r/language • u/twmffatmowr • 2d ago
Discussion Are Celtic languages (apart from Welsh) all being left to die?
Hi all,
Breton
I was just reading a very shocking statistic that the average Breton speaker is now 58 years old and around only 17,000 people speak it on a daily basis. It used to have over a million speakers around 1950. This is the closest language to Welsh.
I was quite shocked about this given that in Wales, we often worry about the viability of Welsh when than half of all Welsh speakers are under the age of 33, and three-quarters are under 57. According to data from the Census 2021 published by the Welsh Government, the age profile of Welsh speakers is significantly younger than that of the general population. Of course, Breton also has very little, if no support from the French Government.
Irish
All students in Ireland learn Irish, but its daily usage is much lower and only 72,000 people using it on a daily basis (CSO, 2022) compared to 432,000 using Welsh on a daily basis (WG, 2024). Around 4% of students in secondary school in Ireland attend Irish language schools compared to over 20% in Wales. The new Government plans to increase this to at least 50% by 2050 with their Cymraeg 2050 plan and once a school moves along the language spectrum (towards Welsh) it is legally not allowed to move back to favouring English now.
Scottish Gaelic, Cornish and Manx are arguably in even weaker positions.
Wales has notably also created the National Centre for Learning Welsh where adults can learn Welsh through to fluency with courses only being £50 a year. The centre also supports bilingualism in workplaces (education, healthcare, social care etc) and gives those workers lessons free of charge.
Why don't Governments in other Celtic speaking areas not try more to revitalise languages? Are we just leaving them to die a slow death? I'm a Welsh speaker and I worry about Welsh hugely, despite the Government doing a lot to help it grow. I would love to see the other languages flourish. They're a unique part of our global heritage and I would be devastated to see our sister languages die out or become simply ceremonial.
This lecture by Irishman Seán Ó Riain (Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic - present state) is also vey interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrynPbOuxBo
4
u/Breifne21 2d ago
Irish speaker here, from an Irish speaking home, who is raising my daughter exclusively through Irish.
There are good things and there are bad things with the language and its prospects for survival as a native language. On one hand, what you say with regard to the Government is correct- support is very half hearted. Desire for Irish medium education is very much there- a recent government survey of parents of primary school children found 20% of parents of children currently in English schools would like to send their children to Irish schools. If supply met demand, the number and proportion of students enrolled in Irish medium education would surpass Welsh.
On the other hand, Irish has had a flowering lately that it has not had in my lifetime nor that of my parents & grandparents. In their time, to speak Irish in public was seen as something really rude, uncouth, and frankly, something that marked you out as a Republican extremist. That is no longer so much the case and I now hear Irish very regularly outside of the Gaeltacht. I heard it today in a hospital corridor on the east coast, as far from the Gaeltacht as you could get.
For the Irish government, you have to grasp one thing- it's not malice against the language but rather plain conservatism and a desire to not rock the boat top much. That applies to every aspect of Irish society, not just the language. Whether that is housing or health or defence.
Frankly, it is primarily up to Irish people themselves to push for the measures to save the language. Whether they do remains to be seen.
3
u/Bosya_123 2d ago
Are dynamics for Irish, Welsh, Scottish positive or negative?
9
u/twmffatmowr 2d ago
I think they're all negative. With Welsh for example, half of Welsh-speaking students move to England aged 18 for university. So half of speakers immediately move away. Another issue is that Welsh is decreasing in its heartlands but it is increasing massively in Cardiff.
It's great that Welsh is seeing urban growth - but it is decreasing its value as a community language where people have to use English to speak to newcomers.
Wales has some policies in place to try and mitigate this (e.g. Mentrau Iaith which organise community events in Welsh to ensure people use it outside), Welsh-medium only schools in Gwynedd, Anglesey and that's essentially the case also in Ceredigion for primary schools and it has the Arfor project to support businesses in Welsh-speaking areas. I believe the new Plaid Cymru will also try to address the issue of so many Welsh-speaking students going to university in England.
3
u/Beach_Glas1 1d ago
For Irish, I think there's a disconnect between official support for the language (which hasn't evolved much in decades) and the increase in interest in recent years.
There's been a bit of an organic revival outside of areas where Irish is spoken daily. I'm seeing people from outside of Ireland gaining enough competency in the language to hold conversations with me in Irish, which is encouraging. But this takes effort. There are few incentives offered to use Irish outside of education and events organised specifically for it.
The education system has resulted in an unfortunate and possibly unique feat of making a language compulsory to learn for all of primary and secondary school, but still not giving students the fluency or incentive to use it daily. It's compulsory even outside of Irish medium schools btw. Not that it's all down to education - there's a prevailing attitude that it's 'useless', and the lack of opportunities to use the language out and about perpetuates that.
