In the sea between Britain and Ireland, there lies a much smaller island that is geographically and politically separate from the two landmasses on either side. This land is nominally subject to its own Lord, passes laws in a Tynwald, and is called home by 84,000 humans, a population of tail-less cats, an internationally famous motorcycle race, and an embattled Celtic language.
These are elements within the unique character of the Isle of Man. It’s a soup of historical ingredients, added into the mixture from all directions. The island passed in antiquity from the Romano-British sphere of influence to being an outpost of Irishness, later to form part of the Norse-Gaelic Kingdom of the Isles (a.k.a. Sodor – the inspiration for Thomas the Tank Engine’s home), before it then fell into the hands of Scotland and England. The Isle of Man has travelled between many countries without moving an inch.
Anything to do with the island is known as Manx. That word is an ideal example of the three major sources from which Manx culture has arisen, having at its root a Celtic place-name (Man), which was made adjectival by a Norse suffix (-skr), and has since acquired currency in English.
Say the word Manx to me, and my mind jumps first to the Manx language. I’m a fan from afar; my home proudly exhibits Manx memorabilia, such as a bilingual teatowel that hangs in my kitchen.
Statistically speaking, though, you’re unlikely to have met a speaker of Manx – even if you’ve been in Man. The language has suffered usurpation by English, taken to an extreme over the past two centuries. This process culminated with the death in 1974 of Edward Maddrell, the last native (or rather, since-childhood) speaker. Maddrell did live long enough to contribute to the efforts to revitalise the language. There are around 2,200 self-reported speakers and readers of Manx today, with expectations of more, 2026 having been declared the Year of the Manx Language.
The name Manx, while fondly employed by locals and linguists alike, nonetheless masks the language’s connections and genealogy. These become apparent when we consider the name for the Manx language in Manx itself: Gaelg.
This is recognisably a form of the word Gaelic, a centuries-old term for matters Irish and for elements of the culture that emerged out of Ireland. Strange to say, though, that the Irish first got the word from Britain over the sea, and it doesn’t seem to have been a particularly nice term – a word generically meaning ‘savage’, which the Irish adopted for themselves.
Manx is a sister of Scots Gaelic in Scotland and Irish (often otherwise called Gaelic) in Ireland. The three trace their ancestry back to a point of linguistic unity known as Middle Irish. That is at least its English designation; to its speakers, it would’ve been something like Goídelc. Before Middle Irish (c. 10th–12th century AD) came my beloved Old Irish, then Primitive Irish, and then centuries of Celtic prehistory.
Just as English’s use of the macro-term Gaelic has disintegrated somewhat, Middle Irish went on to fragment into the three ‘Goidelic’ languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Manx) and their subordinate dialects over the course of the late medieval and early modern eras.
This process would have partly been due to geographical inevitability. Early-medieval movements had spread Gaelic speech over a vast para-Atlantic stretch: from the southern tip of Ireland to the northern points of the Outer Hebrides, and from east to west across Ireland and Scotland too. Within such geography, new dialects were bound to form via natural variation.
However, political shenanigans contributed too. The incursions of Norse speakers then the hammer of English punched holes in this spectrum of Gaelic, cutting up a once fairly seamless tapestry and leaving islands of language behind. Manx became one of them.
On account of their consanguinity, Manx shares countless similarities with Irish and Scots Gaelic. The vast bulk of their vocabulary and grammar is held in common. Manx has the (in)famous Celtic mutations, for example; it changes the first sound of its words according to context. Mannin ‘Man’ becomes Vannin in the phrase Ellan Vannin ‘Isle of Man’.
But at least in the visual medium, in how Manx looks and is read, it feels like the odd one out. When you set the three daughters of an Old/Middle Irish word side by side (readily available to compare on the wonderful Wiktionary), the Irish and Scots Gaelic words tend to be harmonious. The Manx member, not so much.
The three greatly disagree in writing. Irish and Scots Gaelic are written with letters and rules that harken back to a shared ‘classical’ standard, and that transcend later dialectal differences in speech by maintaining archaisms. Written Manx is instead the offspring of a different and infamous orthography: English spelling.
How we write is bound up with history and society; Manx and the histories of the different Gaelic-speaking lands are no exception to that rule. While oral composition may well have flourished in Man for centuries prior, it was only in the early 17th century that the Manx language started to get written down.
Crucially, it was by means of Church of England clergy, notably bishop John Phillips (d. 1633), that the independent Manx language enters the historical record. Who its first authors were (English speakers), what orthography they were used to (English spelling), and what they were writing (translations of Anglican texts) are responsible for the divergent look of Manx today.
Specifically, it was a kind of Early Modern English that provided the Isle of Man with its spelling. This means that the letters landed bearing distinctly English uses, such as the effects of the Great Vowel Shift.
The pairs EE and OO are applied to the same Manx vowels as in English meet and moon. For example, the English influence can be seen in Manx sooill ‘eye’. It sounds just like its equivalents in Irish (súil) and Scots Gaelic (sùil), but for them the single letter U performs the vocalic function.
