A SKETCH OF MANX GAELIC

Manx Gaelic, or Gaelg Vanninagh as it is called by those who speak it, is a member of the Celtic group of the Indo-European family of languages. This huge family, the native homelands of which cover most of Europe, half of Asia and, as a result of colonisation, the Americas, Australasia and parts of Africa, includes such major tongues as Russian, Hindi, German, Spanish, French and of course English, while the Celtic group, once spread throughout Europe, has for many centuries been confined to the British Isles and north-western France.

The Celtic tongues are themselves divided between two branches each comprising three languages: the Brythonic branch (Welsh, Breton and Cornish) and the Goidelic branch (Irish, Scots and Manx Gaelic), and it is not too unrealistic to think of each branch as a family of three sisters, one family being the cousins of the other. It is regrettable but true that Welsh, Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic (each with a little more than 250 000, 1,000,000, 30,000 and 80,000 native speakers respectively) are all in slow retreat towards the remoter, westernmost parts of their home areas, pushed further and further back by the huge, irresistible forces of English or French. Cornish, which ceased to be a medium of spoken communication around 1800, is in a somewhat different position as it has been revived during this century and is slowly gaining speakers. As for Manx, we shall now examine it in a little more detail.

Very closely related to the now extinct Gaelic dialects of neighbouring Ulster and Galloway, Manx began life as an offshoot of Old Irish in perhaps the fifth century of our era, when the Island was colonised from Ireland. Largely unscathed by the Norse invasions, it was, as far as we know, first committed to writing in about 1610, when the Welshborn Bishop of Sodor and Mann, John Phillips, caused a translation to be made of the Book of Common Prayer, though his version was not in fact published until 1894. The first actual publication in the Manx language, however, came a century after Phillips, when the famed Bishop Thomas Wilson had his 'Principles and Duties of Christianity' translated into Manx, using a spelling different from Phillips' Welsh-based system and one which with modifications, has continued to be used to the present day.

At this time nearly all of the Island's residents were Manx-speaking, English being used only by the administration, the educated and those who were sufficiently enterprising to venture across to Britain occasionally for whatever purpose. It was reported in 1764 by the S.P.C.K. that the majority of the inhabitants were ignorant of English, hence the necessity for the Bible translation made into Manx at that time. But the advent of smuggling in the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginnings of tourism soon afterwards, initially in the Douglas area, led to an extension of English influence to the Island and the decline of Manx as an everyday spoken language commenced. Indeed, the abandonment of Manx by the residents of Douglas began so early and was so complete that the present-day local accent of Douglas (and Onchan) more closely resembles that of Merseyside than it does the rural parts of the Isle of Man.

Sufficient evidence exists to indicate that the generation of islanders born during the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the first truly bilingual one (the first non-Manx-speaking Deemster took office in 1819). Except in the villages and farms of the Island furthest removed from the towns, children born after about 1850 were, for the most part, brought up in the English language, and of the handful of native speakers who survived until recent times none was born later than 1877.

It is a simple matter to trace the decline of Manx numerically as the everyday spoken language of the Island. In 1875 Henry Jenner, an interested visitor from Cornwall who later actually initiated the Cornish language revival, sent out a questionnaire to the Island's clergy to ascertain the number of Manx speakers, and this revealed that outside of Douglas only 29% of the population (i.e. 12,350) had a knowledge of the language. From 1901 onwards the question of language was included in the decennial census papers, and although the resultant figures are not strictly comparable as the precise wording on the paper tended to vary somewhat from one census to the next, they do provide a fairly reliable idea of how the decline proceeded: (1901) 4,419, (1911) 2,382, (1921) 896, (1931) 531, (1951) 355, (1961) 165, (1971) 284.

