LINGUIST List 12.2320

Thu Sep 20 2001

Review: Price, Languages in Britain & Ireland

Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terrylinguistlist.org>

What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion Forum. We expect these discussions to be informal and interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion." (This means that the publisher has sent us a review copy.) Then contact Simin Karimi at siminlinguistlist.org or Terry Langendoen at terrylinguistlist.org.

Directory

  • Dominic Watt, Review of Price (2000)

    Message 1: Review of Price (2000)

     Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 14:50:30 +0100
    From: Dominic Watt <domwatthotmail.com>
    Subject: Review of Price (2000)


    Price, Glanville, ed. (2000) Languages in Britain and Ireland. Blackwell, paperback, 240pp., $35.00, ISBN: 0- 631-21581-6.

    Dominic Watt, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York

    'Languages of Britain and Ireland' (LBI) is essentially a revision of Price's 'The Languages of Britain' (1984), and as the titles indicate, the major difference in content is that LBI covers the linguistic history of the whole of Ireland as well as that of the United Kingdom. As there are chapters on the Isle of Man, the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland) and the Channel Islands, the book might equally well have been called 'Languages in the British Isles', were it not for the fact that Trudgill (1984) and Britain (forthcoming) use an almost identical title for their own works.

    Another addition is the inclusion of chapters by other authors in the newer work, though nonetheless nearly half of the chapters are written by Price himself. They are loosely grouped by language family: Q-Celtic (Goidelic) languages are dealt with first, followed by the P-Celtic (Brythonic), Germanic and Romance (other than Latin) groups, with Romani and 'community languages' at the end. Although these groupings appear to be made according to linguistic criteria, Price makes it clear that, unlike for instance Lockwood (1975) or Trudgill (1984), LBI does not aim to deal with the languages' structural properties. Rather, the theme is sociohistorical: the typical chapter is a potted biography of each language, beginning with the language's origins, its subsequent development, and in many cases the reasons behind its extinction. Of the sixteen languages to which full chapters are devoted, nine are either extinct in these islands or extinct altogether; of the survivors, only English, and perhaps Welsh, thrive. The book thus reads rather like a series of obituaries, with the relentless domination of English, the 'killer' language (p.141), a recurring motif.

    The chapters, with their respective authors, run as follows:(1) Prehistoric Britain (Price); (2) Irish in Ireland (Cathair O Dochartaigh); (3) Irish in Early Britain (Price); (4) Scottish Gaelic (Kenneth MacKinnon); (5) Manx (Robert Thomson); (6) British (Price); (7) Welsh (Janet Davies); (8) Cornish (Philip Payton); (9) Cumbric (Price); (10) Pictish (Price); (11) Latin (Price); (12) English (Price); (13) Scots (Jeremy Smith); (14) Norse and Norn (Michael Barnes); (15) Flemish in Wales (Lauran Toorians); (16) French in the Channel Islands (Price); (17) Anglo-Norman (D.A. Trotter); (18) Romani (Price); (19) Community Languages (Viv Edwards). Selection of languages for inclusion must have been troublesome, since it is by no means clear what makes one language more or less 'indigenous' than another, a consideration which perhaps prompted the use of 'in' rather than 'of' in the book's title. Space limitations preclude detailed discussion of the contents of each individual chapter in the present review, and since in any case LBI's approach is essentially descriptive, little would be gained by summarising each of the contributions. Some general commentary on LBI's strengths and weaknesses is instead offered below.

    The chapters in LBI vary widely in length and depth, ostensibly by virtue of the relative importance of each language to the linguistic history of the British Isles, and because of the poverty of evidence for long-extinct languages such as Pictish or Cumbric. Price has presumably also taken into account the amount of existing literature devoted to each language. The chapter on English, for instance, is only half the length of that on Welsh. It could be argued, on the other hand, that Scottish Gaelic deserves as much space as is allotted to Irish since the former is spoken by at least twice as many people as the latter, or that in the absence of anything but the scantiest evidence for either British or Cumbric, the accounts of these languages could be collapsed into one chapter. With the exception of the chapter on Welsh, ample additional sources on each language are provided, though it is noticeable that many of these are now rather dated (e.g. those for Cumbric), and some important sources are conspicuous by their omission. There are, most strikingly, no references anywhere in LBI to Trudgill (1984), which seems odd considering the convergence between the two books' contents and the fact that five of the contributors (Barnes, Edwards, MacKinnon, O Dochartaigh, Thomson) have written entries on the same languages for both collections.

    LBI is a rich, interesting and useful source of information on the individual histories of and interrelationships between the languages in question, and can be recommended for this reason alone. There are several areas in which the book might be improved, however. For example, in the parts of chapters which deal with languages in early Britain and Ireland, LBI alludes disappointingly little to debates currently taking place among linguists, historians and archaeologists concerning the evidence for accounts of invasion, migration and trade within the British Isles and between the Isles and the European mainland. MacKinnon's description of the arrival of Irish-speaking Scots in Argyll, for instance, is based on Bannerman's (1974) history of Dalriada. In a book published over a quarter of a century after Bannerman's, and in view of developments in archaeological techniques and thinking over that period, one might have hoped that MacKinnon would at least have provided a reference to contemporary reinterpretations of the 'Irish invasion' such as those of Foster (1996) or Campbell (2001). Linguists' engagement with such issues is clearly crucial if these closely interdependent disciplines are to avoid becoming 'parasitic' upon one another, as Forsyth (1997) and others have warned.

