Breathing life into the Manx language
Feb 16 2009 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post
As English trade and tourism grew, Manx became associated with poverty. In 1871, 25% of the Island’s population spoke Manx. By 1961, the number of speakers had dropped to 0.35%, out of 73,000. About 600 people on the island now speak the language.
“For example, my mother, Jessica Kewley, who was a well-known Isle of Man head teacher, was brought up to scorn Manx as being a badge of backwardness.
“There was no Manx spoken at home while I grew up, although my grandmother spoke it. When my mother asked why I bothered with Manx, I replied that I was a linguist and Manx was a language.
“She was eventually won round and after I went to classes with John Crelland, one of the oldest speakers, and attended classes when she was 80. Being a good linguist and Latin scholar, she made progress.
“Such is the change of attitude that we now have a Manx language primary school at St John’s. Manx speakers cross all boundaries of age and background.”
Among the best speakers she knows are Stuart Bennett, an art school drop-out who works as a roofer and is a great cyclist (who taxis a blind friend around-pillion), and Brian Stowell, who has a physics PhD.
“When I was being published, I decided to add Kewley as it’s a particularly Manx name and I’m of the generation who took their husband’s names,” says Jennifer.
“I’m not an active part of the revival. My children don’t speak Manx as they said they’d enough problems learning English after Danish and it’s no good forcing them.
“But I feel it’s very important to retain a language like Manx as its extinction is like losing a species, impoverishing the world’s resources.
“A community’s language is the best means of expressing the concerns of its people. The loss of language is more than just the loss of communication.
“Language is something honed through generations by people and encapsulates a way of thought, a history and mindset, which will be lost otherwise.
“When I judged a World Manx Association junior poetry competition, it was won by an eight-year-old boy who wrote: ‘In the waves the seals play and the TT bikes roar down the mountain and the old language comes back from the days of sorrow’.
“We can’t lose this – it’s like hearing the new WB Yeats!”
* PRACTICAL Manx, by Jennifer Kewley Draskau, published by Liverpool University Press, £19.99.
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