How the Isle of Man rebuilt its culture from the record

How Manx stopped being passed to children

Manx is a Goidelic language, descended like Irish and Scottish Gaelic from Old Irish and partially intelligible with both. Britannica records that most of the island's inhabitants spoke it until the 19th century, when English displaced it. The counts show how fast. Henry Jenner estimated in 1874 that about 30% of the population habitually spoke Manx, 12,340 people out of 41,084. The census of 1901 found 9.1% claiming to speak it, and the census of 1921 found 1.1%.

Schools came first. In the 17th century the governor Isaac Barrow required teaching in English in the schools he founded and promoted English in church, with little practical effect while most ministers spoke only Manx. Two bishops pulled the other way. Thomas Wilson, who began his tenure in 1698, published the first book in the language, and his successor Mark Hildesley had Manx used as the language of instruction. By the late 18th century nearly every school was teaching in English again.

The decisive change happened at home. With so few speakers the language carried little prestige, and parents stopped teaching it to children who, they reckoned, would need English. The revivalist Brian Stowell described the speed of it: "In the 1860s there were thousands of Manx people who couldn't speak English, but barely a century later it was considered to be so backwards to speak the language that there were stories of Manx speakers getting stones thrown at them in the towns." The novelist Hall Caine, writing up Tynwald Day in 1893, noticed farmers and fishermen dressed up as lodging-house keepers "pretending not to understand the salutations of old comrades when addressed by them in the Manx".

Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh, the Manx Language Society, was founded in 1899. By the middle of the 20th century a few elderly native speakers remained. The last of them, Ned Maddrell, a speaker of the southern dialect, died on 27 December 1974.

What the revival learned the language from

For a language with so few speakers, Manx was written down early and often, and the revival has leaned on that record at every stage. Britannica dates the earliest record to a version of the Book of Common Prayer translated in 1610 by a Welsh bishop, using a spelling based on English. The first printed book in Manx, Coyrle Sodjeh, a catechism translated by Bishop Wilson, appeared in 1707.

The Bible came in stages. Manx clergy had long complained that their congregations had no Bible in their own language. The Gospel of Matthew was printed in 1748 and the New Testament in 1767, and in 1775 the whole Bible, Yn Vible Casherick, was published as one book. That edition fixed the modern orthography, which has changed little since. Because the spelling rests on Elizabethan English conventions with a trace of Welsh, a reader of Irish or Scottish Gaelic finds written Manx hard going even where the words are shared.

The sound of the language survives in recordings of its last speakers. Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach of Ireland, led an effort in 1947 to save Manx, and in 1948 the Irish Folklore Commission was sent to the island with recording equipment. George Broderick's three-volume Handbook of Late Spoken Manx, published from 1984 to 1986, prints transcribed speech from the last generation of speakers, Ned Maddrell among them.

To fill gaps in the recorded vocabulary, revivalists turned to modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and they reacted against the English loanwords late native speakers had used: boy and badjer in place of the Gaelic guilley and brock. New words were coined for technical vocabulary, and some arrived through Irish, as çhellveeish, television, did from teilifís.

How many people speak Manx on the island today

What the census has counted

Every count since Jenner's has asked a slightly different question, so the figures describe a direction more than a curve.

The 2021 report breaks the ability down. Of the 2,223 residents with some Manx, 702 said they could speak, read and write it, and 1,005 said they could speak it but neither read nor write it. Douglas had 580 residents with some ability, Peel 271 and Ramsey 206.

UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger declared Manx extinct in 2009. The historian and linguist Jennifer Kewley Draskau objected that "there are hundreds of speakers of Manx", and UNESCO has since reclassified it as critically endangered.

The sources disagree on whether anyone now speaks Manx as a first language. Wikipedia's article on the language says no children native to the island do; its article on Manx culture says children brought up by Manx-speaking parents have become the first native speakers, bilingual with English, in many years. The census counts ability and does not record how it was acquired.

