Emergent linguistic norms and translated religious prose in eighteenth-century Manx

ongoing

Emergent linguistic norms and translated religious prose in eighteenth-century Manx Manx Gaelic, the native Celtic language of the Isle of Man, was a largely unwritten oral language until the development of an English-based orthography for religious use from the seventeenth century, This process culminated in authorized translations of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1765) and a complete Bible translation (1772). This late flowering of Manx literature paradoxically came at a time of increasing language shift to English, which was largely complete by the late nineteenth century. The gradual standardization of the Manx written tradition is attested in an extensive, but hitherto largely unstudied, corpus of manuscripts preserved in the Manx Museum in Douglas, including most notably a large corpus of over 600 sermons dating from the end of the seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, and manuscript drafts of around a fifth of the Bible translation. The latter are extensively annotated by the editors and offer a rich insight into processes of textual interpretation and translation; orthographic, morphological and terminological standardization; and revision and preparation for publication. There is also an extensive body of correspondence between the Manx clergy and an international network of intellectuals and ecclesiastical patrons. This project will build on previous work on the orthographical development of Manx in the sermon corpus, to examine wider processes of linguistic standardization and translation in eighteenth-century Manx, with a particular focus on the Bible translation project completed between the 1720s and 1770s. The project will place these processes in the wider sociohistorical and intellectual context of the eighteenth-century in the Isle of Man and further afield, as well as comparing processes of standardization and translation in Manx with those of other linguistic contexts, especially those of other Celtic languages.