Constructing “Traditional Manx”: The persistence of native speaker models in post-shift revitalization

The Manx language revival has seen the emergence of a community of hundreds of fluent second-language speakers in recent decades despite the absence of traditional native speakers since the 1970s. A predominant ideological tendency positions contemporary revival speakers as legitimate successors of historical native speakers. Linguistic innovations are commonly framed as naturalized language change, with language use valued more highly than accuracy. Simultaneously, strongly purist stances have seen the borrowing of numerous lexical items from the closely related Irish and Scottish Gaelic, at the expense of established English loanwords. A countervailing stance has gained ground more recently, prompted by the greater availability of historical texts and recordings in accessible digital formats. This ‘authenticist’ stance seeks greater adherence to norms which were prevalent among native speakers of ‘Traditional Manx’ in terms of phonology, grammar, phraseology and lexis, as well as greater acceptance of English loanwords. This article analyses data from a corpus of semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with contemporary Manx speakers, as well as extracts from pedagogical materials, to examine the motivations and implications of these ideological shifts, and the extent to which they challenge or confirm generalizations about ‘new speaker’ varieties in other contexts. Related issues of gender, counterelites, the role of language ‘experts’ and ‘nerds’, and the language ideologies of teachers are also considered. The present analysis problematizes scholarly contentions that so-called essentialist’ ideologies are necessarily oppressive, reactionary, or likely to be eclipsed within ‘new speaker’ and revitalization contexts. While romantic or nostalgic motivations certainly play a role, authenticist stances may also themselves reflect contemporary shifts towards demotization, resulting in revalorization of the hybridity of the historical language, as well as representing an assertion of Manx identity. Pragmatic motivations are also apparent, reflecting a desire for clearer linguistic models than provided by the perceived heterogeneity of revival usage.