Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjoðanna— “Languages are the chief distinguishing marks of peoples. No people in fact comes into being until it speaks a language of its own; let the languages perish and the peoples perish too, or become different peoples. But that never happens except as the result of oppression and distress.”

These are the words of a little-known Icelander of the early nineteenth century, Sjéra Tómas Sæmundsson. He had, of course, primarily in mind the part played by the cultivated Icelandic language, in spite of poverty, lack of power, and insignificant numbers, in keeping the Icelanders in being in desperate times. But the words might as well apply to the Welsh of Wales, who have also loved and cultivated their language for its own sake (not as an aspirant for the ruinous honour of becoming the lingua franca of the world), and who by it and with it maintain their identity.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, English and Welsh

The Celtic languages are usually divided into two groups based on one major sound-change. The older Italo-Celtic consonant */k^w/ remained /kw/ in one major branch of the Celtic languages, which are consequently known as “Q-Celtic”. This group included Celtiberian, spoken in what is now Spain; some dialects of Gaulish; and the modern Gaelic languages, in which the /kw/ has become a /k/ (spelt with a C in Irish and Scots Gaelic). In the other major branch, including Gaulish and Brythonic — modern Welsh and Breton — it became a /p/-sound, and so this group is called “P-Celtic”. A few examples should suffice to illustrate this:

The Celts, contrary to what is commonly thought, were not illiterate before the missionaries came; but the Druids discouraged the writing of their teachings, believing (rather like Socrates or Pythagoras) that dependence on written texts weakened the memory. That is why so much knowledge about Celtic customs, and especially about the rôle and nature of Druidism, has been lost. The “druids” found in Asterix and in various roleplaying games are based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic notions, and are probably highly misleading.

We do know, however, that the Druids were philosophers, teachers and interpreters of the law. In Ireland their colleges remained side by side with Christian monastic schools, and the laws they had been masters of were adopted and ratified by Christian clerics, including St Patrick himself. Here as elsewhere, pre-Christian documents and traditions were destroyed by the missionaries, but among the Celts it was not so total and systematic an eradication as with many other peoples. Some inscriptions remain in Ireland in a native Celtic script known as Ogam (Celts elsewhere generally used the Greek, Etruscan or Roman alphabets). These Ogam inscriptions reveal that the language of Ireland was Q-Celtic as early as the first century.

By the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion a single Brythonic language was spoken in Britain from the Channel as far north as central Scotland. The language we call Pictish, which some scholars consider P-Celtic, was spoken in the Highlands. A settlement of Belgic Celts from the Continent was underway when Caesar arrived, but their language does not seem to have differed greatly from that already found there. Vulgar Latin more or less replaced the Celtic language of Gaul, where it evolved into French; but it did not gain much of a hold in Britain. Nor did the Romans ever colonize Ireland.

It was not until the collapse of the Roman Empire under Germanizing pressures in the fifth century CE that the British language was threatened. The Angles and Saxons invaded in force from lands around the Rhine, driving the Brythonic-speakers ever westwards and dividing them into several distinct communities: Cumbrians, Welsh, and Cornish in Britain, and a group of refugees who fled to northwestern Gaul, where they are known to this day as the Bretons. Those who did not flee were enslaved. There are several lines of evidence to support this conclusion. For one thing, few Brythonic words were borrowed into English at this period, despite their proximity and despite the usual avidity of English for borrowing other people’s words. Then there’s the genetic evidence. Mitochondrial DNA, which is used to trace female lines of descent, shows no distinction between England and Wales; Y-chromosome DNA, on the other hand, which follows the male line, shows a population very sharply divided by Offa’s Dyke — more so, in fact, than by the British Channel. So Celtic women were having Saxon men’s children, but not vice versa: a tell-tale sign of a slave population.

The largest remaining stronghold of the British Celtic people is known in English as Wales, and its inhabitants as Welsh. According to Professor J. R. R. Tolkien (whose achievements as a linguist have been eclipsed, perhaps unfairly, by his literary success) the Anglo-Saxon word walh or wealh, from which these names are derived, was a common Germanic name for a speaker of a Celtic language, or of Latin. The common translations “foreigner” and “slave” are somewhat misleading. The word was not applied to foreigners of Germanic speech such as Goths and Franks, nor to speakers of other languages that the Germanic peoples came into contact with in early times. In England wealh was often used to mean “slave”, but always specifically a Celtic slave; other slaves were referred to as þeow.

