Tristram H.L.C. The Celtic Languages in Contact

Postdam University Press, 2007. — 346 p.This e-book contains fifteen papers given at the Thirteenth International Congress of Celtic Studies.The fifteen contributions form an impressive collection of papers all dealing with issues of language contact and the resultant language change. The time span is a broad one, beginning with the Nostratic hypothesis in Tatyana Mikhailova’s paper and with weighty arguments against the Afro-Asiatic hypothesis in Graham Isaac’s paper, continuing with Gearóid Mac Eoin’s reflections on the language that might have been spoken in Ireland before the spread and development of Irish there, with Karin Stüber’s account of language contact as shown in the mixed naming patterns in ancient Gaul, and with Ranko Matasović’s discussion of language contact among the Insular Celtic languages so as to form a specific linguistic area.Seven papers deal with language contact in the modern period. Alan Kent discusses the linguistic legacy of Cornish settlers in North America and Gary German the interface between Breton and French, and the effect of the lack of a standard of the Breton language on the dialectal fragmentation of the Bretonspeaking areas.Liam Mac Mathúna informs us about the code-mixing of Irish and English between about 1600 and about 1900 for literary purposes, Piotr Stalmaszczyk about the transfer of specifically Insular Celtic features onto the
respective ‘Celtic Englishes,’ Raymond Hickey about the transfer of Irish prosody onto the prosody of Irish English, and Katrin Thier about the presence of Insular Celtic entries in the ongoing edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.Four papers deal with the current demise of Irish as an autochthonous community language even in the Gaeltacht areas and the rise of Irish as a token language used for the construction and maintenance of ‘Irishness,’ or ‘Celticity,’ underscoring a sovereign national identity. Feargal Ó Béarra reports on the grievously endangered linguistic situation of Irish both in the Gaeltacht and in the Republic in general, in spite of prolongued official efforts to reintroduce the language into public life.John Kirk & Jeffrey Kallen use data from the Irish part of the International Corpus of (Standard) English (ICE-Ireland) to show that, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic, the occurrence of Irish words and phrases provides indexical features of language use in which English in Ireland is used in such a way as to point to the Irish language as a linguistic and cultural reference point. Hildegard Tristram deals with the ideological significance of the use of Irish lexis in selected English medium newspapers for sale in the Republic of Ireland in 1995/6.Finally, Göran Wolf presents his reflections on the present-day status of both the Celtic languages and the Celtic Englishes in Great Britain and Ireland.ISBN: 978-3-940793-07-2