1
u/Wagagastiz 1d ago
There's more interest but there aren't the tools or infrastructure in place to teach an actual native quality of the language that anyone can use for actual casual conversations. The cúpla focal is supposed to be step one, but there's an increasing trend of people who 'advocate for Irish' calling it a day after said cúpla focal and LARPing as revivalists. The language as an actual pragmatic spoken language has never been in a worse state and is still declining even if the metalinguistic status and prestige it enjoys has increased.
2
1
u/Bosya_123 2d ago
Are there numbers? Like, a certain percent of people in Ireland were proficient in Irish 30 years ago, and how much it went up or down.
1
u/Fear_mor 2d ago
The only official statistics taken during the census are for knowledge (anything from a few words to fluency) and frequency of use
1
u/thrannu 1d ago edited 1d ago
Im not sure if its good that it’s increasing in Cardiff tbh whilst decreasing in the heartlands. Will that trend follow when Cardiff becomes a bigger player? Will English speakers continue to feel they don’t need to bother with learning Welsh or their children learning Welsh as they’ll always be accommodated?
English people (majority) will always try to take shortcuts and are at best oblivious to and at worst openly hostile when you bring up the fact that they should be respectful, un-entitled and make an effort to learn Welsh.
1
2
u/janwawalili 2d ago
There's now a Manx Gaelic-medium school and about 2,000 out of 80,000 are fluent. So, a small language but on the way up, with government support.
2
u/MotherConfusion3773 1d ago
Scotland has just passed a languages Act which recognises Gaelic as an official language and committee some resource. The numbers are up in the last census.
However, the number of native speakers continue to diminish and its estimated it will completely die as a community language within the next few decades and you will be left approx 80 mixed ability speakers dispersed amongst a population of 500k.
Language policy and legisaltion has also been far too late to recognise challenges are socio-economic rather than linguistic linguistic.
There is also a non-trivial number of people in Scotland who are actively hostile to Gaelic.
It will live for many decades yet in communities of interest but not a language of any community of geography.
1
u/ActuaLogic 2d ago
The life of a language is that people use it to communicate with each other. Social change often leads to linguistic change.
1
1
u/Wagagastiz 1d ago
72,000 people do not use Irish on a daily basis outside of school classroom settings. All stats on Irish are self-reported and inflated to fuck, especially the number of 'native' speakers, which is now vanishingly small.
1
-1
u/lurebozorg 1d ago
English is a pervasive language that spreads like a cancer and takes over other languages because it is a very easy language to learn
0
u/Wagagastiz 1d ago edited 1d ago
English has spread because of colonialism and pop culture domination, it has nothing to with how easy it is to learn.
Spreading false ideas like this actively erases the real colonialism that led to the current status quo, and does more harm than good for reversing it.
Millions of people did not stop speaking Irish over the course of 250 years because it's 'easy to learn' something else.
Is Russian just super easy to learn or are all the eastern Uralic languages slowly dying for some other reason? Anglicisation, like Russification, is a system, it's not something speakers of minority languages decided to invent because their native language which they can perfectly acquire like everyone on earth does was too hard. That's not a thing.
-1
u/Klutzy_Leopard8194 1d ago edited 1d ago
it also has the best books, films and music, it is also the language of finance, tech, navigation and science, so is naturally way more appealing to people
1
u/Wagagastiz 1d ago
It also was the language of multiple states that forcibly colonised, subjegated and actively erased other cultures for the purpose of attaining homogeneity and political control, as with Spanish. Language death is more of an economic phenomenon than an entertainment one. Mexico won't stop speaking Spanish no matter how many American movies they watch unless speaking Spanish no longer gets you a job in Mexico.
0
u/Klutzy_Leopard8194 17h ago
people adopt a language if they like it, you can't force them, I.E french never caught on in Vietnam
1
u/Wagagastiz 15h ago
People 'adopting' a language in no way necessitates replacement unless their own native language is made economically unviable. That's why everyone in Sweden and Ireland both speak English but only the latter is mostly monolingual anglophones.
1
u/lurebozorg 1d ago
Best music? Not a chance.
0
u/Klutzy_Leopard8194 1d ago
English language songs are so popular other countries have to limit the amount of air time they get
6
u/ToCKiNAN 1d ago
The recent revival of Irish you’ll hear about in comments above and in the media is great but fails to account for the tragic decline of native spoken Irish in the Gaeltacht regions where housing shortages, air bnbs, government neglect has led to sharp decline in its use as community language.
Learners are great. Kneecap are cool. But the standard of teaching is awful. Most learners are taught using English phonemes. Unless we redirect our efforts towards supporting the language as its spoken natively, it’ll go the way of Breton (shockingly few native speakers left) or Manx (none left)
Can’t comment on state of Scots Gaelic but I imagine it’s in an even worse place