The use of wealh, apart from the legal status to which surviving elements of the conquered population were no doubt reduced, must always have implied recognition of British origin. Such elements, though incorporated in the domain of an English or Saxon lord, must always have remained “not English”, and with this difference preservation in a measure of their British speech may have endured longer than is supposed.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, English and Welsh

One group of the Gaels, known as Scots, had meanwhile been building the kingdom of Dál Ríada, covering Ulster, the Isle of Man and Argyll. In the late fifth century the Argyll settlement became the political centre of the kingdom. Their contacts with the native Pictish kingdom of Fortriu ran the gamut from co-operation in raids on Roman Britain to outright war; the Scots had the aid of the Celtic Church, established by Colum Cille (“St Columba”), but no resolution was found for many years.

It was not until the Norse began to invade the British Isles in the ninth century that the Scottish-Pictish King Cinaed mac Alpin (“Kenneth MacAlpine”) finally united his two peoples. The Vikings harried the coasts, and many Norse immigrants settled in the north and west, particularly in the Hebrides; but their speech did not last. As elsewhere in the Viking world, the settlers began to speak the local language rather than clinging to their own. In the Highlands and Islands their descendants became the MacDonalds, the MacLeods, the Sutherlands, and many other clans who today are at the centre of Gaelic Scotland. The Isle of Man, situated between Scotland and Ireland, became the centre of a Norse-Gaelic kingdom which was to last into the thirteenth century. Meanwhile, Pictish also quietly disappeared. Here Sæmundsson’s aphorism seems not to apply; there is no archaeological or historical evidence that the Scots’ régime was anything but benign.

Several Norse factions were present in Ireland, and they warred both against each other and against the indigenous population, destroying many centres of monastic education. King Brian Boru eventually succeeded in uniting the Irish clans under his command, and after his decisive defeat of the Viking armies he levied taxes from the clan chiefs — hence his name “Brian of the Tribute” — to build new bardic schools, with a more secular focus than the monasteries. Thanks to these schools, Irish Gaelic was for many centuries second only to Latin in Europe as a language of culture and learning. Boru is remembered to this day as an Irish hero. It could well be said that Ireland’s economic success today is due to following his lead in providing lavish government funding for educational institutions. However, the Norse settlements about the Irish coasts remained (Dublin, Cork, Wexford, and others), and Boru’s reforms did not reach these areas.

A Norse settlement was also established in northern France. The Normans, having adopted French speech and customs, began to expand their territory over land and sea. The kingdom of the Bretons was broken less than a century after its foundation. Although Brittany subsequently became a duchy, the Breton language was reduced to a vernacular of the common people; nobles spoke French. Brittany has no “classical” literature of its own.

The Brythonic languages in Britain were not doing very much better. Cumbrian had vanished quickly, leaving only a few dialect words in north-western England and southern Scotland. Wales was a conglomerate of dynastic principalities; they formed many temporary alliances over the years with other rulers, Welsh and English alike. The southernmost principality, Cornwall, was separated from the rest of Wales by the Bristol Channel. Its language was already distinct by the time it succumbed to the might of united England in 939 CE, but no body of Cornish literature was created.

In 1066, William the Conqueror subdued the English state at Hastings, and Wales was subjected to Norman rule. They did not take conquest lying down. For the next two centuries, violence was the rule of life. Various short-lived treaties existed between Welsh lords and the English crown, and the balance of power often lay with the border provinces (the “Marches”). Throughout this time, Norman-English towns were established throughout Wales, from which the indigenous population, and their language, were excluded. The last crown prince of Gwynedd died in the late thirteenth century, and Wales was left to the tender mercies of King Edward I “Longshanks” of England.

Some nine years before the Norman invasion, Maol Calum had killed MacBeth at Lumphanan (not Dunsinane!) and become known as Calum Ceann Mór, or in English King Malcolm III “Canmore” of Scotland. When some of the Saxon nobility who survived the Norman Conquest fled north to Scotland, Canmore, who had sheltered in England during MacBeth’s reign, gave them asylum. They included Edgar Æþeling and his sister Margaret.

