This chapter provides an overview of the early history of the Celtic languages. The first part offers a tour of Britain and Ireland, pausing at key points, both historical and geographical, from which we may consider the development of the Celtic languages. The second part of the chapter then goes on to examine a number of features of the Celtic languages in greater detail: the stress accent, lenition and mutations, the loss of final syllables, and the verbal system.

This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

Languages often present cases in which two rules together express content some of which cannot be attributed to either rule individually. The inflection of regular verbs in Breton presents several examples of this sort; holistic rule combinations are a way of modeling this phenomenon. Some instances of holistic combination have an emergent character; these are cases in which all of the forms realized by the composite of two rules happen to possess a property P that neither rule realizes on its own. In such cases, the composite is open to reanalysis as a holistic combination realizing P. Limbu verb morphology provides an example of this sort. A particularly compelling case for the postulation of holistic combinations arises in systems in which the same two rules express different holistic content in different contexts; Old English verb inflection is a system of this sort.

This chapter provides an overview of the main distinguishing features of the Celtic branch of Indo-European. It furthermore discussses the internal relationship between the branches of Celtic, specifically the position of Brittonic. The main arguments in favour of Gallo-Brittonic and Insular Celtic are evaluated.

This chapter provides an overview of how to use focus groups in order to elicit language attitudes. Focus groups allow access to the collective discourse practices of a specified group of participants and can be used as a way of eliciting more natural and spontaneous responses. However, participants may feed off each other’s ideas rather than express their own original thoughts, and certain minority opinions may be downplayed, repressed, or withheld by the participants. Nevertheless, this method can be viewed as an attempt to analyse salient social representations in a communicative conversational situation and can yield otherwise unrevealed strands of research participants’ narratives. After an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of using focus groups to investigate language attitudes, this chapter offers an overview of key practical issues of planning and research design. The analysis of the data resulting from focus group discussions is explored, particularly from a critical sociolinguistic perspective, involving mapping/categorisation of the data, tracing the circulation of people and resources over space and time, finding meaningful connections, and making valid claims. The chapter concludes with a case study of attitudes towards Breton and Yiddish in a variety of settings.

In this chapter I offer a reorientation of Thomas Adès’s relationship to surrealism by positioning his music in the context of automatism, wherein surrealism's famed incongruities become legitimate, logical manifestations of our unconscious. This perspective allows us to incorporate works that have not often been understood as surreal, like the Mazurkas studied here. Second, automatisms link Adèsian surrealism to the compositional logic that theorists have uncovered in the past twenty years. And finally, Adès’s automatism suggests a way of composing genuinely surreal music. André Breton, surrealism's founder, thought music was ‘confusing’, and much literature on Adès’s music has established such a connection only by suggesting the music's surreal qualities are found in its painterly traits. I, on the other hand, suggest that through automatism we are able to imagine those marvellous sounds that emerge from logical processes of structured time as themselves fundamentally surreal.

This chapter focuses on New Speakers of minority languages and their alignment with traditionalist and modernist ideals of standardization, authority and legitimacy. First, the relevance of the New Speaker paradigm for minority languages is outlined and associated standardization processes are analysed, particularly in the cases of Breton and Irish. It is argued that while standardization initiatives in both languages were carried out with a view to modernization, the processes nonetheless took place within value-laden, traditionalist contexts. The subsequent discussion focuses on the manner in which the language practices of New Speakers of Breton and Irish have come to be associated with the standard written varieties of the languages and perceived, at times, as oralizations of written standards. This association is a fundamental feature of the language ideological landscapes of Breton and Irish and is at the heart of debates pertaining to target language varieties. In order to illustrate these tensions, the chapter shows how New Speakers of Breton and Irish can align their linguistic practices with traditionalist and modernist discourses by identifying either with a conservative dialect of either language or by not focusing on any particular established target variety in their practices or ideologies.

Performance and poetry, song composition and music, and other cultural activities are popular as strategic ways to revitalize minoritized languages. Language activists may both reclaim forsaken linguistic art forms, like traditional storytelling, song and oratory performances, and also experiment with new forms of artistic expression. When music, literary traditions and film are employed in innovative ways by language and cultural promoters, language is embodied and becomes present, not just in everyday life but in larger public spaces – e.g. in plays, performances and festivals, on TV and online. The chapter discusses examples, principles and guidelines, and challenges involved in working with arts, music and other cultural activities. The capsules give examples of language transmission through the arts: the fest-noz night festivals in Breton have become a significant revitalization tool; modern music genres are prominent in grassroots efforts in Latin America; and the Jersey Song Project facilitates collaborative songwriting between local musicians and Jèrriais speakers. Wymysiöeryś, Ainu and Mexican examples are also given.

This chapter describes some prevalent ideologies and attitudes found in minority language communities. It emphasizes the importance of listening to attitudes expressed in a community, and identifying the underlying ideologies, before developing programs to improve negative attitudes. Particularly in cases of linguistic discrimination and language trauma (e.g. Breton, Kashubian Polish), changing language ideologies is a long-term process and must be handled sensitively. The best approach is to make people aware of ideologies and how they function, through education, media and other means. Case studies address ideologies leading to the loss of Zadar Arbanasi in Croatia, and a positive shift in attitudes to Guernesiais, although these are not necessarily followed by action. In the Isle of Man, in order to change perceptions of Manx it is necessary to avoid arguments about the authenticity of the modern form of the language. In Jeju (Korea) Jejudommal is seen as a language in which emotions can be expressed more richly than in Standard Korean. Negative attitudes and ideologies associated with speaking Nahuatl are described.