CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE CELTIC LANGUAGES
TODAY
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Glanville Price
S
ix Celtic languages survived into post-medieval times. Of these, three, namely
Scottish Gaelic, Manx and Irish, belong to the Gaelic or Goidelic branch of Celtic
and are closely related to one another. The other three, Breton, Cornish and Welsh,
constituting the Brittonic or Brythonic branch, are less closely related to one another
than are the Gaelic languages. Cornish died out towards the end of the eighteenth
century but Manx survived until well into the second half of the present century (the
last native speaker died at the age of 97 in 1974).
The situation of all four remaining Celtic languages is precarious, leaving few
grounds for optimism as to their long-term future. In widely differing respects, to
varying extents, and with markedly divergent practical effects, official attitudes
towards and public awareness of and concern for all four have improved in recent
decades and significant numbers of non-native speakers have achieved considerable
competence in them, but the decline in the number of native speakers goes on.
We have, with the proviso noted below, reasonably accurate figures for the
numbers of speakers of Scottish Gaelic and of Welsh, but, for different reasons, not
for Irish and Breton.
The decennial censuses held in the United Kingdom have, since 1891, included
in Scotland and Wales a question relating to each individual's ability to speak (and,
in recent censuses, to understand, read or write) Gaelic or Welsh respectively.
The statistics derived from the answers to these questions can be taken as a fairly
safe indication of the state of the language at the dates in question, provided always
that one makes allowance for the fact that it is not always easy, or possible, to give
a straight 'yes' or 'no' answer to the question: 'Do you speak a given language?' It is
quite certain that some individuals whose knowledge of Gaelic or Welsh is very
limited have claimed, on census returns, to be speakers of the language, whereas it is
more than likely that some (perhaps many) others who have a real, if limited, con-
versational competence in the language and whose usual medium of communication
is English have been enumerated as non-speakers of Gaelic or Welsh respectively.
There is the further consideration that no corresponding question is asked in
England, where there have been throughout this century and still are substantial
numbers of Welsh speakers.
However, if statistics relating to linguistic competence derived from the censuses