Canmore was much impressed by Margaret, and eventually made her his second wife and his queen. She spoke no Gaelic and had little regard for Scottish court customs or the rites of the Celtic Church. Due to her influence, English became the language of Scottish gentry. (It was at this time also that Scotland — at least in the Lowlands — began to replace its communal pattern of land ownership with feudal law, whereby economic control was vested in a single leader figure in a system not unakin to contract capitalism.) When Longshanks usurped the Scottish crown about two centuries later, taking advantage of a disagreement over the succession, it had little or no effect on the linguistic situation in Scotland. Nor did William Wallace and Robert the Bruce’s ultimately successful guerrilla war against the English occupation. The Bruce and his heirs, the Stuart monarchs, all spoke either French or English.

However, it is clear that people of all stations living in the Highlands and Islands continued to speak Gaelic; when the Isle of Man was annexed by Scotland in 1266 it was Gaelic that replaced the Norse speech of the older kingdom. In the Highland universities of the time, students were permitted to speak Gaelic, French, Latin, Greek or Hebrew — but “Inglis” was considered vulgar, and forbidden.

Ireland was invaded by English Normans about a hundred years after the Battle of Hastings. The occupied area, known as “The Pale”, was centred on the earlier Norse settlements, where the bardic schools were absent; it seems the bards, heirs to the druids, were the single greatest source of resistance to colonization. The invaders became Ireland’s political rulers, but did not displace the native Irish culture. Instead, they were assimilated into it, gradually becoming a more or less Irish élite. The English state, looking askance at Ireland’s communal land ownership and liberal marriage laws, continued to interfere with Irish politics over the following centuries.

After the death of Llywelyn of Gwynedd, the Welsh aristocracy began to seek their advancement in England, and to adopt English language and customs. Wales stood as a recognisably separate political entity from England again, briefly and for the last time, at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, when Owain Glyndŵr (Shakespeare’s “Owen Glendower”) rebelled, unsuccessfully, against the English crown. During the times that followed, while certain Welsh noble families, notably the Tudors, rose to the highest ranks in English society, they did so by becoming more English than the English.

And it was the Tudor King Henry VIII who finally sealed Wales’ fate. The Act for certain Ordinances in the King’s Majeſty’s Dominion and Principality of Wales, passed by an English parliament and crown alone, asserted that Wales had always been a part of England. Dismayed that the people of the ſame dominion haue and do daily vſe a ſpeche nothing like ne conſonaunt to the naturall mother tonge vſed within this Realme, Henry laid down that English should be the only language of the courts, and that the use of Welsh would debar one from administrative office. His intention, clearly stated, was vtterly to extirpe alle and ſingular the ſiniſter vſages and cuſtoms of Wales.

In Ireland likewise, Henry began a systematic eradication of the obstacles to his dominion. The House of Kildare were exterminated. The other chiefs had their lands confiscated, to be regranted on condition that they were parcelled out according to England’s feudal laws, rather than the collective ownership that had been customary under the Brehon Law. The heirs of the chiefly houses were forced to go to England and learn English ways; Henry’s new laws required them to bring their children up as English. Irish manuscripts (and their writers) were deliberately destroyed. And Henry declared himself head of the Church of Ireland. As in England, he had Catholic monasteries and schools demolished, and the Mass banned. This turned out to be a mistake. Many of the Anglo-Irish townspeople were devout Catholics, and in defiance of Henry’s reforms they adopted Ireland’s Gaelic culture and language en masse.

Brittany was officially incorporated into the French state under King François I in 1532; strictly speaking, however, this was merely a milestone in a long process of assimilation that had begun far earlier and continued for centuries following. Religious literature had been written in Breton since about 1450, but from the beginning it was strongly influenced by French. The Breton vocabulary filled up with French words, to the point that modern Breton has more French borrowings than any other language (bar English).

The English oppression of Ireland became truly effective in the time of Elizabeth I. English people, especially those who had no lands in Britain, were transplanted in increasing numbers to Ireland in the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, under the auspices of nobles such as Sir Henry Sidney. The destruction of the chiefly houses, begun by Henry VIII, was continued, to devastating effect. Six of the nine Earls of Ulster fled their counties to seek refuge in Catholic Spain — and the plantations were concentrated in their territory. The Reformation, introduced to Ireland at this time, failed largely because of its separation from the Irish language; Protestant preachers who spoke no English were required to conduct services in Latin.

