What does it mean to speak “good Manx”? Insights from ideologies and attitudes around Manx morphosyntax

Abstract This paper discusses Manx as it is spoken in the twenty-first century. Like many minoritized languages, Manx underwent linguistic obsolescence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently, Manx has undergone revitalization, which has increased speaker numbers. The revitalized Manx speaker community is here analysed as new speakers, who acquired the language through means other than transmission in the home. New speakers of minority languages often differ from other speaker profiles in various ways, including the beliefs they hold about language. This paper aims to explore such beliefs in the context of Revitalized Manx. To do so, I will present both qualitative and quantitative data from new speakers of Revitalized Manx, collected by means of sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic observation. The paper addresses the following research questions: 1) How do Manx new speakers understand “good language use” in Manx? 2) What language ideologies underlie the judgements speakers make about their own and others’ language practices. This paper will shed light on the beliefs around “good language use” present in the current Manx revival community. It will also explore the relationship between these beliefs and linguistic structure in Manx, namely the valuing of varying morphosyntactic constructions in a revitalized language community.