Where the language is taught and heard

The Manx Language Unit was formed in 1992 with three members, headed by Brian Stowell, and put in charge of Manx teaching and accreditation in schools. Manx is now offered as an optional second language in all the island's primary and secondary schools, up to A Level. Since 2003 the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh, a Manx-medium primary school run by the playgroup organisation Mooinjer Veggey, has used the former St John's School building; it had 67 children in September 2016, taught nearly everything through Manx. Its pupils can continue part of their secondary education in the language at Queen Elizabeth II High School in Peel.

Outside school the language is mostly visible in fixed places. Road, street, village and town boundary signs are bilingual, and other road signs are in English. The House of Keys conducts its proceedings in English, and its Standing Orders let the Speaker ask a member who uses a Manx term for a translation; at the sitting on 12 February 2019 one member used boghtnid, stated to mean nonsense. Manx Radio carries weekly programmes in the language. Culture Vannin employs a Manx Language Development Officer and runs a translation service, and Manx National Heritage points readers to Jeebin, the language strategy for 2022 to 2032. The greetings moghrey mie and fastyr mie, good morning and good afternoon, are in everyday use, and given names such as Moirrey, Illiam, Orry, Breeshey and Fenella have come back into use on the island.

Why Tynwald Day is proclaimed in two languages

Tynwald Day, on 5 July, is the Manx national day, when the parliament sits in the open air at St John's. Tynwald's own account traces the outdoor sittings to the Viking settlements and describes a ceremony unchanged except in detail for more than 1,000 years. Isle of Man: politics covers what the day does to a law. What matters for the culture is that the proclamation is bilingual. Each act that has received Royal Assent is promulgated by the First Deemster in English and by the Second Deemster in Manx, with its title and a brief description of its effects.

The Manx reading is older than the revival. Hall Caine's account of 1893 has the senior Deemster reading the titles of the new laws in English and the Coroner of Glenfaba reciting the same titles in Manx, and he added: "Hardly anybody heard them; hardly anybody listened." The recitation survived a period when the language itself was barely spoken, and it now takes place in front of a population in which about two thousand residents can now speak the language.

Participants wear bollan bane, mugwort. The path from the chapel to the hill is strewn with rushes, a custom traced to the Celtic practice of offering bundles of rushes to the sea god Manannan on Midsummer's Eve; a ballad dated to 1507 to 1522 names a bundle of coarse marsh grass as the rent Manannan demanded each Midsummer Eve. A fair and market still run alongside the ceremony, and since 2000 the week of Tynwald Day has been kept as Manx National Week, with evening concerts that end with the national anthem and fireworks. In 2020 the fair and market were cancelled because of COVID-19 and only the legal proceedings took place.

What the Manx believe and where they worship

The 2021 census was the first Manx census to ask about religion. Of the 74,487 residents who answered the voluntary question, 54.7% said they were Christian and 43.8% reported no religion. Islam and Buddhism each took 0.5%, Hinduism 0.4% and Judaism 0.2%.

The Anglican Diocese of Sodor and Man traces its history to 1154 and has belonged to the national churches of Norway, Scotland and England in turn; its bishop and parishes have been part of the Province of York since 1541. The Methodist Church is close to it in size. The Catholic Church has eight parish churches under the Archbishop of Liverpool, and in September 2023 St Mary of the Isle in Douglas was made a co-cathedral; the Lord's Prayer was recited in Manx at the Mass of dedication. There is a mosque in Douglas and a small Jewish community.

Older traces of the church are all over the island. More than 200 small chapels called keeills were built in the first centuries after Christianisation. Religious writing dominates the surviving literature in Manx: the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, metrical psalms by the Rev John Clague printed with the Prayer Book of 1768, and carvals, the Christian ballads that took the place of the older spoken tales after the Reformation. Manx has not been used in church services since the late 19th century, apart from an annual Christmas service held by Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh.

How music and folklore came back after the language

What the revival did for Manx music

Little can be said about Manx music before the 15th century. The carved crosses of that era show two musicians in all, one playing a lur and one a harp. Church music is the best documented Manx music of the 19th century: the first collection of Manx church songs was printed in 1799, and from the 1870s and 1880s ballads, religious songs and choral arrangements were published in quantity as the tourist trade grew. The composer Haydn Wood, who moved to the island in 1885 at the age of three, based his tone poem Mannin Veen of 1933 on four Manx folk tunes.