Elizabeth was succeeded by the Scottish King James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England), whose policies with regard to his native land’s Celtic language mirror those of Henry VIII. The Gaelic bards were considered “idlers”, and unworthy of teaching the young; propertied men were required by law to send their eldest child to an English school. James’ avowed purpose was

that the vulgar Ingliſhe tounge be vniuerſallie plantit, and the Iriſh language, whilk is ane of the cheif and principall cauſes of the continewance of barbaritie and inciuilitie amongis the inhabitantis of the Iſles and Heylandis, may be aboliſheit and remouit.

After the 1641 Rebellion English controlling measures became much harsher. Oliver Cromwell, England’s leading statesman in the brief period when England was a republic, had as many as two-thirds of the Irish Catholic population killed or exiled as slaves to the American colonies. The English language gained its greatest foothold in Ireland around this time; it became the usual language of business in the towns, without yet displacing the use of Irish Gaelic in the rural communities. The advantage conferred to the Gaelic by Henry VIII’s affront to the Anglo-Irish Catholics was now gone. There was now a thriving pro-Catholic royalist movement in England and Scotland, and it was with this, rather than with their Gaelic neighbours, that the Anglo-Irish papists identified. The Brehon Law finally ceased to operate around 1650, and fears for the language itself began.

Most of the resistance movements of eighteenth-century Ireland arose among the peasants — the one group who were still mainly Irish-speaking. None of them amounted to an organized, Ireland-wide revolution. Larger movements began to appear in the nineteenth century. Controversy arose between those who promoted Gaelic as absolutely vital to the Irish identity, and those who believed that it was a hindrance to the development of the Irish people. Then came the terrible Potato Famine of 1847–48. The solution offered by the English state was to enact freedom of trade throughout the province, which was not a great help to the thousands of rural poor who had no cash and nothing left to sell. The total population of Ireland was halved, the decline being most drastic among the peasantry, who fled — to the towns, to America, and to English.

And the English authorities began cracking down on the remnants of the Irish language. If a farmer wrote the Gaelic form of his name on his cart, he was liable to be summonsed by the Royal Irish Constabulary; such names were considered “illegible”. Naturally, the Irish language became a new focus for the separatist movement, which at this time was strongest among discontented middle-class city-dwelling intellectuals. These people began to use Irish as a badge of their distinctiveness, forming Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League).

In the twentieth century the separatists achieved their main objective, and Ireland became a state in its own right — with the exception of those six counties of Ulster whose Earls had fled to Spain. These are still subject to the English crown, under the name of “Northern Ireland”. Gaelic is a compulsory subject in the schools, but “learners’ Irish” is a very different language from the speech of the Gaeltacht (the fragmented areas around the west coasts where Gaelic is still spoken at home). Most of the native speakers can read and write only in English. Furthermore, where it is necessary to speak about twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies, it is the learners who have invented, and use, new terms in Gaelic. Native speakers simply insert the English words into their conversation. Outside of the Gaeltacht Irish is mainly used in public speeches to make a political point.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw great political upheaval in Scotland, with wars over both religion and monarchy mirroring those in England. Even before the Jacobite Risings, the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge forbade the use of Gaelic in schools, with much the same rationale as James VI & I’s legislation a century earlier. The translation of the Bible into Gaelic (New Testament 1767, Old Testament 1801) mollified the Society’s dislike of it a little; but by that time England had finally gained complete control over Scotland, with the brutal crushing of the Bonnie Prince’s forces at Culloden in 1746, and the English policy-makers had no more time for Gaelic than for tartan and the pipes. All three were officially banned.

In the nineteenth century Gaelic Societies of one kind or another began to spring up all over Scotland. But in a state centred in London, these societies could only slow the onslaught of English. The Highland chiefs had been divorced from their traditional rôle as representatives of their people, and given a new position as landlords; they proceeded to clear the people from the farms by fair means or foul, and put sheep runs in instead. Thus the population of Gaelic speakers in Scotland was heavily reduced. Most either emigrated to Britain’s new colonies or joined the urban poor in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In either case they usually found themselves required to speak English every day simply to obtain basic necessities. The Gaelic Societies were largely the domain of politically-minded intellectuals.

