Languages in the News: The North American Gaeltacht

A Google Map of the location of Tamworth, Ontario, 

which I screencapped myself without help from anyone

That’s right. There’s an official Gaeltacht in North America. Canada, in fact, specifically Tamworth, Ontario. It consists of about 62 acres, and is officially called Gaeltacht Thuaisceart on Oileáin Úir, which just means North American Gaeltacht. The area was settled by Irish immigrants escaping the Great Famine (Gorta Mór in Irish). The Gaeltacht itself was opened officially in 2007. While there are other Irish-speaking areas in Canada, as well as a few in the US, this is the only one recognized as an official Gaeltacht.

The North American Gaeltacht has its own website at http://www.gaeilge.ca/index-b%C3%A9arla.php. The goal of its founders is to support and promote the learning and speaking of Irish Gaelic in North America. In 2009, the group’s founders were awarded the Global Gaeilge Award in Ireland, given in recognition of efforts to spread the Gaelic language outside Ireland. Visitors can participate in summer programs to learn the language, so if you want to learn Irish, but don’t think you can make it all the way to Ireland, try Canada! 

http://www.hamiltonirisharts.ca/event/north-american-gaeltacht-agm-and-immersion-weekend-2019/ --details on the 2019 festivities. You can follow information on upcoming festivities at https://www.facebook.com/pg/OireachtasGaeilgeCheanada/posts/?ref=page_internal 

Further Reading:

https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/education/the-only-official-gaeltacht-outside-of-ireland-in-ontario-videos 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_North_American_Gaeltacht 

https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111123/http://www.nwipp-newspapers.com/DN/free/324892792346375.php 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-tongue-twisting-labour-of-love-in-canadas-gaelic-speaking-community/article593113/ 

https://tamworth.ca/ 

https://www.mintpressnews.com/irish-language-reemerges-north-america/199974/ 

Languages in the News: Yagán’s Last Living Speaker

Tierra del Fuego lies at the southernmost tip of South America, making it the southernmost inhabited area in the world. This makes it the home of: the southernmost city, the southernmost indigenous people, and the southernmost endangered languages. 

Cristina Calderon, of Villa Ukika, outside Puerto Williams in Chile, is the last living speaker of Yagán, the language of the indigenous people of the same name. The language has been estimated to have been spoken in the area for at least 10,000 years. Calderon is not the last of the Yagán people, but most have abandoned the native language in favor of the more popular Spanish. Without someone else to take up the cause of preserving the language, Yagán is likely to become truly extinct with Calderon’s death. She is 91 years old. 

Like most indigenous peoples, the Yagán were decimated upon the arrival of European settlers and explorers. Europeans diligently hunted whales and seals that the Yagán needed to survive, and missionaries bent on converting them to Christianity and teaching them to live in a more “civilized” manner brought diseases to which the Yagán had no immunity. Some of the Yagán were sent to the Falklands in the 1920s. As of 2002, there were about 1,600 Yagán in Chile.

Basics about the Yagán Language 

The Yagán language and its speakers are also known as Yaghan or Yámana. The language is an isolate, meaning it has no known relatives among any other languages of the world. 

The Yagán alphabet, with phonetic pronunciations and sound files, can be found here: http://www.uchile.cl/cultura/lenguas/yaganes/alfabeto.html (in Spanish) 

Scroll down a bit on this page to find some examples of Yagán vocabulary: http://www.victory-cruises.com/felipeetc.html. There are also links to photos, commentary from early explorers to the area, and a few translated myths. (Probably NSFW in some cases, since the Yagán, in spite of living in a very cold climate just a stone’s throw from Antarctica, went mostly naked because apparently they are HARDCORE.) 

The Open Language Archives offer a variety of resources regarding the language: http://www.language-archives.org/language/yag   

A creation myth from the Yagán people: https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/man-who-became-rainbow

SOURCES 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-language-indigenous/in-chiles-remote-south-the-last-speaker-of-an-ancient-language-fights-to-keep-it-alive-idUSKCN1T11YU 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaghan_people 

https://www.ethnologue.com/language/yag 

Language in the News: Welsh

In Bangor, Wales (not the one in Maine), a company called Sports Direct appears to have issued orders that Welsh people weren’t allowed to speak Welsh in Wales. (Here’s the original article, as well as a follow-up article that indicates it wasn’t an official directive from the company. The intrigue continues.)

The company stated that English is the official language of their company, and no other language should be spoken by their employees while on the job, even during personal conversations. Now, you could argue all you want that they can do whatever they like, since it’s their company, but it seems a little tone-deaf, if not straight-up rude, to tell people they can’t speak their own native language in their own country, even if it’s included on a list of a bunch of other languages they also can’t speak on the job. It just seems like a bad move, especially when you’ve come into that country from elsewhere. In fact, as of 2011, it’s actually illegal in Wales to tell people they can’t speak Welsh.

Distribution of Welsh speakers in Wales per the 2011 census. Graphic from Wikipedia.

Wales has gone to a lot of trouble to be sure Welsh, aka Cymraeg, is an actively used language. Like most Celtic languages, it’s been beleaguered for centuries, being pushed out by English, and is now only spoken by about 20% of the population of Wales. It’s mostly spoken even in Wales as a second language, though parts of the north and west of Wales are home to native speakers (i.e. those who learn it as their first language). With the government passing protections for the language as well as establishing organizations to preserve it, Welsh has the kind of backing it needs to stay alive, at least in its native land. Technically, then, it’s not an orphan language, but it’s one that could easily be lost if efforts to maintain it are for some reason discontinued.

Language in the News: Uyghur

In July of 2017, authorities in northwest China's Xinjiang region banned the use of the Uyghur language in all their schools. Schools are to use Chinese only.

It's directives like these that have led to the decline and disappearance of languages all over the world, including many indigenous languages. Uyghur is currently spoken by 10 to 25 million people in this portion of China as well as in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It has also been called Eastern Turkic. Formerly, it was an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, used widely by the Uyghur people.

About Uyghur

Uyghur is a Turkic language, which means it's related to Turkish and other languages spoken in an area that stretches from Eastern Europe to northern Siberia. It belongs to the Karluk branch of this family, which also includes Uzbek, Salar, and Aini.

Distribution of Turkic Languages from Wikimedia.org

Historical influences on the language include Persian and Arabic, while in more recent times it's been influenced by Chinese and Russian, picking up numerous loan words from these languages. It has three main dialects, the most common of which is the Central dialect spoken by ninety percent of Uyghur speakers. It's written primarily in an Arabic-Persian script, although some speakers use Roman or Cyrillic alphabets. Unlike most languages using Arabic script, written Uyghur requires the writer to indicate all the vowels.

Linguistic Gobbledygook

Linguistically, Uyghur exhibits the following qualities, which it shares with many other Turkic languages:

• Vowel harmony. Only certain combinations of vowels are allowed.
• Agglutination. Morphemes (the smallest meaningful "chunk" of a language, but not always equivalent to a word) are strung together without being modified to create a longer word. These long words can be the equivalent of a full sentence.
• No grammatical gender. Words are not classified as masculine or feminine, as in many romance and Slavic languages, for example.

Learn More:

An article about the culture and clashes in China regarding Uyghur speakers.

Learn the language with A Handbook of Modern Uyghur. (pdf link)