Possible New Celtic Language Discovered
I always get excited about new linguistic discoveries. This new discovery isn’t certain yet, and the final linguistic consensus may not arrive for decades, but it’s an exciting possibility anyway.
The Celtic languages were once spoken all across Europe, from Ireland to the Ukraine and from Denmark to the valley of the Po. Slowly, as the Romans, and then Germans, encroached on Celtic territory, the language family shrank. Today Celtic languages are spoken only in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, Nova Scotia, and Brittany. They are lovely, with a verb-initial syntactic structure rare among the world’s languages, and a beautiful and tricky phonemic inventory. They are also almost all endangered.
The possible discovery of a new Celtic language is very exciting. This new language has been studied by linguists for quite some time, but heretofore it hasn’t been recognized as Celtic. The reason for this is that it shares almost no vocabulary with other Celtic languages. Instead, its “Celticness” lies in its syntactic structure, which is itself quirky and lovely — and indeed shares many features with the distinctive syntax of the Celtic languages.
Why doesn’t it share many words with other Celtic languages? Most likely because of an intense and extensive language contact situation. To be specific, the speakers of this language were probably conquered by speakers of another language — a Germanic language — and ended up borrowing so many Germanic words that the resulting mixture has usually been assumed to be Germanic. But the syntax and morphology of this “Germanic” language has long been known to be quite different from that of other Germanic languages, for reasons that have been controversial.
For example, while this new Celtic language is not verb-initial as other Celtic languages are, it does show several interesting verb-related phenomena that are not known in the Germanic languages. Negation in Germanic languages is typically indicated by simply inserting a negative polarity item (e.g. “nicht”) near the verb, but in this language, this is illegal. Instead, this “Germanic” language obligatorily inserts a semantically bleached auxiliary, as well. This same auxiliary is required for polar questions and tag questions, a requirement that is unknown among the Germanic languages. However, this behavior is perfectly standard among the other Celtic languages.
This possible new Celtic language is spoken on an island off the northwest coast of Europe, near the other Celtic languages. It is also spoken in some fomer colonies of that island. It is not endangered, and in fact has a great number of speakers and even a sizeable internet presence. If it were classified as Celtic, it would immediately become the most widely spoken Celtic language, with the greatest number of speakers; and the Celtic language family, instead of being confined to the margins of Europe, would become the most widely spoken language family in the world.
Yes, of course! It’s English.
January 17th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Awesome, and thank you for the link to the Language Log article! Wouldn’t it be fascinating, to someday see English become its own language family? Not entirely Germanic, not fully Celtic…but a hybrid family of its own, as unique as its contributors
January 17th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Bernulf, the possibility of English becoming its own language family — very cool thought, and also insightful, because any linguist you ask will tell you that it certainly WILL happen, and has already begun!
Look at Latin. For anyone reading who doesn’t know, Latin began as a language spoken in the area of Latium in Italy (the area near Rome), and was carried by the Roman Empire all over Europe. Spread as it was over such a wide area, the speakers of the various regions (France, Spain, Italy, Romania, etc.) began to carry the language in different directions. The result, after 2000 years, was a new language family — the Romance family.
English, of course, is now spread over a much wider area than Latin was. It is also being spoken in a large number of places where it is in extensive contact with other languages — Hindi in India, Afrikaans and indigenous languages in South Africa, French in Canada, Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong, Spanish in the Americas, etc., etc. In each of these places, the English takes on a special character because of the contact languages.
It used to be thought that English would never break apart into daughter languages because of electronic communications. But recent studies of dialect have shown that it is breaking apart! What’s typically happening is that each region is developing its own variation on English while at the same time maintaining fluency in “standard” English. The end result, after a thousand years or so, will be a “standard” English that most people worldwide will know, and alongside that, dozens of “nonstandard”, daughter-Englishes that will gradually develop into their own languages.
You can see this already happening in, say, the southeastern United States, where there are any number of African Americans who are perfectly fluent in “standard” American English, but also know how to speak the “nonstandard” dialect that is spoken in the African American community.
Let me make clear: by “standard” and “nonstandard” I’m not implying any value judgements, or saying that the dialects of English are any less regular or rule-governed or grammatical or anything like that. On the contrary! I just mean “standard” in the sense of “usual” or “widespread”.
Now, see? I got started on language, and I just kept going. Sorry about that.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:59 am
We can see an excellent example of this process in the Arabic-speaking world - most people understand “literary” or “broadcast” Arabic (what the textbooks usually call “Modern Standard Arabic”), whether or not they actually speak it themselves, while also having their regional or national dialect.
January 17th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Erik, thanks for dropping by. You’re absolutely right about Arabic; and of course it began its expansion over a thousand years before English did, so it’s much further along in the process.
Chinese is an interesting variation on this theme. Chinese began its expansion what, five thousand years ago? Since then, it’s been basically politically unified, but its dialects have been diverging. Mandarin Chinese, with its nuceus around Beijing, is unintelligible to speakers of the Shanghai or Hong Kong dialects. Nevertheless they share the same writing system; and this is possible because their writing system is pictographic, and has almost no relationship with the sounds of the language.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
[...] Read the article and the comments posted here. Thank you to Druid Journal. He has done another excellent job of bringing forward relevant Celtic news. Read the link inside his article too. Good stuff! [...]
January 22nd, 2007 at 2:49 am
Wonderful post! It actually kind of reminded me of the Nacirema article (though, of course, with a different aim!).
I’m excited to see what will come next from this!
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:33 am
Hi Jen, thanks for the compliment and the link! The Nacirema article is hilarious.
As for what will come next, well, as I said, I think reaching a consensus on this topic will take at least a decade. When the dust settles, I think the most we can expect is that English will be dual-classified as both Germanic and Celtic. The best possible result will be more interest and funding in the preservation of the more “purebred”, non-English Celtic languages and culture.
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Fabulous post! Having grown up in Appalachia, I think I’ve heard my share of Celtic in speech and especially in song.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
(still laughing…) No.