Rationalisation versus revitalisation: neoliberal capitalism and language revival in the Isle of Man

1 Introduction

Within language revitalisation circles, the revival of Manx, a Celtic language, is often cited as a notable success story offering hope to many beleaguered small language communities around the world (e.g., Farfán and Olko 2021: 90). Having undergone what Ó hIfearnáin (2015) has termed “extreme language shift”, the number of Manx speakers has since begun to grow, showing what can be achieved even in very trying circumstances.

The Isle of Man – sometimes known as “Mann” – is located mid-way between Ireland and England and was overwhelmingly Manx-speaking at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the linguistic make-up of the island had changed enormously. In the 1901 census, Manx was reported to be spoken by just 8.1 % of the population – some 4,419 people (Gawne 2002: 174). This sharp decline was the result of a number of intersecting factors which will be familiar to people aware of the history of language loss in other communities around the world, including economic, political and sociological trends and a colonial dynamic related to the island’s status as a “Crown Dependency” of the British state (Lewin 2024; McNulty 2023a: 2).

As is well known in language revitalisation contexts, despite the death in 1974 of the last native speaker, fisherman Ned Maddrell, Manx has been the object of a remarkable revival in recent decades. These efforts have been driven by “new speakers” who learned the language as adults, including in some instances from Maddrell and other native speakers before their passing (McNulty 2023b). Census data from 2021 show that 2,223 people – i.e., 2.64 % of the 84,069 inhabitants of the island – have some ability in the language (Statistics Isle of Man 2022: 28). With census data being a notoriously blunt instrument for measuring speaker numbers (Ó hIfearnáin 2022: 111–112), however, a perhaps more useful figure is that given a decade ago, when Ó hIfearnáin reported that the language was spoken to a high level of fluency by approximately one hundred people, a number which had grown in the recently preceding years (Ó hIfearnáin 2015: 54). In one of the most notable steps in the revitalisation effort, a Manx-medium primary school, the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh, was established in the island in 2001 – a development with few parallels internationally amongst languages with such small numbers of speakers, and one which has been successful in creating many cohorts of young speakers over more than two decades. Compared to the situation at the time of Ned Maddrell’s death, when a handful of new speaker activists began revitalisation in earnest, these metrics clearly demonstrate the successes that have been achieved by the Manx-speaking community.

While this impressive case of revitalisation periodically gets much-deserved attention in the mainstream media (e.g., New York Times 2022), outside of those relatively small circles of people interested in minoritised languages, the Isle of Man is more often thought of – typically in less glowing terms – in reference to its status as a tax haven for international capital (e.g., BBC 2020). Indeed, since the decline of mass tourism in the island in the 1960s and 70s, banking and financial services centred on the island’s low tax regime have been key to its positioning in the global economic order. Despite this being one of the more widely known facts about the Isle of Man (especially since the massive “Panama Papers” leak of 2016 exposed the key role played by the island in facilitating the world’s richest people avoiding tax), little attention has been given to the implications of this neoliberal economic model for the language revival taking place in the island. Considering that it is commonly stated in language revitalisation literature that economic forces are a – if not the – key factor in determining the vitality of a language and the fate of revitalisation efforts (e.g., Grenoble and Whaley 1998: 52; Ó Ceallaigh 2023: 3), this deficit is somewhat surprising. This article takes some steps towards addressing this topic.

In order to do so, I look at a number of key areas in which the implications of the Isle of Man’s economic policies have particular relevance for Manx revitalisation. First, I discuss the postmaterialist nature of language revitalisation in general (i.e., that it is a cause most likely to flourish in conditions of relatively high economic/material security and equality – which is not what neoliberal capitalism tends to create). I then explore some of the challenges relating to education and the teaching of Manx to both children and adults – a topic of key importance in a post-language shift context. Finally, I examine funding for Manx-language revitalisation and some of the various challenges regarding this in an era of austerity. While, as will be seen, there are numerous overlaps between these topics, I have endeavoured to discuss them as discretely as possible for the sake of clarity. To conclude, I make some further brief observations about the Isle of Man’s important role as a tax haven which exacerbates inequality enormously at a time of increasing global instability and ecological crisis, and the damaging implications of this for linguistic minorities worldwide.