These figures require some further clarification, for whilst the great majority of the 4,419 speakers recorded in 1901 would have been middle-aged or elderly native speakers, the same could not be said of the 531 speakers of 1931, most of whom had acquired the language more deliberately in adult life, and such people represent almost the totality of those claiming to speak Manx at censuses after the Second World War. Indeed an attempt was made in 1946 to comb the Island for genuine native speakers, as a result of which only 20 were found. Only four years later, when Prof. Kenneth Jackson came to visit native speakers in order to document the last remains of the spoken Manx language, the score of elderly speakers had been halved the publication of his work in 1955 saw only six of them still surviving, and by the advent of the 1960s only two were left: Mrs. Sage Kinvig of Ronague (d. 1962) and Mr. Edward (Ned) Maddrell of Glenchass (d. 1974, aged 97).

Yet the language continues to be spoken, more hesitantly (and grammatically less corruptly) than earlier this century but no less naturally, in the sense that there are today living on the Island people who, though having themselves learnt the language, regularly use it to communicate between themselves and resort to English only in cases of difficulty. In fact, the efforts of young enthusiasts to acquire fluency in the spoken language began back in the '30s, when several of them individually befriended native speakers alive at the time and thus learned the language from them at first hand, supplementing their knowledge with the few books on Manx then available, such as Goodwin's "First Lessons in Manx" and the dictionaries by Cregeen and Kneen. Later they in turn taught others or held classes, so perpetuating the tradition of the spoken Manx tongue with a tenuous but indisputable continuity right down to the present day. The fruits of their long-term labours may be seen in the above census figure for 1971, which shows a 72% increase on the figure just ten years before. In 1981, incidentally, the language question was, for the first time this century, not included in the census paper.

At the same time as this revival was beginning to show results numerically,other successes were won for the language in various fields. The society founded in 1899 to promote and preserve the Manx language, Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh, was injected with new enthusiasm in the early '60s after a period of lying dormant, and has since then been responsible for the co-ordination of Manx Gaelic activities, having a continuing programme of publishing and republishing books in and on Manx Gaelic.

In 1985, through a resolution in Tynwald, the Island's Parliament, the Manx language was for the first time in Manx history given limited official recognition, and under the government- sponsored Manx Heritage Foundation a Manx Gaelic Advisory Council was set up (Coonceil ny Gaelgey) to regulate and standardise the official use of Manx. Then, in September 1986, Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh was able to open its first ever headquarters, named Thie ny Gaelgey, a former school building at St. Jude's in the north of the Island, and at the time of writing it is confidently hoped that this will provide a focal point for the language movement's future activities.

The present position is thus very different from that of a century ago, when the Rev. Gill of Malew was able to write of Manx: "It is a doomed language - an iceberg floating into southern latitudes", with the reasonable certitude that its final demise would not be too far away. In one sense, of course, the language actually died when Manx children ceased once and for all to be brought up to speak it and no further native speaking generations could be assured, i.e. in the middle of the last century. But in our particular instance this point of view might be an over- simplistic one; it would be hardly accurate, for example, to describe Mediaeval Latin as a dead language during the Dark and the Middle Ages when, despite its having no actual native speakers, it was widely known and used by educated Europeans and could even boast the luxury of a living literature. The position of Manx Gaelic is certainly a much more precarious one than that of Mediaeval Latin due to the very small number of those who speak and nurture it and the inevitable peaks and troughs with which the Manx language movement has always had to contend - as long as half a century ago J. J. Kneen was writing about "Celtic enthusiasm, always of a fugitive nature"; yet there are very good grounds for saying that Manx Gaelic, having been recorded and documented in the nick of time and even updated to meet at least some of the demands of the twentieth century, will continue to enrich the lives of those islanders who have made the hard effort to make the language their own and who cherish it as perhaps the most distinctive badge of Manxness it is possible to wear. Indeed, as long as the Isle of Man's individuality remains, one can be fairly certain that succeeding generations will never fail to provide a small number of enthusiastic speakers and users of the language, thus assuring its survival for centuries to come.