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Old Languages, New Countries

I know I'm responding to an old message here. I'm a Manx learner, the language is alive and doing reasonably well. It's the healthiest it's been in nearly a century, whether the Manx being taught now would be recognizable to Ned Maddrell et al. is another matter of course.
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I was given the Guinness Book of Records in 1976 and I remember Ned Maddrell being in it as the last native Manx speaker. The plan was to take as much tape recording as possible and introduce kids to the language to keep it alive. So glad that seems to have happened.

Cornish (Kernow) on the other hand is dead in the water. I recall four distinct Societies applied for Regional funding to resurrect the language about 10 years ago or more. None of the groups agreed on spelling or pronunciation.
 
I was given the Guinness Book of Records in 1976 and I remember Ned Maddrell being in it as the last native Manx speaker. The plan was to take as much tape recording as possible and introduce kids to the language to keep it alive. So glad that seems to have happened.

Cornish (Kernow) on the other hand is dead in the water. I recall four distinct Societies applied for Regional funding to resurrect the language about 10 years ago or more. None of the groups agreed on spelling or pronunciation.

Sadly one of those instrumental in the revival of the Manx language, Dr Brian Stowell, died yesterday.

https://www.manxradio.com/news/isle-of-man-news/loss-of-giant-of-manx-language-revival/
 
An old language/argot which attracted the real Language Police.

The Language Police Were Terrifyingly Real. My Grandfather Was One.
Martin Puchner on Rotwelsch, an Elusive Language of Central Europe


Our society seems divided between those who want to abolish the police and those who want to abolish the language police. The Left fears people with handcuffs and guns making violent arrests while the Right fears newspaper editors and college teachers canceling offensive words.

While today “the language police” is only a metaphor—no one is actually handcuffing words or arresting their speakers—it hasn’t always been that way. I’ve been researching how generations of police tried to control a forgotten language called Rotwelsch, which I learned about as a boy.

Rotwelsch—which means “beggar’s cant” (in Rotwelsch)—was a language spoken by vagrants on the roads of Central Europe since the Middle Ages. Combining German, Yiddish, and Hebrew, it was incomprehensible to all but initiates, and never written down, a language perpetually on the run.

Associated with vagrancy and criminality, Rotwelsch attracted the attention of the police. Collaborating over centuries, police forces across Centra Europe compiled lists of words and their meanings to decode this jargon of the underground. Their preferred method was to arrest its speakers and force them to divulge their secret way of talking. In the case of this language, at least, the police with handcuffs and the language police were one and the same. ...

https://lithub.com/the-language-police-were-terrifyingly-real-my-grandfather-was-one/
 
It has been mentioned in the thread earlier, but Yiddish continues to be a first language for a few in the UK and the USA.
Rapidly dwindling numbers of these are immigrants though, they are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants.

I live in London, and I estimate there are 15,000 people London for whom Yiddish is their first language, nearly all live in Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington and Clapton, and hardly any would speak Yiddish because of a lack of knowledge of English.

As time goes on, the current teen to 40 somethings will speak a dialect called Yinglish.

A mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and English, it emerges out of the Yeshivas (institutions of religious study) of London, Gateshead, Brooklyn, Lakewood and Israel.

Of note to me are two things:

1,) The ratio of Yiddish to Hebrew to English is very fluid, and depends who is speaking to who, varying from conversation to conversation.

2.) The use of Yinglish often demands a knowledge of a religious context, it being used for discussions about religious matters.
Even if an outsider studied this dialect in an academic sense, they would not be able to converse authentically and practically without the requisite religious context.
 
Is it harsh of me to think `Why am I surprised?`

Ive met both Cornish and Manx speakers...What makes a living language?

Both languages have books published in them regularly.
 
A clip of Eddie Izzard "Talking to a Frisian Farmer in Friesland with Old English" (Mongrel Nation) appeared in my Firefox pocket a few days ago so apologies if already disseminated on other threads. Eddie, armed with a smattering of Old English, tries to buy a brown cow (broon coo) from a Frisian farmer on the premise that the English language originated from Frisian-speaking settlers arriving here with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes etc around 500 AD. I've provided a link to a follow-up on the original clip, from the perspective of someone who has studied both O. E. and Frisian.
Anyone with a familiarity of modern German or Dutsch should see the similiarities between the Frisian dialect and Old English, which makes me marvel less at the evolution of English over the past 1500 years than at the conservation of the Frisian tongue.

 
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