2 Global neoliberalism and the Isle of Man’s tax haven status

Originally coming to prominence in the mid-1970s, neoliberalism – the present phase of capitalism – has been characterised by a profound shift in the way in which capitalist states make public policy. This change came about in response to the sluggish growth combined with inflation which was gripping the capitalist world at this time. This “stagflation” crisis was the first international crisis of the Keynesian economic model which had been dominant in most of the Global North for some 30 years post-WWII. While Keynesianism had been associated with relatively strong downwardly redistributionist economic policies – themselves the product of decades of union agitation – neoliberalism has seen the steady undoing of this legacy of class compromise. In order to address stagflation – and subdue an increasingly militant working class – a retrenchment of public spending in all manner of domains was embarked upon across the capitalist world in the 1970s (Gamble 2009: 6; Harvey 2005: 19) and has continued apace since then. Paragons of mid-20th century welfare state policy such as readily available social housing, free third-level education, socialised healthcare or well-funded public transport have been dismantled or weakened, and the unions that had been so key to their development suppressed (Gallas 2016; Harvey 2005). While the concept of austerity only came to public attention after the 2008 financial crisis, scholars such as Pierson (2002) had long since claimed that neoliberal states entered a period of “permanent austerity” in the 1970s, with expenditure on public goods in many polities falling over the following decades. Commenting on neoliberalism’s need to defang organised labour in order to implement such unpopular policies without resistance, Reed has characterised this economic model as “capitalism without a working-class opposition” (2014: 65; see also Bourdieu 1998).

According to economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who were central to theorising neoliberalism and, as such, key figures in creating the world we live in today, attempts at regulating the market were responsible for the totalitarianism of both Nazi Germany and the USSR. Hayek claimed that the redistribution of resources via welfare programmes and social planning was “the road to serfdom” (2006 [1944]), which must be avoided at all costs. Nonetheless, and contrary to commonplace, simplistic understandings of neoliberalism, they did not argue for a complete withdrawal of state intervention in the market (Mirowski 2013: 40). Instead, they claimed that state intercessions should only take place in favour of capital – doing things such as bailing out banks, privatising public utilities, breaking strikes, creating favourable tax regimes, etc. Through such action, it is contended, private enterprises will be more successful, which will lead to the greatest possible aggregate benefit, as wealth “trickles down” from the top of the class structure to the bottom.

The neoliberal triad of deregulation, privatisation and globalisation has been fundamental to creating the role filled by tax havens like the Isle of Man. Such “offshore financial centres”, as they are often called, are crucial to the way neoliberalism works. Being locations where enormous amounts of the world’s wealth is hidden by the super-rich, they were also fundamental to the great economic crisis which began in 2008 (Palan et al. 2010: 236; Rixen 2013: 435). The island’s constitutional status as a Crown Dependency – allowed to make its own laws, but ultimately subservient to Britain – grants it the freedom to facilitate tax avoidance for financial centres such as the City of London. An authoritative U.S. publication, Tax Analysts, estimated conservatively in 2007 that, combined with Channel Islands Jersey and Guernsey (which are also key players in this so-called “shadow banking system”), the Isle of Man helps host about $1 trillion of potentially tax-evading assets (Shaxson 2012: 16).

Notwithstanding claims by theorists such as Hayek about neoliberalism merely being an efficient way to ensure a just distribution of resources, a vast body of research across the social sciences has documented how it has ultimately served to create enormous levels of inequality which, in turn, have egregious social consequences (e.g., Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Piketty 2014). It has significantly contributed to the creation of deeply precarious living conditions for huge sections of the world’s population and has led to a series of interconnected environmental catastrophes so severe that they present existential challenges regarding the very future of civilisation (Monbiot 2016; Saad-Filho and Johnston 2006). As Bourdieu (1998) famously summarised, “the essence of neoliberalism”, therefore, is a “utopia of endless exploitation”. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (e.g., Ó Ceallaigh 2023), and as will be further discussed in this article, neoliberal capitalism is also, in numerous fundamental ways, in tension with the needs of many of the world’s minoritised languages.

