John Donald Publishers, 1997. — 258 p.Most likely if you are interested in studying any of the Celtic languages, you are aware of the fact that all of them are considered either endangered, as with the case of Welsh, Breton, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, or dead (and now perhaps revived), as with Manx and Cornish. But what does this really mean? A particular area of study within the field of sociolinguistics (which basically studies the interrelationship between languages and societies) focuses on language death. It looks at questions such as why and how languages die, why it matters and what can and should be done about it.
An excellent starting place for considering language death is David Crystal’s book aptly entitled Language Death. It is particularly convenient because he is British and therefore many of his examples come from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
The How and Why
A language can be considered dead when its last speaker dies, but in many respects, it is dead when it is no longer a working language within a community. This can sometimes be as a result of community who speak a distinct language being decimated by natural disasters, famine, war or associated emigration. The 1840s potato famine in Ireland was definitely a factor in the decline of Irish, because the majority of people who died or emigrated from the country were rural Irish speakers
More often, languages decline when another language begins to take precedence within that community, which is exactly the circumstances with English and all of the Celtic languages except Breton, where it is French that is the dominant language. In many cases, the dominant language replaces the minority language slowly and almost by choice, as has happened with many Latin American immigrants in America (where the kids grow up speaking only English, although this trend does seem to be changing some now). Why do people abandon their native languages? In most cases, the reasons are largely economic, or even social. The Celtic languages have survived best in rural areas. Often trade and commerce comes into the rural areas, creating a bilingual environment, where English (or French) is seen as the language of progress. Since most parents want their children to do better than themselves, they view English or French as the key to this improvement. This is clearly the case with Cornish and Manx, as both Cornwall and the Isle of Man absorbed a great amount of English trade and eventually English took precedence over the other language.
