New Speakers of Minority Languages

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxi

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2. New Speakers, Familiar Concepts?

   • Noel P. Ó Murchadha, Michael Hornsby, Cassie Smith-Christmas, Máiréad Moriarty

   Pages 1-22

3. New Gaelic Speakers, New Gaels? Ideologies and Ethnolinguistic Continuity in Contemporary Scotland

   • Stuart Dunmore

   Pages 23-44

4. ‘We’re Not Fully Welsh’: Hierarchies of Belonging and ‘New’ Speakers of Welsh

   • Charlotte Selleck

   Pages 45-65

5. ‘We Don’t Say It Like That’: Language Ownership and (De)Legitimising the New Speaker

   • Julia Sallabank, Yan Marquis

   Pages 67-90

6. Identities and New Speakers of Minority Languages: A Focus on Galician

   • Bernadette O’Rourke, Fernando Ramallo

   Pages 91-109

7. Double New Speakers? Language Ideologies of Immigrant Students in Galicia

   • Nicola Bermingham

   Pages 111-130

8. Land, Language and Migration: World War II Evacuees as New Speakers of Scottish Gaelic

   • Cassie Smith-Christmas

   Pages 131-149

9. The Ideological Construction of Boundaries Between Speakers, and Their Varieties

   • Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin

   Pages 151-164

10. New Basques and Code-Switching: Purist Tendencies, Social Pressures

    • Hanna Lantto

    Pages 165-187

11. New Speakers and Language in the Media: Audience Design in Breton and Irish Broadcast Media

    • Stefan Moal, Noel P. Ó Murchadha, John Walsh

    Pages 189-212

12. Linguistic Innovation Among Glasgow Gaelic New Speakers

    • Claire Nance

    Pages 213-230

13. Verbal Lenition Among Young Speakers of Breton: Acquisition and Maintenance

    • Holly J. Kennard

    Pages 231-252

14. New Speakers, Potential New Speakers, and Their Experiences and Abilities in Scottish Gaelic

    • Nicola Carty

    Pages 253-270

15. New Speakers and Linguistic Practices: Contexts, Definitions, and Issues

    • David Atkinson

    Pages 271-282

16. Reflections on New Speaker Research and Future Trajectories

    • Cassie Smith-Christmas, Noel P. Ó Murchadha

    Pages 283-288

17. Back Matter

    Pages 289-295

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This book represents the first collection specifically devoted to New Speaker Studies, focusing on language ideologies and practices of speakers in a variety of minority language communities. Over thirteen chapters, it uses the new speaker lens to investigate not only linguistic issues, such as language variation and change, phonetics, morphosyntax, language acquisition, code-switching, but also sociolinguistic issues, such as legitimacy, integration, and motivation in language learning and use. Besides covering a range of languages - Basque, Breton, Galician, Giernesiei, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh - and their different sociolinguistic situations, the chapters also encompass a series of interactional settings: institutional settings, media and the home domain, as well as different contexts for becoming a new speaker of a minority language, such as by migration or through education. This collection represents an output by a lively network of researchers: it will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics working in the field of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, language policy and those working within minority language communities.

• applied linguistics
• education
• language
• linguistics
• minority language
• New Speak
• sociolinguistics
• teaching

“The book is obviously written for researchers and graduate students, but the issues discussed throughout may also be of interest to a wider readership, particularly language activists and language teachers. … Overall, this book makes an important contribution to the literature. … Most of the issues treated in this collection will be familiar to scholars of language contact and shift, but the chapters provide a new perspective on many of them.” (Colin J. Flynn, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, December 26, 2019)

“It is the first book on new speakers that explores the practical implications of new speaker theory on populations, and incorporates quantitative studies into a largely qualitative field. … most of the more prevalent voices in new speaker theory are present in the book, this volume is sure to become key reading for all those with an interest in this emerging field, particularly in relation to minority languages.” (Deirdre A. Dunlevy, Language Policy, Vol. 18, 2019)
“This volume is a must-read for scholars of minority languages. Data and theoretically rich, the chapters explore the lived complexities of practice and identification associated with learning a minority language against the backdrop of diverse language ideologies. New Speakerness emerges as a site of boundary-making and/or contestation around which core questions of what “the language” is and who counts as being a speaker are negotiated.” (Alexandra Jaffe, Professor, Department of Linguistics, California State University, USA)

• University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

  Cassie Smith-Christmas, Máiréad Moriarty

• Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

  Noel P. Ó Murchadha

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

  Michael Hornsby

Cassie Smith-Christmas is a Research Fellow at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests involve the sociolinguistics of minority languages and she is the author of Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language in the Home (Palgrave, 2016).

Noel.P. Ó Murchadha is Assistant Professor in Language Education at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests lie in the sociolinguistics of minority languages, particularly perceptions of linguistic variation in ‘small’ languages.


Michael Hornsby is Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, and head of its Centre for Celtic Studies. He is the author of Revitalizing Minority Languages: New speakers of Breton, Yiddish and Lemko (Palgrave, 2015).



Máiréad Moriarty is a lecturer in Sociolinguistics and New Media at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests lie in multilingualism and the place for minority languages in domains of popular culture. She is the author of Globalising Language Policy: An Irish Language Perspective (Palgrave, 2015).

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