What’s even cooler is that Manx uses the pair AA to spell the front vowel /ɛː/. This is what ‘long A’ in English probably stood around the year 1600, in words like name and face. Doubled AA was also a common practice for English once (e.g. “faas” for face), although it has since yielded to the A_E rule. Manx therefore preserves a technique of spelling, and the vowel that it represented, from an earlier stage of English.
Special attention is worth paying to Manx’s employment of SH, J and ÇH. These are used to signify sounds that readers of Irish and Scots Gaelic must instead recognise from context. This belongs to the Celtic phenomenon of ‘slender and broad’ sounds, whereby certain consonants in speech have been changed (palatalised) by the following vowel. The slender and broad pairs of consonants are the result of a sound change in very early Irish, before which they were single sounds.
The Irish eye, brain and mouth will know that the S in sé ‘six’ is slender and pronounced like an English SH, because it comes before an E. It does not sound like the visually identical S in súil. In Manx spelling, however, the pairs of sounds are not left to context, because each is given its own spelling. The same number Manx spells as shey.
Likewise, an Irish D and T sound different depending on which vowel letter they precede. If it’s E or I, context leads the reader to pronounce them as the slender version. If A, O or U, D and T are broad. Manx instead assigns the broad sounds to D and T alone, and spells the palatalised sounds with J and ÇH. Irish deich ‘ten’, Dia ‘God’, tiarna ‘lord’ and teanga ‘tongue, language’ correspond to Manx jeih, Jee, çhiarn and çhengey.
By giving different sounds their own dedicated letter(s), we might laud Manx as being more phonetically accurate or ‘honest’ in writing. To put it more fairly, how Irish and Scots Gaelic are written can be characterised as conservative, unrepresentative of later sound changes and leaving awareness of them down to context and memory. Meanwhile, Manx spelling, with its 17th-century English origins, is more likely to reflect those changes in its use of the alphabet.
This does seem true at least of the many fricative sounds that have either disappeared or morphed in Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx speech. The TH in Irish guth ‘voice’ is variably pronounced between the dialects, but never in Manx – hence the Manx spelling goo. Likewise, the fricative sound behind the BH in Irish and Scots Gaelic leabhar ‘book’ (related to library) has for centuries been absent from pronunciation. Manx lioar simply doesn’t acknowledge it.
‘Bull’ in Manx is tarroo (distantly related to the constellation Taurus), the spelling of which accurately indicates that its pronunciation ends in a vowel. Some dialects of Irish also pronounce it that way, but you wouldn’t immediately guess that from the Irish spelling tarbh, which preserves the memory of a consonant long since altered.
In this and other features, Manx might merit praise for its correspondence between sound and letter. After all, isn’t that the point and goal of any alphabet?
Opinions on Manx spelling, however, incline towards the negative.
The Manx scholar Christopher Lewin has collated a few experts’ comments from the past century:
“… an abominable system, neither historic nor phonetic, and based mainly on English.” (1932)
“… a historic abomination … destroying the linguistic unity of the Gaels, without replacing it with anything better” (1979)
“… an English monstrosity…” (1955)
“… fundamental deficiencies and diverse inconsistencies … From a philological viewpoint … a wholly inappropriate spelling, which obscured its historical relationship with its congeners and discouraged scholarly interest in its investigation.” (1993)
“… arbitrary, unhistorical orthography … likely to have an inhibiting effect on those familiar with the other branches of Gaelic…” (2001)
Linguists, famous for watching their language, have not minced words on the matter. But I cannot entirely agree – or rather, the identified flaws are not all linguistic in nature, and therefore would need to convince me on other grounds.
For example, it is not bad per se for an aspect of language to be “based mainly on English”. It might be bad for political and historical reasons, but not inherently linguistic ones. Moreover, if Manx orthography has indeed “discouraged scholarly interest”, then this affects only a subset of people, namely scholars and academics, whose perspectives and preferences are not universal and generalisable (thank God). As one such scholar, I will only admit that the spelling does obscure some old etymological connections (e.g. lioar = library) that might delight and assist learners.
More nuanced is my consideration of the charge of “destroying the linguistic unity of the Gaels”. It is true that Manx is not immediately readable for those coming from Irish and Scots Gaelic; Manx’s orthographic otherness may have been a contributing factor to the disintegration of Gaelic, both as a recognised concept and as a single linguistic community.
Whether this is a bad thing, though, is again a political matter at least as much as a linguistic one. The Manx people may or may not subscribe to a greater Gaelic view of themselves; they reserve the right to be Manx above all else. To that end, a distinctive spelling system is a boon.
On linguistic grounds, I can agree with some of the charges laid against Manx. The claim of “fundamental deficiencies and diverse inconsistencies” does seem fair; one sound of Manx may have varied spellings, and one spelling often varies in sound. Setting and meeting the principles of spelling does come under the purview of language, so there are grounds here for linguistic criticism.