The folk revival of the 1970s began after Maddrell's death, with a music festival called Yn Chruinnaght in Ramsey. Culture Vannin now employs a Manx Music Development Officer to bring music and dance into schools and the wider community, and the Isle of Man Arts Council, set up in 1965, funds individuals, groups and venues. New writing followed the music: Brian Stowell's Manx translation of Alice in Wonderland appeared in 1990 and his novel Dunveryssyn yn Tooder-Folley, the first full-length novel in Manx, in 2006. The first film in the language, the 22-minute Ny Kirree fo Niaghtey, premiered in 1983.

What the folklore and the three legs record

Manx folklore is populated with named creatures. The Buggane is said to have blown the roof off St Trinian's Church in a rage; the Fenodyree is helpful and unpredictable; the Glashtyn is a shapeshifter from the water; the Moddey Dhoo is a black dog said to have haunted Peel Castle. The little folk are called mooinjer veggey, and it is said to be bad luck to cross the Fairy Bridge without wishing them good morning or good afternoon.

The island's symbol, the three legs, carries a legend of its own: Manannan repelled an invasion by turning into three legs and rolling down a hill. The symbol has no official design. Government publications, the currency, flags and the tourist authority all use different versions, some running clockwise and some anticlockwise, with the knee bent at angles from about 60° to 120°. The Latin motto added late in the symbol's history, Quocunque Jeceris Stabit, says that whichever way the thing is thrown, it will stand.

What the Manx eat and brew

The traditional national dish is spuds and herrin, boiled potatoes and herring, the food of subsistence farmers who crofted the land and fished the sea. A newer claimant is chips, cheese and gravy: thick-cut chips under shredded Manx Cheddar and thick gravy, sold in most of the island's fast-food outlets. Manx kippers, smoked herring, come from the smokeries in Peel, and the queen scallop, called queenies, is fished commercially along with crab and lobster. Isle of Man: economy covers the fisheries as a trade.

The Loaghtan, the island's own breed of sheep, has dark brown wool and four or sometimes six horns, and its dark meat is served as a delicacy. Manx cheese won bronze medals at the British Cheese Awards in 2005 and sold 578 tonnes that year. The island has few desserts of its own; the Peel flapjack is a popular one.

Beer is regulated by a purity law of 1874, the Brewers' Act, which resembles the German Reinheitsgebot. Okells has brewed since 1850, and a whiskey distillery run by the Manx Whiskey Company was operating by 2019.

Why road racing became part of Manx identity

The Tourist Trophy exists because racing on British roads was illegal. The Motor Car Act of 1903 limited cars in the United Kingdom to 20 mph, and the Automobile Club's secretary, Julian Orde, asked the Manx authorities for permission to race on public roads instead. The Manx authorities agreed and passed the Highways (Light Locomotive) Act in 1904. The first motorcycle TT was run in 1907 on the 15.85-mile St John's course, and in 1911 the races moved to the Snaefell Mountain Course, which now runs 37.73 miles (60.72 km) through towns and countryside with 219 turns.

The roads are ordinary public roads, closed for racing. More than 600 volunteer marshals close, clear and prepare the course, and once it is shut it can be crossed only at a few bridges and tunnels. Until 1927 practice sessions ran with the roads open; that year Archie Birkin swerved to avoid a fish van, hit a wall and died, and practice has been held on closed roads since. Between 1907 and 2023, 156 people died in official practice or racing on the course, and 269 including the Manx Grand Prix and the Clubman races.

The TT brought 47,000 visitors to the island in 2024, and 23.9% of all visitors that year attended a motorsport event, among them the TT, the Southern 100 and the Manx Grand Prix. Wikipedia's article on Manx culture calls the TT part of Manx identity.

Cammag, the national sport, is similar to Irish hurling and Scottish shinty and was once the most popular sport on the island. It had stopped being played by the start of the 20th century, and it is now revived with an annual match at St John's. Beyond the island, Manx competitors have won three gold medals at the Commonwealth Games, among them the cyclist Mark Cavendish in the scratch race in 2006, and the island started the Island Games in 1985.