Europe Mapped by Language

[Tez3]

Oy vay! how can I have forgotten Yiddish for cying out loud!!
There are well over 30,000 Yiddish speakers in the United Kingdom, and several thousand children now have Yiddish as a first language.spoken in america too as well as quite widely in Europe. Simply the best language for insults and descriptions!
Ladino a sort of southern Yiddish is still spoken in Eastern Gurope, Greece and Turkey

 

[jarrod]

I just had a thought which should have struck me earlier ( I have flu so am more woolly headed than usual lol).
Another place where Welsh is spoken is Argentina! there is a Welsh enclave there and to help them remain Welsh speakers the Welsh send teachers over! http://www.britishcouncil.org/argentina-education-edu_cooperation-welsh.htm

there's also a very interesting article on the state of welsh in argentina that you can find at http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/celtic/ekeltoi/volumes/vol1/1_2/index.html

jf

 

[jarrod]

Well done on 'having the Gaelic'! In Scotland it's prounounced 'Gallic' as opposed to 'Gaylick' elsewhere.
The Gaelic in Scotland has only ever been spoken in the Highlands and Islands areas which are in population decline.

did a little research on this since it didn't sound quite right to me. according to what i dug up, gaelic was spoken in the lowlands as well though it was largely displaced by the end of the middle ages. this is supported by the gaelic placenames in the lowlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RossScotLang1400.JPG) as well as the Book of Deer, a 10th century manuscript which contains old irish, scots gaelic, & latin. it was produced in aberdeenshire.

i only recently (& embarrassingly) learned that gaelic was pronounced 'gallic', & i'm still tripping up on it!

jf

 

[exile]

BTW, folks, if you're interested in another New World Welsh enclave, look no further than... Ohio!. The information is to be found here. I don't know if there's a surviving Welsh speakership here, but it's not out of the question!

 

[arnisador]

Don't worry--English will kill it off sooner or later.

 

[Tez3]

did a little research on this since it didn't sound quite right to me. according to what i dug up, gaelic was spoken in the lowlands as well though it was largely displaced by the end of the middle ages. this is supported by the gaelic placenames in the lowlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RossScotLang1400.JPG) as well as the Book of Deer, a 10th century manuscript which contains old irish, scots gaelic, & latin. it was produced in aberdeenshire.

i only recently (& embarrassingly) learned that gaelic was pronounced 'gallic', & i'm still tripping up on it!

jf

Bit beyond when I lived there lol! I went to school and uni in Aberdeen and being English it was hard to understand what was being said even after a few years.
Where I live now in North Yorkshire many of the placenames are Norse,as is some of the local dialect, a reminder of it's Viking past.

 

[CoryKS]

I've sort of suspected that there was a small patch near Wales where a language was spoken using only the vowels that the Welsh language seems to be missing. Guess not.

 

[exile]

Don't worry--English will kill it off sooner or later.

Prolly right.... sigh.

 

[Sukerkin]

Erioed! Anghydffurfiaeth yw hanfodal.

That grammar probably is terrible as it's two decades since I last used Welsh . I think I just said "Never! Noncomformity is key".

 

[Tez3]

I fear for English too. We are being taken over by the media types who say things in a riduculous fashion.
In the Olympics they were talking about countries and people who had medalled, I was thinking who's been meddling then only to realise they meant people who'd won medals.
They talk on the news about people dying from being shot dead and 'a man could be sentenced to prison without parole or death'. The language is being mangled, schools simply don't teach good English anymore and it's our loss.

 

[Sukerkin]

I quite agree. Perhaps it is just the way I was brought up and taught that is skewing my viewpoint but I know that I am swayed in no small part by how someone says something.

It's why I'm forever re-iterating in heated threads here that it is perfectly possible to vehemently disagree with somone and still have a productive discussion with them. The words you choose are very important - one of my old English teachers used to say that that they were the tools with which you built ideas and it was important to pick the right tool for the job.

 

[jarrod]

Bit beyond when I lived there lol! I went to school and uni in Aberdeen and being English it was hard to understand what was being said even after a few years.
Where I live now in North Yorkshire many of the placenames are Norse,as is some of the local dialect, a reminder of it's Viking past.

sorry, i'm kind of a history nerd. when someone says "never" i tend to take it literally!

jf

 

[Tez3]

sorry, i'm kind of a history nerd. when someone says "never" i tend to take it literally!

jf

10th century Scotland was a vastly different place than it is now, there were still the Picts around as well as the Scots plus Vikings in the Islands
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ac69

Mind though, that on a Saturday night in Glasgow it can still resemble the early days of Scottish history, rampaging Scots yelling incompreheively while fighting allcomers!!