Geographical retreat and symbolic advance?

Language policy in the Republic of Ireland has an unusual starting point: the geographical base of the Irish language is very weak and territorially dispersed, yet the constitutional status of the language is extremely strong. The article explores this paradox. It sets Irish language policy in two contexts: that of successful nationalist movements mainly in Central and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, and that of the struggling Celtic languages of Western Europe. It explores the evolution of the language and its weakening demographic status since the nineteenth century, noting that while its demographic weakness mirrors that of the other Celtic languages, its constitutional entrenchment resembles that of the national languages of Central and East European states. It attempts to explain this by suggesting that the language has played a marginal role in nationalist mobilisation; the language served as a symbol of a specific cultural heritage rather than as the vital lingua franca of the community. The central role of the language in nationalist ideology, however, failed to address the reality of continuing decline in the Irish-speaking districts, notwithstanding the emergence of a sizeable population of ‘new speakers’ of the language outside these districts.

Why Scottish and Welsh Speakers Will Miss European Structural Funds

In this blog piece Craig Willis investigates the contribution of European Structural and Investment Funds projects in the period between 2007-2013 and 2014-2020, in order to ascertain direct and indirect links to the four Celtic languages, following the separation of cultural funds from the ESIF into Creative Europe and Erasmus Plus from 2007. He shows that, given that the speakers of such languages often reside in economically peripheral areas (at least in higher percentage terms), their livelihoods and everyday culture in the traditional speaking areas (even for non-speakers) are affected by availability of structural funds.

The Celtic Languages in the Сравнительные Словари (1787–1789): An Introduction

In the 1780s, a multilingual dictionary was published in Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire, under the editorship of the German Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811). As its title— Сравнительные Словари Всѣхъ Языковъ и Нарѣчiй [Comparative Vocabularies of all Languages and Dialects]—explains, it aimed to be a comparative dictionary of almost 300 headwords and numbers in Russian and their equivalents in 200 languages and dialects from all over Europe and Asia. Amongst these are five of the six Celtic languages—Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton, as well as an unknown “Celtic”—and this paper gives a brief overview of the background to the dictionary, and then focuses on the first 10 lexemes in each of the Celtic languages as they are presented in the dictionary itself, pointing out various inaccuracies, but also the historical value therein.

Left Branch Extraction and Clitic Placement in Gaulish

The inscriptional remains of Gaulish preserve syntactic behaviours that are not expected from the perspective of the diachronic schemes usually posited for the development of early Insular Celtic syntax from Proto-Indo-European. Widespread evidence is attested, particularly for the behaviour of clitics, that does not seem reconcilable with many of the assumptions made in previous studies regarding the nature of the syntax of Proto-Celtic. Gaulish also evidently features scrambling-type phenomena such as left branch extraction that are not usually thought to appear in other Celtic languages. An analysis which begins with an assessment of these features leads to a more empirically predicated and consistent understanding of the early development of Celtic word order than has been proffered previously.

A Dictionary of Gaulish Nominal Stems. Review of the book: Delamarre X. Dictionnaire des thèmes nominaux du gaulois. I : Ab- / Iχs(o)-. Paris : Les Cent Chemins, 2019. 398 p.

This new book by Xavier Delamarre is the first volume of the dictionary of Gaulish nominal bases. Since onomastics is the source for most of its data, this book is of interest for the readers of this journal. Apart from Gaulish, the author considers data of other ancient Celtic languages such as Lepontic, Celtiberian, or British (Brittonic). The review surveys methodological aspects underlying this research, and particularly a number of questions related to suffixation in relation to the most recent research on Celtic morphology and word-formation. Undoubtedly, the book is the most complete collection of Gaulish onomastics up to date, although a number of missing forms can be brought forward, which is to be expected due to the amount of data at our disposal, and selection of several examples as Celtic should be questioned. The text contains etymological comments, and some of them appear in the book for the first time which deserves special attention. The dictionary is a very important contribution to Celtic studies in general, and to Gaulish onomastics in particular.