory) language policies, discrimination, stigmatization, repression, and armed conflict. Official language policies can be and have been historically a particularly decisive factor in language death. Western colonialism has proved extremely efficient in this respect, as can be gathered from the use of the consumption metaphor encoded in “glottophagy”. Another incendiary term frequently encountered in this context is ‘linguicide’, a concept analogous to genocide. The classic example is the ‘English Only’ policy of the United States government during the 19th century, designed to force Native Americans to learn English at the expense of their native languages. Many modern parallels can be adduced, such as the repression of Kurdish in Turkey, or Aromanian in Greece. The official status of languages crossing borders may vary according to the statutory laws of the respective countries.