    Also, while Price does not claim LBI's coverage of languages in Britain and Ireland to be exhaustive, it is puzzling that he has chosen not to include chapter(s) on signed languages (these are, however, dealt with in Price's recent 'Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe' (2000)). There are estimated to be between 50,000 and 70,000 users of British Sign Language (source: Royal National Institute for Deaf People) and around 4,000 of Irish Sign Language, making ISL the third largest indigenous language of Ireland. One might therefore have expected these languages to warrant chapters in their own right. It is regrettable that the attempts of BSL and ISL users to have their languages recognised as such have failed on this occasion, but this could perhaps be rectified in a subsequent edition.

    Some improvements could also be made in terms of LBI's presentation. The longer chapters, especially those by O Dochartaigh and Davies, are informationally very dense and would benefit from division into headed subsections. O Dochartaigh's chapter on Irish is, moreover, rather disjointed in places. We move abruptly, for instance, from a discussion of attitudes among anglophones in Belfast towards the perceived preferential treatment of the Gaelic speaking community in that city, to a description of the ogam alphabet used to inscribe the earliest written texts in Old Irish. Elsewhere (p.24/25) we proceed without warning from Weinreich's contact model back to Ireland's linguistic prehistory. The text throughout the book is tightly packed and printed in fairly small close-set type, so the reader in search of specific pieces of information may foreseeably find the format frustrating, especially given the shortcomings of the index (see below).

    There are places, again particularly in O Dochartaigh's and Davies' contributions, in which the detailed statistics on native-speaker numbers might be more easily absorbed through the use of graphics, perhaps in the form of charts or maps. The maps and illustrations that are provided in the text are generally clear, though most of the maps lack scales, and no maps are provided of certain areas (e.g. the Channel Islands or Cornwall). The only map of the British Isles as a whole comes toward the end of the book - in Barnes' chapter on Norse and Norn - though the Channel Islands are not shown here either, and nor is the French coastline. A detailed map of the entire British Isles somewhere more accessible (on the inner front cover, for instance) would be a useful addition to a second edition of LBI, since many of the book's readers, even British and Irish ones, are likely to unfamiliar with the geographical layout of the archipelago.

    The reviewer runs the risk of appearing excessively picky about the book's formatting for expressing a strong preference for footnotes rather than endnotes at the end of each chapter, and for querying the odd decision to omit publishers' names from the reference lists. These are minor quibbles, though, compared to the serious inadequacies of LBI's index. Only three sides are devoted to the subject index, as compared with seven for the name index, and its coverage is generally thin (there are no independent entries for 'Scots', 'Hiberno-English', 'Manx', 'Gaelic', 'Gaidhealtachd', or 'Irish', for instance). It also appears to be unfinished, with entries ending at 'television'. There are thus no references to Wales, Welsh, Ulster, or Yorkshire; readers who would be interested in knowing more about the Vikings, the Welsh language newspaper 'Y Cymro', or Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh (the Manx Language Society), say, are committed to searching through the text of the relevant chapters paragraph by paragraph. A glossary, as per Trudgill (1984), might also have been helpful for those readers less familiar with linguistic terminology.

    Despite these shortcomings, LBI will still nonetheless be a valuable reference for anyone looking for summaries of the principal strands in the linguistic history of the British Isles, and the current status of the languages of the United Kingdom and Ireland that have survived until the present day. The book is very informative on the attempts to protect endangered Celtic languages and to revive extinct ones, and offers fascinating insights into the role language has played in the political histories of Ireland and the UK's constituent countries. Linguists in search of information on structural aspects of the languages must look elsewhere, but plenty of references to appropriate historical and contemporary sources are given. In terms of both coverage and currency, however, it will be interesting to see how LBI and Britain's revision of Trudgill (1984) will compare with one another when the newer volume emerges.

    REFERENCES Bannerman, J. (1974). Studies in the History of Dalriada. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Britain, D. (forthcoming, ed.). Language in the British Isles, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, E. (2001). 'Were the Scots Irish?' Antiquity 75: 285-292. Foster, S. (1996). Picts, Gaels and Scots. Edinburgh: Historic Scotland. Forsyth, K. (1997). Language in Pictland: the Case against Non-Indo-European Pictish. Utrecht: de Keltische Draak/Muenster: Nodus Publikationen. Lockwood, W.B. (1975). Languages of the British Isles Past and Present. London: Andre Deutsch. Price, G. (1984). The Languages of Britain. London: Edward Arnold. Price, G. (2000, ed.). Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (1984, ed.). Language in the British Isles, 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Dominic Watt is Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York. He is involved in a research project on the acquisition of phonological variation among infants from Newcastle upon Tyne, work which develops his doctoral research on variation and change in the vowel system of Tyneside English. Other research interests include language and identity along the Scottish/English border, and vowel production and perception.