Despite all the encouragement and subsidization given to Gaelic in Ireland, it is spoken by twice as many people in Scotland, where there has been negligible government assistance. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic is one of the few minority languages in the world to be growing. Gaelic was introduced to Scotland by invaders from Ireland thirteen centuries ago and long held sway in the more remote islands and glens along the western side of the country. From 80,000 speakers in 1960 the number has now crept up to a little over 90,000 today. Even so, Gaelic speakers account for just 2.5 percent of the Scottish population.
But almost everywhere else the process is one of slow, steady, and all too often terminal decline. The last speaker of Cornish as a mother tongue died 200 years ago, and though constant efforts are made to revive the language, no more than fifty or sixty people can speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation. It survives only in two or three dialect words, most notably emmets (âantsâ), the word locals use to describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous landscape each summer. A similar fate befell Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man, whose last native speakers died in the 1960s.
The Gaelic of Ireland may well be the next to go. In 1983, Bord na Gaelige, the government body charged with preserving the language, wrote: âThere is very little hope indeed that Irish will survive as a community language in the Gaeltacht beyond the end of the centuryââan uncharacteristically downbeat, if sadly realistic, assessment.
We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Synge, Behan, and Irelandâs other literary masters had written in what is inescapably a fringe language. Their works would be as little known to us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.
4.
The First Thousand Years
I n the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the âveather ist coldâ or inquire of the time by asking, âWhat ist de clock?â According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is âvery close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago.â [Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987.] This shouldnât entirely surprise us. This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become its most prominent language.
Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to English. These are the 300,000 Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of them can, according to the linguistic historian Charlton Laird, still read the medieval epic Beowulf âalmost at sight.â They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Frisian for boat is boat (as compared to the Dutch and German boot ), rain is rein (German and Dutch regen ), and goose is goes (Dutch and German gans ).
In about A . D . 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, these two groups of people and two other related
But almost everywhere else the process is one of slow, steady, and all too often terminal decline. The last speaker of Cornish as a mother tongue died 200 years ago, and though constant efforts are made to revive the language, no more than fifty or sixty people can speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation. It survives only in two or three dialect words, most notably emmets (âantsâ), the word locals use to describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous landscape each summer. A similar fate befell Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man, whose last native speakers died in the 1960s.
The Gaelic of Ireland may well be the next to go. In 1983, Bord na Gaelige, the government body charged with preserving the language, wrote: âThere is very little hope indeed that Irish will survive as a community language in the Gaeltacht beyond the end of the centuryââan uncharacteristically downbeat, if sadly realistic, assessment.
We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Synge, Behan, and Irelandâs other literary masters had written in what is inescapably a fringe language. Their works would be as little known to us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.
4.
The First Thousand Years
I n the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the âveather ist coldâ or inquire of the time by asking, âWhat ist de clock?â According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is âvery close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago.â [Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987.] This shouldnât entirely surprise us. This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become its most prominent language.
Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to English. These are the 300,000 Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of them can, according to the linguistic historian Charlton Laird, still read the medieval epic Beowulf âalmost at sight.â They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Frisian for boat is boat (as compared to the Dutch and German boot ), rain is rein (German and Dutch regen ), and goose is goes (Dutch and German gans ).
In about A . D . 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, these two groups of people and two other related
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