The 1872 Education (Scotland) Act made no mention of Gaelic. Later legislation allowed it to be introduced as a subject, but not as a medium of teaching. And although the proscription of Gaelic in public schools does not seem to have been enshrined in law, harsh punishments were frequently handed out to children caught speaking it.

Of all the new colonies, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia held on to the Gaelic for the longest. Most of the emigrants who fled the Clearances directly went there, forming a comparatively self-sufficient community of Gaelic-speaking farmers and foresters. Although the language faded from use in the face of English, as it did everywhere, it was preserved in the schools and in the Catholic churches. John MacLeod estimated the Gaelic-speaking population in 1900 at one million (Highlanders: A History of the Gaels, 1996); this may have been exaggerated, but Cape Breton does retain a vibrant Highland culture to this day, and the language is not forgotten. The same does not appear true, alas, of Waipū in New Zealand, to which a small religious group of Gaelic-speakers made their way from Cape Breton in the late nineteenth century.

Today all Scots Gaelic speakers are bilingual in English. The language has no political standing outside the Western Isles, despite recent moves to put Gaelic signage in places as far east as Dundee and Aberdeen. And it is mostly found among the older population; for those aged five to eighteen, nearly all their peers speak English only. This bodes ill for Gaelic. As a general rule children will learn the speech of their peers rather than their parents when a conflict arises; and with adults, only those languages which are necessary from day to day tend to be retained.

The third Gaelic language, Manx, was unwritten until the Book of Common Prayer was translated into it in 1610, using English spelling conventions instead of those shared by Irish and Scots Gaelic. All legal and Parliamentary proceedings on the Isle of Man were held in Manx — but they were recorded in English. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a rapid decline, and the last native speaker died in 1974. Manx continues to be taught and learned by those seeking a distinct Manx identity.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, like so many other places, Wales saw a great increase in its urban population at the expense of its tenant-farmers. The older town population, who had been landlords, now became factory bosses. And, like so many other places, the minority language was quickly overwhelmed in the cities; it was held to be a barrier to progress. But the situation as regards Welsh education seems to be unique. While the state schools sought to destroy it (and the 1870 Education Act stipulated that education could take place only in English), the Non-Conformist churches did not comply, and continued to teach in Welsh. This may well explain why Welsh today has more native speakers than any other Celtic language, despite having had one of the longest histories of rule by a non-Celtic state. The National Eisteddfod, a Welsh cultural competition established in 1881, must also have helped.

However, there was enough concern about the preservation of Welsh language and culture to send emigrants over the Atlantic, seeking a country where they could live in peace. In 1865, a group of Welsh people settled in lands that now belong to the province of Chubut, Argentina. Having established a rather better relationship with the indigenous people than characterized the Spanish colonization, they founded a small but stable community that survives to this day, in the towns of Trelew and Puerto Madryn, and the surrounding area. As in so many other parts of the Celtic world, the churches maintain the strongest hold on the language.

Today, the ten-yearly United Kingdom National Census reports a stable figure of a few hundred thousand Welsh-speakers, amongst a Welsh population rapidly approaching three million. This, however, is widely held to underestimate the real number. Many people are reluctant to admit that they speak Welsh. About 20% of its speakers cannot read or write in their own language. Many more use it only in informal home contexts, and lack a technical vocabulary. Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that people will not encourage the senders of official formal Government documents to start communicating with them in Welsh. Additionally, the Census does not ask those living just across the official border about their language, despite the many Welsh-speaking towns in this area.

In general, Welsh follows the same population patterns as most minority languages; it is most common among the elderly, it is dwindling with the rural population. However, there appears to be a greater degree of competency in Welsh among people who were at school in 1980s and ’90s than among their immediate seniors; evidently educational measures introduced in that time are working. The 1967 Welsh Language Act granted Welsh equal validity with English in Welsh courts, and Welsh radio and television are today well-established.

The last native speaker of Cornish is traditionally supposed to have been Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777. At no time did it have a standard spelling and writing system, but recently one has been invented by language revivalists.

