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This comprehensive volume describes in depth all the Celtic languages from historical, structural and sociolinguistic perspectives, with individual chapters on Irish, Scottish, Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Organized for ease of reference, The Celtic Languages is arranged in four parts. The first, Historical Aspects, covers the origin and history of the Celtic languages, their spread and retreat, present-day distribution and a sketch of the extant and recently extant languages. Parts II and III describe the structural detail of each language, including phonology, mutation, morphology, syntax, dialectology and lexis. The final part provides wide-ranging sociolinguistic detail, such as areas of usage (in government, church, media, education, business), maintenance (institutional support offered), and prospects for survival (examination of demographic changes and how they affect these languages). Special Features: • Presents the first modern, comprehensive linguistic description of this important language family • Provides a full discussion of the likely progress of Irish, Welsh and Breton • Includes the most recent research on newly discovered Continental Celtic inscriptions

The Celtic Languages describes in depth all the Celtic languages from historical, structural and sociolinguistic perspectives with individual chapters on Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. This second edition has been thoroughly revised to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the modern Celtic languages and their current sociolinguistic status along with complete descriptions of the historical languages. This comprehensive volume is arranged in four parts. The first part offers a description of the typological aspects of the Celtic languages followed by a scene setting historical account of the emergence of these languages. Chapters devoted to Continental Celtic, Old and Middle Irish, and Old and Middle Welsh follow. Parts two and three are devoted to linguistic descriptions of the contemporary languages. Part two has chapters on Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, while Part three covers Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Part four is devoted to the sociolinguistic situation of the four contemporary Celtic languages and a final chapter describes the status of the two revived languages Cornish and Manx. With contributions from a variety of scholars of the highest reputation, The Celtic Languages continues to be an invaluable tool for both students and teachers of linguistics, especially those with an interest in typology, language universals and the unique sociolinguistic position which the Celtic languages occupy.Dr Martin J. Ball is Hawthorne-BoRSF Endowed Professor, and Director of the Hawthorne Research Center, at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Dr Ball has over 120 academic publications. Among his books are The Use of Welsh, Mutation in Welsh, and Welsh Phonetics. Dr Nicole Müller is Hawthorne-BoRSF Endowed Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Among her books are Mutation in Welsh, and Agents in Early Irish and Early Welsh.

This book is a study of the print cultures of the four principal Celtic languages — Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton — in the crucial period between 1700 and 1900.Over the past four centuries, the Celtic languages of northwest Europe have followed contrasting paths of maintenance and decline. This was despite their common lack of official recognition and use, and their common distance from the centres of political power. This volume analyses publishing, circulation and reading in the four languages, particularly at a popular level, showing the different levels of overall activity as well as the distinctions in the types of printed texts between regions. The approach is a broad one, considering all printed books down to very small cheap formats. It explores the interactions between the different regions and the continuation of print culture within diasporic communities.This volume will appeal to book historians, to scholars of the four languages and their literature, and to students of Celtic studies.

This is the first comprehensive authoritative survey of Arthurian literature and traditions in the Celtic languages of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. With contributions by leading and emerging specialists in the field, the volume traces the development of the legends that grew up around Arthur and have been constantly reworked and adapted from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It shows how the figure of Arthur evolved from the leader of a warband in early medieval north Britain to a king whose court becomes the starting-point for knightly adventures, and how characters and tales are reimagined, reshaped and reinterpreted according to local circumstances, traditions and preoccupations at different periods. From the celebrated early Welsh poetry and prose tales to less familiar modern Breton and Cornish fiction, from medieval Irish adaptations of the legend to the Gaelic ballads of Scotland, Arthur in the Celtic Languages provides an indispensable, up-to-date guide of a vast and complex body of Arthurian material, and to recent research and criticism.

This book showcases the state of the art in the corpus-based linguistics of medieval Celtic languages. Its chapters detail theoretical advances in analysing variation/change in the Celtic languages and computational tools necessary to process/analyse the data. Many contributions situate the Celtic material in the broader field of corpus-based diachronic linguistics. The application of computational methods to Celtic languages is in its infancy and this book is a first in medieval Celtic Studies, which has mainly concentrated on philological endeavours such as editorial and literary work. The Celtic languages represent a new frontier in the development of NLP tools because they pose special challenges, like complicated inflectional morphology with non-straightforward mappings between lemmata and attested forms, irregular orthography, and consonant mutations. With so much data available in non-electronic form and ongoing efforts to convert these data to computer-readable format, there is much room for the developing/testing of new tools. This books provides an overview of this process at a crucial time in the development of the field and aims to the data accessible to computational linguists with an interest in diachronic change.

This volume, one of the few devoted to Celtic syntax, makes an important contribution to the description of Celtic, focusing on the ordering of major constituents, pronouns, inflection, compounding, and iode-switching. The articles also address current issues in linguistic theory so that Celticists and theoretical linguists alike find this book valuable.

This study examines the current situation of the Celtic languages in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It demonstrates how, over a significant period of time, they shifted under pressure from the domination of English from monolingualism to bilingualism.