It is, of course, important to note that the neoliberalisation of our economies and societies has been an uneven and contested process. While various minoritised groups have won certain rights and concessions since the decline of the Keynesian era, these victories – partial as they often are – are emblematic of this unevenness and contestation and remind us of the way in which grassroots counterpower can operate to disrupt neoliberal trends. The rationalising of policy structures is an ongoing phenomenon, rather than something completed by early neoliberal politicians in the 1970s and 80s. Notably, however, the post-2008 period has seen the process of neoliberalising public policy intensified considerably (e.g., Allen 2012: 425). Indeed, Piller and Cho have described neoliberalism as operating as a “covert form of language policy” (2013: 23) in the post-2008 world, a contention that the arguments presented below align with.

At the state level, the free movement of capital that has been facilitated by the policies of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund has led to fierce competition to attract private investment, which under this economic paradigm is key for creating employment and prosperity. In peripheral areas disconnected from large metropolitan economies of scale and infrastructure, this tax competition dynamic is particularly prominent. It ensures that economies like that of the Isle of Man are forced into a race to the bottom with each other, vying to provide a policy arrangement which is maximally attractive to large investors who are currently free to move their wealth anywhere in the world (Rixen 2013). Indeed, the island is one of just eight polities in the world that scored a maximum 100/100 for its tax haven status in a recent report by the Tax Justice Network (2021) – alongside places such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, etc.

Significantly, such an economic paradigm also means that the capitalist class effectively has a veto on public policy, with the threat of divestment and capital strikes serving to limit the sort of policies governments tend to be able to implement (Block 2020 [1977]; Rixen 2013: 436). This dynamic is a key driver of neoliberalisation, making “competition states” (Kirby and Murphy 2011) such as the Isle of Man less inclined to undertake large-scale redistributive social policy endeavours for fear they would appear likely to pursue policy platforms disadvantageous to wealthy investors. Important for the purposes of this article, however, is the fact that successful language revitalisation almost definitionally requires redistributive socio-economic planning – the bête noire of neoliberal theory. While there are, of course, some schemes that can be implemented at little cost, as Ó Riagáin notes, for language revitalisation policies to be successful “they will require large resources on a scale which has not been hitherto realised” and will need to “affect all aspects of national life and will have to be sustained for decades, if not forever” (1997: 283).

Jurisdictional competition to facilitate the needs of large investors, then, has led to many islands like Mann resorting to becoming tax havens due to the relatively few other options for economic development available to them (Rixen 2013: 485). As such, promises of low tax and “light touch” regulation feature heavily in the marketing of the Isle of Man to potential investors (e.g., KPMG n.d.). While this has led to a certain degree of prosperity for some, it has also created a society with a stark wealth divide and with low investment in public services. Indeed, the private jets of some of the world’s richest people, which are regularly seen at the Isle of Man’s airport, stand in stark contrast to the cuts to public expenditure and high levels of material deprivation experienced by many of the island’s inhabitants, as discussed below.

3 Postmaterialism and the fate of Manx

In an important article about the revival efforts for Manx that blossomed from the 1970s onwards, Wilson (2011) argues that this trend was largely a product of the policy legacy of the post-WWII Keynesian class compromise mentioned above. In making his argument, Wilson, a political scientist, drew on literature about a concept called “postmaterialism”, which has been used to explain the remarkable emergence of many progressive social movements around the world in the 1960s and ’70s. As noted above, welfare state provisions were at their strongest ever circa 1945–1975, and this offered large sections of the population a high degree of material security (e.g., readily available affordable housing, well remunerated and secure employment, etc.). According to literature on postmaterialism, this security created a degree of freedom that allowed many people to focus on “postmaterial” issues such as racial equality, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights and feminism. A greatly increased level of mobilisation for the rights of linguistic minorities was also, of course, part of this trend – the so-called “Ethnic Revival” that is so often mentioned in language revitalisation literature and that had its own inflection in the Isle of Man, as Wilson explains.

