Students wanting to try a Celtic language, however, and those with ancestry from the Isle of Man may find it worth the effort. "Vel Gaelg ayd?" asks a lesson on the Ynsee Gaelg website, meaning "Do you speak Manx"? With the many Manx classes available on the island as well as the availability of Manx language lessons online, the answer from more and more Islanders and Gaels abroad is "Yes".
The Isle of Man is located in the Irish Sea between the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Celtic language of the Isle, Manx, was widely spoken on the island until the late 1700s. By the 1960s, the Manx language was extinct, after a few centuries of English immigrants and tourists as well as the departure of many native Islanders to different countries.
The Isle of Man and North America
“Most ‘Gaels’ in North America will probably consider themselves to be Irish,” said Ynsee Gaelg's Adrian Cain, who is also the Manx Language Officer for the Manx Heritage Foundation. “Even if they are of Manx descent they may be unaware of it. The most common name in the Island is Kelly, but North Americans with that surname would think they are of Irish descent,” he added in a December 3, 2008 email interview.
The Revival of the Manx Language
Despite the long-ago departure of native speakers and the present dominance of the English language, the Isle of Man or “Ellan Vannin” has revived the Manx language over the last few decades. The Isle, popular with tourists for its motorsports and natural beauty, recognized Manx as a minority language in 1985. Currently many Manx language programs are taught on the Isle of Man.
Sites such as Ynsee Gaelg,also called learnmanx.com, provide lessons online. Cain said the online lessons attract not just people from the Island who can’t make classes, but also people from other Gaelic countries and around the world.
The Challenges of Learning the Manx Language
Manx is related to the Gaelic languages Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Cain said that as a group, the Gaelic languages are difficult for English speakers to learn. The Manx language is no exception.
“It is very unfamiliar in structure,” said Cain. “There are numerous grammatical features which, although common in the Celtic languages, have no comparison with Germanic languages. Most Manx vocabulary would be very unusual to English people,” Cain added. “They may recognize words in Spanish or French but this isn’t the case with Manx.”
Cain does see one advantage of speaking the Manx language over its related Gaelic cousins. “The orthography of Manx is similar to English and so it is less scary than Irish or Scottish Gaelic which look very different,” said Cain.
The Manx Language: Increasingly Vibrant and Successful
Despite the great strides made in reviving the language, Manx is still a minority language in the Isle of Man. Cain said it is one disadvantage when learning the language. “It can often be difficult to meet fluent speakers,” he said. Cain added, however, that Manx is becoming an “increasingly vibrant and successful language community”.
Between the people of Ellan Vannin, North Americans learning an ancestral language and students wanting to speak a unique language, the language that was extinct 40 years ago now has people who answer “Vel Gaelg ayd? – Do you speak Manx?” with “Ta Gaelg aym – Yes, I do.”
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