The Celtic Languages (review)

The Celtic languages is a paperback edition of a collection of papers that provide an in-depth analysis of the historical, structural, and sociolinguistic aspects of Celtic languages. The volume is arranged in four parts.

Part 1, entitled ‘Historical aspects’, covers the origin and history of the Celtic languages, their spread and retreat, and their present-day distribution. James Fife’s introductory chapter deals with typological issues, including theories on the division of the Celtic family and a number of typological characteristics that are specific to the Celtic languages and are drawn from their phonology, morphology, and syntax. Phenomena like word-initial mutation, VSO basic word order, ‘autonomous’ verb forms, inflected prepositions, and so on are shown to be excellent diagnostic tests for inclusion of a language in the Celtic family, even though from a historical perspective these properties were not always present in the languages under consideration. Joseph F. Eska and D. Ellis Evans discuss the historical background of the ancient Celtic languages attested on the European continent, including Hispano-Celtic, Goulash, Laconic, and Galatians. They provide information on the scripts used in the written forms of these languages, while individual sections provide extracts from primary texts accompanied by a basic linguistic description of each language. Karl H. Schmidt provides a history of the surviving Celtic languages called ‘Insular Celtic’ because they originated in the British Isles. They include Goidelic (Ireland) and Brythonic (ancient Britain). Using linguistic evidence, the author discusses the two more prominent theories on the emergence of the different Celtic languages and their possible groupings: the theory that stresses the unity of all ‘Insular Celtic’ languages in contrast to ‘Continental Celtic’, and the theory that groups Gallic and Briton together in contrast to Geodesic, Celt Iberian, and Laconic.

Part 2 describes at some length each of the languages of the Geodesic group. Gearóid Mac Eoin offers a sketch of Irish and William Gillies does the same for Scottish Gaelic, while George Broderick offers an extremely valuable description of Manx, a language which has not been the focus of much linguistic work. Each of these chapters includes a brief historical overview of the language under consideration, while subsequent sections provide a linguistic sketch of the language covering phonology, morphology, and syntax. Issues that were mentioned in previous sections as characteristic of the Celtic language family, including phonological mutations, agreement patterns in prepositions, VSO word order, and so on, are discussed in more detail.

Part 3 continues the description of individual Celtic languages by offering chapters on the languages of the Briton group. T. Arwyn Watkins provides information on Welsh, Janig Stephens on Breton, and Ken George on Cornish. As with Part 2, each chapter provides historical information and a brief linguistic sketch of the language discussed. Included also is information on dialectal variation within individual languages and the lexicon.

The last part of the book contains five chapters devoted to the sociolinguistic analysis of the Celtic languages. Areas covered in these chapters include language usage, language maintenance and preservation, and prospects for the survival of each of the active Celtic languages. Máirtin Ó Murchú discusses the societal status of Modern Irish, showing that older underlying social values in combination with contemporary reality have played an important role in the status of Modern Irish in present-day Ireland. KennethMac Kinnon presents detailed statistical information on the geographical distribution of the Gaelic speech community, the domains of language usage, the efforts of institutional support for Gaelic, and finally, the language’s prospects of survival in the future. Robert Owen Jones, in a similar fashion, provides detailed information on the recent developments in the sociolinguistics of Welsh, with emphasis on the numbers of speakers in relation to the different geographical regions of Wales. Separate sections discuss the use of the language in education...