Following hard on the heels of the Roman conquest came the rise of the Germanic conquerors, the Franks pushing into Gaul to create France and the Anglo-Saxons carving out England in a formerly Celtic Britain.

Today, when we speak of the Celts, we refer to only six peoples who have survived into modern times: the Irish, Manx, and Scots, who constitute the Goidelic- (or Gaelic-) speaking branch; and the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons, who represent the Brythonic-speaking branch. The definition of Celtic, even among the ancient Greeks and Romans, was a linguistic one. Professor Eoin MacNeill summed up the definition in succinct terms in Phrases of Irish History (1919): “The term Celtic is indicative of language, not of race.” A Celtic people are a people who speak, or were known to have spoken within modern historical times, a Celtic language.

Sadly, of the 16.5 million people who live in the Celtic countries today, only 2.5 million speak a Celtic language. It has been estimated that perhaps a further one million speakers of a Celtic language may be found among emigrants, some particularly concentrated in the Welsh-speaking area of Patagonia, Argentina, and the Scots Gaelic speakers of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. Therefore, we may well be standing at the deathbed of Celtic civilisations, for if the same political and economic forces continue into the twenty-first century, Celtic-speaking communities may well not survive into the twenty-second century.

For centuries the Celtic languages, and their attendant cultures, suffered at the hands of their conquerors. It was state policy, enacted by law, to attempt the eradication of these languages and supplant them with English and French. This policy of cultural genocide has today largely succeeded. Only Irish is an official state language, being the first official language of the 26-county Irish state. Irish has no recognition in the six partitioned counties. Welsh achieved a status within Wales only with the enactment of the Welsh Language Act in 1969. And while the Manx government unanimously agreed, on July 10, 1985, that “the preservation and promotion” of the Manx language was official policy, the last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, had died on December 27, 1974; since then the language has passed into the hands of enthusiasts and revivalists. Scots Gaelic and Breton still suffer debilities by lack of recognition and promotion by the state. The Cornish language, the last native speakers of which died out in the