funding pressures, university departments only offer their own local language. The positive side of this is that the modern languages are taught in more invigorating ways, which enhance students’ fluency, preparing them for successful careers where the language is a genuine asset.
But the new landscape presents challenges. The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s decision in 2013 to fund a multi-institutional Centre for Doctoral Training in Celtic Language, led by the University of Glasgow, acknowledged what risked being lost. The centre allows budding researchers to exchange ideas with research students and gain access to the resources of Celtic-language units across the different countries within the UK.
These debates smoulder on, though much less heatedly than in the 1990s. We shall see what the British Museum exhibition does to fan the embers. In the meantime academics convened in Glasgow in July for the 15th International Congress of Celtic Studies, which has been taking place at regular four-year intervals since 1959.
The Congress encompasses a big, baggy, interdisciplinary field. Scotish archaeologists rub shoulders with Welsh socio-linguists, and experts on medieval Irish poetry buy pints for scholars of Gaulish place names. It is extremely international, with 500 delegates from 25 countries and 130 institutions. The plenary sessions included Welsh modernism, Germany and World War I; Breton ballads and early modern history; continental Iron Age urbanism; medieval manuscript culture; and Celtic studies in the digital age. Despite all the debates, they still gather under the name of “Celtic Studies”.
Why should anyone care? This university discipline is tasked with atending to the health of several of the native languages of Britain and Ireland; and preserving the ancient, medieval
and modern heritage of much of Britain and Ireland, including parts of what is now England. In other words it should remind people in Britain that, never mind current controversies over immigration, these islands have been from our earliest historical records a multicultural and multilingual place.
In the devolved regions that diversity of language is increasingly there to see and hear – in Welsh conversations on Aberystwyth streets, on road signs in Scotish Gaelic, and Irish-Language television channels. Many of these Celtic languages are experiencing a real resurgence an aghaidh na sìorraidheachd (“in the face of eternity”). It’s beter to face the future together.
But in the 1990s and into the new millennium, things began to change. Tis was a time of radically declining numbers of native speakers, and a need to make these languages relevant and vital in the modern world. Te “Celtic” project was increasingly rejected as not helpful to, for instance, revitalising Welsh or supporting Gaeltacht communities in Ireland.
It is worth remembering that Welsh, Breton, Irish and Scotish Gaelic, and also the revived languages of Cornish and Manx, were particularly stigmatised by law, education and imperial mindsets during the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the people challenging the term (and quite a few defending it) were based outside the countries where these are spoken as living languages. It is perhaps understandable that in radio interviews and live debates, maters got a bit heated.
The irony was that the discipline had been going through a period of internal soul-searching, worrying that “Celtic” had become a term that could mean anything to anyone. This failure to pay atention to how “Celtic” was used had led scholars into a variety of paradigms about the past – and sometimes the present – that just didn’t stack up. Ideas like “Celtic Christianity” and “Celtic nature poetry” were examined and found wanting, for example. Popular writing generally ignored such concerns. Caught between what Patrick Sims-Williams of Aberystwyth University called “Celtomania and Celtosceptiscism”, most scholars just stopped using the C-word and got on with their work.
September 2015 81
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100