The French Revolution marked France’s transition from a monarchic state to a nation-state in the modern sense, and as such can be considered the birth of nationalism, strictly so called, in modern Europe. The revolutionaries used the French language to further their ideology, and came down with increasing harshness on minority languages like Provençal and Breton. Their slogan was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but Égalité did not mean that all cultures were of equal worth — it meant that all within France were to become French, and hence equal. Teachers were instructed to kill the Breton language, and they tried, tying a piece of wood known as la symbole around the necks of those caught speaking Breton, to be removed only if they told on someone else. Similar measures were employed in Scotland and Wales in the Victorian era, but in Brittany the practice only ceased in 1951, when voluntary courses were introduced to the curriculum. The medium of teaching remained French.

As elsewhere in the modern Celtic world, Breton is largely confined to rural areas; the bourgs (towns) and their inhabitants, les bourgeois, have long been Francophone. But the French policy on minority languages is much harsher than that of the British Isles. The public notices which once read Il est interdit de cracher par terre et de parler breton (“It is forbidden to spit on the ground and to speak Breton”) have been removed, but the state authorities still ignore Breton in their statistical surveys, and the shame of being Celtic is still deeply felt. Many people will lie outright rather than admit knowledge of Breton to a stranger. Parents were still trying, within the living memory of the middle-aged, to discourage their children from speaking the language. Since many of them were not at all competent in French, there are today some people in Brittany who cannot speak any language with fluency.

Public attitudes to Breton began to change in 1968, and much more has been printed in it since that time. But Breton still faces many major obstacles. The tendency, noted throughout the Celtic-speaking world, for native speakers to be literate only in the majority language, is most marked here. And those who do learn to write face another hurdle; Breton has a huge variety of dialects and about eight different spelling systems, and every single one is a politically loaded choice. The system known as Zedachek represents nearly all of Breton’s widely divergent dialects, but it carries the stigma of having been approved by the Nazis during the 1940s, when many leading Breton nationalists collaborated with their enemy’s enemy. The Falc’huneg system, its major rival, is ill-adapted for the Vannetais dialect, and also marks its user as a friend of Paris and a federalist — again, not a particularly popular position.

We have seen several general trends that apply to all the modern Celtic languages. All have faced heavy opposition from the majority language; all have declined despite their resistance to this decline. All have been banished from the towns by the presence of a majority-culture bourgeois. In each case industrialization, and the urban growth that goes with it, has struck the heaviest blow. In each case printed texts, and especially sacred printed texts, have been crucial to the language’s survival. And, tragically, in each case the native speakers are less competent in, and less proud of, their own language than those who learn it as a political gesture.

According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen (writing for the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo), nationalism, being “a political doctrine which holds that the boundaries of the state should be coterminous with the boundaries of the cultural group”, has intolerance of other cultures within those boundaries built into it from the outset. Thus minority linguistic communities will always be treated with disdain and suspicion by the ruling ethnic group. Eriksen argues that, far from being an archaic aberration, ethnic distinctiveness is a fundamentally modern phenomenon:

In the modern world, there is a marked tendency for many cultural differences to be smoothed out and to disappear. This holds true for many languages too, particularly those lacking a script, which tend to die quickly in these times...
       ...On the other hand, a strong ideological and political current in recent decades has been that which can best be described as forms of ethnic revitalization. This tendency, which may be seen as a countervailing, “negentropic” force directed against the processes creating cultural similarity, has led to the widespread revival of half-forgotten rites and religions, the codification and articulation, and in some cases the “re-invention”, of presumedly ancient custom, and frequently, the glorification of vernacular languages. Despite its often traditional appearance, ethnic politics is in an important sense thoroughly modern.

— Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Languages at the margins of modernity

In the main, Eriksen’s arguments are sound. However, in writing what is after all a global overview of the situation of minority languages, he has smoothed over a few points that need to be made clearer.

First, the hostility felt by majority cultures towards minorities within their borders is far older than the modern nation-state. Neither Henry VIII nor James VI & I ruled over a nation as we understand the term, but both actively pursued the destruction of the minority languages within their dominions. For that matter, not all movements which describe themselves as “nationalist” fit Eriksen’s definition; their cause is what we might call “sovereignty”.

