- Chapter Forty-One -
Gaeilge [1986]: 42), and the proportion of those attending Irish-medium secondary
schools fell from 28 per cent in 1937-8 to 17 per cent in 1957-8 and to a mere 1.4 per
cent in 1981-2 (ibid.: 28).
The problems of publishing books and periodicals in minority languages are, of
course, immense and few such publications can be viable in the absence of public or
private subsidies or commercial sponsorship. State subsidies are, in fact, available for
Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic and, in the case of Welsh, a wide range of both books
and periodicals continues to appear. Inevitably, however, these represent only a small
fraction (and an even smaller one in the case of Irish and Scottish Gaelic) of what
is available in English. Such factors as the definition of what counts as a book and
fluctuation from year to year mean that precise figures, unless given for a period of
several years and accompanied by a detailed commentary, could be misleading. It
would not, however, distort the picture unduly to say that, in recent years, the
average number of books published annually has been about thirty for Scottish
Gaelic, forty to fifty for Breton, about a hundred for Irish, and between four and five
hundred for Welsh.
In the broadcasting media, only Welsh has achieved a level of diffusion generally
considered by the linguistic community in question to be more or less satisfactory.
The BBC's Radio Cymru broadcasts in Welsh for an average of twelve or thirteen
hours per day while there is a daily average output of some five hours in Welsh on
television. To give daily or weekly averages for the other three languages would serve
little purpose, given that the situation is constantly changing, that there is much
variation according to season, and that some programmes can be received only in
parts of the relevant areas. It can, however, fairly be said that they all compare most
unfavourably with Welsh and that, in the case of TV, each of them has substantially
less (often less than half) in an average week than Welsh has per day.
One important stronghold of the languages has been the churches and, in general,
the use of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic or Irish in churches in a given area corresponds
more or less to the extent to which the languages are still in use in everyday life
in that area. The case of Breton is, however, different.^6 Up to the First World War,
Breton was extensively used both in sermons and for teaching the catechism,
but more recently there has been a catastrophic decline: '[French] took over the
catechism almost completely by 1950. Breton preaching survived a little longer but
was generally abandoned in the 1960s ... ; hymns often survived only in connection
with annual festivals' (Humphreys 1992: 256).
Although, thanks to the initiatives of groups of individuals (clergy and lay), the
liturgy and the Bible have been translated and occasional Breton masses are still held,
'the church as an institution seems to have no place for Breton, beyond the inclusion
of a Breton appendix in the three diocesan hymnals' (ibid.).
The pessimistic conclusion to any survey of the Celtic languages in the late twen-
tieth century must be that they are all at risk. Numbers of native speakers of both
varieties of Gaelic may well have declined beyond the point of no return and Breton
is in a distressingly disadvantageous position. Welsh probably still has a chance of
more than short-term survival: it has a substantial number of native speakers, the
numbers of those who achieve considerable competence in it as a second language
are increasing significantly, its role in official and public life, in education, and in the