We publish in endangered languages to restore and preserve endangered, dying, and forgotten languages, so that the myths and folklore carried in them survive in the tongue that made them.
That is the whole answer. What follows is the evidence behind it, and what we build as a result.
What is actually lost when a language dies?
A way of seeing, not a set of labels. A language carries the jokes, the weather-words, the names of places no map keeps, and the grammar of how a people reckon time and kinship and grief. None of that translates cleanly. When the last fluent speaker goes, it is simply gone.
Irish shows this better than any argument. The tradition of dinnseanchas, the lore of place-names, means half the country is a text. A hill, a ford, a rock in a field each hold a story folded into the name. Let the language go and the land stays, but the map of meaning laid over it goes blank. You keep the ground and lose the memory of what happened on it.
The scale is not small. Between 1950 and 2010 the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger recorded 230 languages gone extinct. Roughly 40 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken today are endangered. On the current trajectory, linguists expect half of them or more to fall silent this century.
Can a language come back once it is gone?
It already has, more than once, and this is the part of the record most people do not know.
Manx is the clearest case. Its last traditional native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974, and UNESCO listed the language as extinct in 2009. Children at the island’s Manx-medium school wrote to UNESCO, in Manx, to point out the problem. The classification was changed.
Cornish went the same way and came back the same way. Its traditional speakers died out around the end of the eighteenth century. Revival work from written records began in 1904, and a few hundred people speak it today, with a growing number of children learning it.
Two of the six Celtic languages lost their last native speakers outright and were rebuilt from dictionaries, recordings and refusal. That is not a sad footnote. It is the proof that the work is possible. When somebody tells you a language is too far gone to save, those two are the answer.
Why publish, rather than archive?
Because a language behind glass is still dying. It survives by being used.
Joshua Fishman spent a career establishing this. His 1991 Reversing Language Shift set out the finding that revival does not begin with governments or grants. It begins in homes, between generations, in daily use. A language lives when a child hears it, speaks it, and hands it on. Everything else is scaffolding.
So we make new work in these languages and about them. Books, references, and tools a person picks up and uses. We build for the diaspora as much as the homeland, because tens of millions of people are scattered from the old countries and feel the pull of a language they were never taught. That hunger is a reason for the language to be spoken this year, not only remembered from the last one.
What do you actually build?
References a returning speaker can trust. That standard is specific, and we hold ourselves to it in public:
- Every word traced to a named source.
- Every pronunciation attributed, or left honestly blank rather than guessed.
- Corrections published where the mistake was made.
That last one matters most. A language coming back deserves something accurate to come back to, and accuracy is a practice rather than a claim. If you find an error in our work, tell us and we will correct it on the page where it appeared.
Two references are live now. Irish Words & Grammar covers the lexicon, the mutations, the cases and the dialects, built to be used rather than consulted once and shelved. Manx Words & Grammar does the same for Manx, drawn from Cregeen and Kelly.
Which languages, and in what order?
The Celtic family runs in two branches. Goidelic holds Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. Brythonic holds Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Every one of the six is endangered, with Welsh the strongest and the only one UNESCO does not classify that way, and it is strong precisely because people fought for it for decades.
Irish and Manx are published. Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton are in preparation. You can see the whole family, with speaker numbers and current status for each, on our Celtic Languages overview.
We are building the same reference for each in turn, one language at a time.
How does any of this reach the next generation?
A reference serves the people already in the fight. Fishman’s point was that a language lives or dies with the children, so the work cannot stop at scholars.
That is why we make activity books and coloring books in these languages. Plain, usable, built for learning by doing. Something a parent and a child can sit down with at a kitchen table, or a classroom or a diaspora club can share without waiting for anyone’s permission. A learner finishes a page and feels the language move.
A language is not saved in one lifetime. It is handed forward, and the handing forward has to be something a seven-year-old will actually pick up.
Where do the myths come in?
They are the reason for the languages, not a separate project. The stories were made in these tongues and carry meanings that thin out in translation.
That is the thinking behind MythALLogy, where every figure and every story names the manuscript or translation it came from. The same standard as the language references, applied to the mythology the languages carry.
The work continues
A language goes quiet. It comes back loudly, in the mouths of people who refused to let it go. Manx and Cornish already proved that.
Irish and Manx are the first two references. The rest of the family follows. If you speak one of these languages, or you are learning one, or you have found something we got wrong, we want to hear from you. This work gets more accurate the more people check it.
Sources
- UNESCO, Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger: about 40 percent of roughly 7,000 languages endangered; 230 languages recorded extinct 1950 to 2010; classifications for Irish (definitely endangered), Scottish Gaelic (definitely endangered), Breton (severely endangered), and Cornish and Manx (critically endangered, revived from extinct).
- Hallett, D., Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. E. (2007). “Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide.” Cognitive Development, 22(3), 392–399.
- Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Multilingual Matters.
- Isle of Man: Ned Maddrell, the last traditional native speaker of Manx, died in 1974. UNESCO classified the language as extinct in 2009 and revised the classification following representations that included a letter written in Manx by pupils at the island’s Manx-medium school.