Its current orthography as a whole gives the impression of a settled chaos of imported practices, most of them reasonably applied but without the guiding and undemocratic hand of a linguistic authority. Funnily enough, the history of modern Man and Manx bears out this impression.
What interests me more is the calmer observation also quoted by Lewin that:
“The English conventions mean that the radical and lenited or nasalized consonants lack the visible connection shown in Gaelic spelling…”
(Thomson 1984)
By this, Robert L. Thomson is referring to the grammar of Manx. As briefly mentioned above, Manx and other Celtic languages string words together with the help of consistent mutations: the alternation of words’ initial sounds.
These mutations developed centuries ago when a single original sound, used in different positions within an utterance, became more than one sound. I won’t walk into the weeds of mutation any further, in this article at least.
Manx, true to its phonetic honesty, straightforwardly spells the changed consonants with different letters. This system takes the basic or ‘radical’ word ben ‘woman’, and turns it into ven and men according to the context. For example, ‘my woman’ is my ven, while ‘our woman’ is nyn men. These three forms of the same word are separate in sound and spelling.
Irish, meanwhile, does at least maintain “the visible connection”. Its spelling system displays the mutations by means of additional letters: bean ‘woman’becomes bhean and mbean. This trio is pronounced much like Manx ben/ven/men, but Irish spelling at least acknowledges their unity through the continued presence of the radical B.
Likewise, Manx paitçhey ‘child’ (related to English page) has the mutated forms phaitçhey and baitçhey; these match in initial sounds with Irish páiste/pháiste/bpáiste, but the lexical relationship is that little bit clearer in Irish.
Irish ceann‘head’ mutates into cheann and gceann, which are associated by a common C, even though it’s silent in gceann. The Manx equivalent kione lacks that common thread with its variants chione and gione. Irish súil ‘eye’ has the mutated form shúil, pronounced like ‘hool’. The S in shúil is therefore phonetically unnecessary, but it does maintain a written link to the radical súil. Manx, meanwhile, alternates between sooill and hooill.
What I’m getting at here is that phonetic accuracy in spelling, as displayed by Manx, can come at a cost. Irish is the target of mockery for its multiplication of seemingly silent letters, but for readers and writers, the M in mbean, the C in gceann and the S in shúil still serve a purpose. They are mute indicators of their lexical allegiance, to what word they fundamentally belong.
This spelling is conservative and etymological in origin, because the radical letter and sound are actually the ‘older’ one, prior to the development of the mutations. For example, it was in an original /s/ sound that the initial /h/ sound of shúil originated, centuries ago. But being conservative and etymological doesn’t necessarily mean being useless. It may well help readers and writers of Irish (I won’t speak definitively for them all) to keep the radical letter across the mutations.
With Manx, the cord is cut. Its English-inspired commitment to spelling different sounds differently separates conjoined words thoroughly – perhaps even to the point of confusion for learners of Manx, if not also its fluent readers and writers. I have no doubt that the latter group manage just fine, but I think the case still stands that a helpful piece of visual information is present in Irish, but absent from Manx.
Accurately matching sequences of letters to sequences of sounds is a good thing. Including silent letters that associate forms of the same word is also a good thing. Updating spelling to match modern sounds can offer benefits. So too can preserving archaic spelling that unites later divergent sounds. Any reform, whether it be partial or wholesale, gives and takes. This is before its phonetic updates in time become outdated themselves (as has indeed happened in the case of Manx).
Yet reform we must; otherwise the archaisms will build up into total unintelligibility. It approaches the level of a paradox to realise that spelling cannot stand still, but rather must always risk losing good things and getting worse through necessary improvements.
The consideration of Manx – in particular its individual history and the comparison of its innovative-ish orthography with that of Irish and Scots Gaelic – adds to my disbelief in perfect spelling. It provides a case study for examining the larger forces and tensions at work behind writing and orthography.
The incessant shifting of speech does not necessarily lend itself towards either innovation or conversation in spelling. Counterintuitive and counterproductive as it may seem, it will in some instances be the wiser course to keep joined together what speech has put asunder.
END.
Non-linked references:
- Broderick, G. (2009). Manx. In Ball, M. J., & Müller, N. (Eds.) The Celtic languages. Second edition. Routledge. 319–370.
- foclóir.ie
- Lewin, C. (2020a) ‘An Abominable System’? Manx Orthography in Its Historical Context. Presentation: Sabhal Mòr Ostaig research seminar, 25 November 2020.
- Lewin, C. (2020b). ‘An English Monstrosity’? Evolution and Reception of Manx Orthography. Studia Celtica Posnaniensia 5. 36–59.
- McNulty, E. (2023). Manx speakers, language, and identity. Studia Celtica Posnaniensia 8. 1–24.
- Thomson, R. L. (1984). Manx. In Trudgill, P. (Ed.) Language in the British Isles. Cambridge University Press. 306–17.
- Thomson, R. L. (1992). The Manx language. In MacAulay, D. (Ed.) The Celtic Languages. Cambridge University Press. 100–136.
Images my own or from Wikimedia.
Danny L. Bate 
Danny,This artic
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