Are Celtic Languages Under Pressure?
Take a look through these learner articles, and you might find yourself inspired by the many people learning Irish online. Indeed, for many, the Irish language is in rude health!
However, cast your eyes beyond this community of learners, and towards officialdom, and you may find reason for concern. In fact, you may find six of the living Celtic languages under pressure to one degree or another. Each of them is ranked at best as “vulnerable” according to the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages, with Irish in the “definitely endangered” category, three ranks above “extinct.”
Challenges for Irish at Home
Irish seems to have made strides in Ireland over the past few years, and it appears on the surface that it did so over the pandemic lockdown period. Many Irish and those of the Irish Diaspora took advantage of the downtime to start their Zoom journey toward speaking as Gaeilge. Let’s Learn Irish has been a significant and recognised leader in that effort. However, some would argue that on a government level – and they may be right – that the recent progress being made to support minority languages is little more than baby steps.
Bunreacht na hÉireann officially declares Gaeilge as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, and it is a compulsory subject of study in school. Knowledge of it is required for employment in certain public sector positions. The previous Conservative Party government in the UK shepherded legislation through the Westminster Parliament granting official recognition to both Gaeilge and Ulster Scots in the North. This move was celebrated but with caution among Irish speakers in the North. As Conradh na Gaeilge continues to assert, the languages act has not yet been fully implemented and remains an empty promise to them. Irish’s challenges are not limited to the island of Ireland. It faces them elsewhere in Europe as well as in North America. Worse, these challenges not only confront Irish, but they also confront the other Celtic languages.
Reduction of Celtic Language Courses
Particularly concerning is a series of programme and budgetary cuts affecting Celtic studies programmes at the university level on both sides of the Atlantic. In the past eighteen months, the University of Toronto moved to replace its Celtic Studies degree with an “Irish and British Studies” programme that would not require learning any Celtic language as a degree requirement. This move caused the Celtic Studies Association of North America (CSANA) to move its annual conference slated for 2025 from Toronto, as it did not wish to reward the university for this move against these languages and their associated cultures.
The University of Aberdeen in Scotland took steps toward eliminating its language programmes, including Scottish Gaelic. Aberdeen is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Scottish Gaelic literature in its libraries, and the language is in a more precarious state than Irish, despite ongoing forward progress in the Scottish Parliament on legislation that will – for the first time ever – grant Gaelic official status within Scots law, including establishing legal rights to use it.
In 2023, Utrecht University in the Netherlands played host to the quadrennial International Congress of Celtic Studies, the largest academic gathering of Celticists on the planet. It hosted this prestigious event as part of the celebration of its Celtic Studies programme’s centennial. I recently received an email from CSANA notifying its membership that the baccalaureate degree programme is slated to be axed by the university, a mere year after the Congress convened there. The email included a link to a Change.org petition that interested parties worldwide were asked to sign, asking the university to reconsider this decision.
I write this post not just as a member of this Let’s Learn Irish community but also as a student learning Welsh and as the recently-elected ceann-suidhe (president) of An Comunn Gàidhleach Ameireaganach, the American Scottish Gaelic Association. As such, I take a point of view toward the Celtic languages that generally resembles a key portion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] charter: an attack on one Celtic language is an attack on all of them, wherever and whenever that attack might happen.
Cultural Vandalism?
The reduction of foreign language learning in universities, often for financial reasons, has been well documented. The removal of these Celtic languages from systems of higher education is a very significant blow wherever and whenever it happens, but for three of the globe’s most prestigious institutions to do so is – and I will be very blunt here – reprehensible and irresponsible. This effort to cut off the professional study and the teaching of them not only strikes a serious blow to their futures but also to the communities who speak them and want them to continue to be available to their children and grandchildren. The human knowledge they communicate, the culture, the literature, the songs, the poetry, and much more will suffer losses that cannot be recovered if these languages suffer the fate that – for instance – Latin did when it ceased to be a language of daily communication.
What is happening here is perhaps an act of cultural vandalism, or maybe even wanton destruction. A language is far more than a means of communicating thoughts to one another. The organic nature of any language is that it is a community, and a living community at that. To be sure, these Celtic languages are well recorded to the point where knowledge of them will not be completely lost; Latin would be a comparator as a language that is no longer spoken as a daily community language. That said, let no-one ever doubt that the death of a language also marks the death of cultures – in the plural.
Future Focus
This is where linguistic and cultural communities such as Let’s Learn Irish are growing ever-the-more important. If official institutions that we trust to nurture, protect and promote the human knowledge that these languages represent, should fail to meet their obligations, then the onus falls to us to stand up to those institutions and keep our languages alive despite such moves. Part of this necessarily includes holding to account those officials who feel at liberty to hang these languages out to dry, as it were. I would encourage and urge us to do so, but we must also play out part in sustaining these languages. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? We, ourselves, must be Irish. Is linne an Ghaeilge.
Bígí páirteach!
Join the online Irish community at LetsLearnIrish.com.
Follow on social media @LetsLearnIrish.