Sovereignty can be defined as a political viewpoint which, like nationalism, holds that political and economic power over a given ethnic group should be held by members of that ethnic group, but which, unlike nationalism, does not insist on the state’s cultural homogeneity. Rather, its advocates hold that minority cultures should be given equal representation within a multi-ethnic state. Thus, for instance, the Scottish National Party, despite its name, is strictly speaking a sovereignty movement; it deplores the special position England holds with regard to control of Scottish economic resources, but welcomes the advent of the European Community as an overarching system which may potentially replace England as Scotland’s economic buffer in lean times. Irish “nationalists”, likewise, as a rule, seek not to expel Protestant and English people from Ireland, but only to remove Irish land from the political control of London.

Indeed, it could be said that the confusion between nationalism and sovereignty actually furthers the cause of nationalism to some degree. We have seen this happen in New Zealand, with the right-wing response to the current Māori renaissance. Many Pākehā feel that, in celebrating and promoting their distinctive culture, Māori are well on the way to becoming “nationalists” in the strict sense, and will shortly be exiling and killing white people en masse. “Why can’t we all just be New Zealanders?” is the cry. That cry itself is, of course, as neat an expression of nationalism as one could wish. Monoculturalism by assimilation is not much better from the point of view of the minority than monoculturalism by expulsion — as the Celts know to their cost.

Additionally, while nationalism as defined by Eriksen is indeed the motivation for cultural homogenization within a state, it is not, in itself, an effective method for destroying minority languages. It is when nationalism is combined with a highly urbanized population and sophisticated communications infrastructure that minority languages are most in danger; then, citizens of the nation-state have no choice but to participate in the majority culture. It is indeed under these circumstances that speakers of minority languages around the world have sought to escape their minority status, and with it their linguistic heritage; this is especially true of immigrant minorities.

But Eriksen gives us a little hope for the future. “While (say) one’s grandparents lived as traditional Saami (Welshmen, Kurds...) without giving it any thought, and one’s parents took great pains to escape from their stigmatized ethnic minority position and become assimilated and modern, ego does everything in his power to revive the customs and traditions that his grandparents followed without knowing it, and which his parents tried to forget.” The 1980s and ’90s were a great era for ethnic revitalization, and people of Celtic ancestry from all over the world are “rediscovering” their heritage with great enthusiasm and gusto, albeit also with some frustration at the dearth of resources left to us by previous generations.

Whether “learners’ Gaelic” will someday once again become “native speakers’ Gaelic”, or Welsh, Cornish, or Breton, remains to be seen. Hebrew certainly succeeded in that respect, but then Hebrew is the vehicle of a text held sacred by no less than three of the world’s great religions. The Celtic-flavoured version of the neo-Pagan revival has not produced anything to compare with it. Perhaps what is needed is for ethnic traditionalism and multiculturalism themselves to become sacred; then indeed we could be confident that future generations will still be saying Suas leis a’ Ghàidhlig. In the meantime, our lifeline is education. If we would not see our Celtic language and identity disappear, we must fight for universities to receive far more public funding than they do; for courses to be held in Celtic history, language and culture; and for a truly multicultural outlook to become universal in our society.

Mark I. Baxter and Nigel Cairns, 1996 (last ed. Daniel Copeland, 2004), The Case for Gaelic & Celtic Studies: first draft, odin.prohosting.com/highsoc/draft.htm

Daniel Corkery, 1954, The Fortunes of the Irish Language, published by C. J. Fallon for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland

Peter Berresford Ellis, 1998, The Ancient World of the Celts, Constable

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, 1991, Languages at the Margins of Modernity: linguistic minorities and the nation-state, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), PRIO Reports # 5, 1991, folk.uio.no/geirthe/Margins.html

Carl Gierstorfer, 2002, Saxon hordes ousted Celts, New Scientist volume 175 issue 2350 — 6 July 2002, page 20

Geraint Jones, 1999, History and Status of the Welsh Language, users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/about.welsh/

Donald MacAulay, (ed.), 1992, The Celtic Languages, Cambridge University Press

John MacLeod, 1996, Highlanders: a history of the Gaels, Hodder and Stoughton

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Cynthia A. Muse, 1997, Irish Protestants, Huguenots and English Reactions, userwww.sfsu.edu/~amozart/thesis.html

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