Ned Maddrell

Following the death of Mrs. Sage Kinvig (c. 1870–1962), he was the only remaining person who could claim to have spoken Manx Gaelic from childhood (according to one source, he had some knowledge of English before he learned Manx, and learned Manx from his great-aunt¹), although some others at the time also spoke it as a second language, having learned it later in life.

Maddrell recorded some of his speech for the sake of linguistic preservation; for example, in 1948 he recorded the following about fishing (in Manx, with the English translation):

Dooyrt "Ballooilley" rish:
::"Ballooilley" said to him:"Vel ny partanyn snaue, Joe?"
::"Are the crabs crawling, Joe?""Cha nel monney, cha nel monney," dooyrt Joe. "T'ad feer ghoan."
::"Not much, not much," said Joe. "They're very scarce."²

Ned Maddrell, who went to sea at 13, found he was able to keep his Manx "alive" by talking to Gaelic-speaking sailors on British ships. He was brought up in the remote village of Cregneash, where "unless you had the Manx you were a deaf and dumb man and no good to anybody."

This was not the case in the towns. "Nobody there wanted to talk Manx, even those who had it well. They were ashamed, like. It will never earn a penny for you," they said. Ned is a sprightly old man, a trifle deaf but very proud of his role as one of the last native speakers. "They have tape recordings of me telling legends and stories in Manx," he said "in Ireland and in America and in places you never heard of."³

Objections to Ned as last native speaker

The first objection to this claim is that a number of small children speak Manx as a first language right now, as they have been raised in the language. The counterargument to this is that they speak "Neo-Manx" and are "native speakers" in the sense that young Israelis are new "native speakers" of neo-Hebrew rather than Classical Hebrew.

The second objection to the claim is that many Manx native speakers often did not openly announce themselves due to some social stigma attached to the language, and/or emigrated. For example, an unverified story claims that a native speaker died in Chicago in the 1980s, the best part of ten years after Ned.

The third objection is quite different, claiming that Ned was not a true native speaker at all, but had acquired it as a very young child from his great-aunt rather than his parents. However, Ned was fluent in Manx from a very early age, which would have made him a near-native speaker.

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