The pioneer of postmaterialist research, Ronald Inglehart – the most cited political scientist of recent decades (Kim and Grofman 2019: 297) – summarises his argument in a co-written piece as follows:

Growing up taking survival for granted makes people more open to new ideas and more tolerant of outgroups. Insecurity has the opposite effect, stimulating an Authoritarian Reflex in which people close ranks behind strong leaders, with strong in-group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and rigid conformity to group norms. The 35 years of exceptional security experienced by developed democracies after WWII brought pervasive cultural changes, including the rise of Green parties and the spread of democracy. During the past 35 years, economic growth continued, but virtually all of the gains went to those at the top; the less-educated experienced declining existential security, fueling support for Populist Authoritarian phenomena. (Inglehart and Norris 2017: 443)

Commenting on the relevance of this for language revitalisation, Wilson observes that “the cultural imperatives that drive the process of revitalization are consistent with many of the general value characteristics associated with post-materialism; namely: belongingness; autonomy; self-expression; self-actualization; self-fulfillment; quality of life; and intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction” (2011: 67). As such, the reversal of the policies that were key to the development of the Ethnic Revival and the widespread precarity and material insecurity that characterise neoliberal societies are of clear relevance for any contemporary discussion of language revival, including, of course, in the Isle of Man.

I have elsewhere published material about Irish-speaking (“Gaeltacht”) communities that discusses this topic in detail, exploring how language revitalisation efforts are negatively impacted by the cost-of-living crisis that is ongoing at the time of writing, and the wider trend towards increasing inequality that it is part of, along with some possible solutions (Ó Ceallaigh 2024). While undertaking fieldwork in the Isle of Man in 2023, it was clear that many of the same dynamics were at play as in Gaeltacht areas. This was not least visible in the overwhelming sense amongst Manx speakers that the position of the language was far from secure, despite the attention it gets internationally: “T’eh er stagnateal” [it’s stagnated], as one young interviewee told me when discussing the state of the revival in recent years. Various informants spoke of their concern that activists and volunteers in the movement are few in number, and, seemingly, becoming fewer as time passes. This point was also made in a recent article by Phil Gawne, a prominent figure in the revival who commented extensively about activist numbers dwindling, and the great need for a new cohort of younger revivalists (Gawne 2021).

Relatedly, Wilson notes that “[m]any of the current generation of activists grew up after the Second World War. While their personal economic and social circumstances obviously differed, they experienced the general sense of economic security that prevailed in post-war Europe” (2011: 69). It is undoubtedly true that many central figures active in Manx revitalisation in recent decades had their formative years before neoliberal reforms had fully transformed society and when the horizon of possibility for young people was more expansive in many ways. By contrast to the sort of optimism that is presumably needed to drive commitment to revitalising the island’s language, when I talked to people in their twenties during my fieldwork, they universally expressed very negative sentiments about life there. Indeed, all three of the Manx speakers who were in their twenties that I interviewed told me they planned to leave the island. Several others I spoke to in passing had already left and were only back to visit family when I met them. While all three of my young adult interviewees had returned to the island having finished university in Britain (a return which I was repeatedly told was itself uncommon, with most graduates never going back to Mann for any extended period), difficulties regarding low pay, housing and transport costs meant that they all talked seriously about emigrating. As one of them put it: “It can be incredibly depressing being a young person trying to afford life in the Isle of Man because everything is geared to people who already have money … You don’t have money to do anything. A lot of my friends live with their parents because they can’t afford housing”.

Other research reinforces this sentiment, demonstrating the challenges facing those who are not counted amongst Mann’s population of “high wealth individuals” who live in the island for tax purposes. There are, however, some very notable deficits in the official data available for the island. As McCartney states, “[i]nequality is not measured on the Island. It will never be an equal place to live because for a small island, it is home to many extremely wealthy people” (2023: 1151). Similar to this refusal to collect data on inequality, the Isle of Man government does not gather adequate information to provide a comprehensive understanding of poverty in the island (Ewart 2019: 15), something the Tynwald Select Committee on Poverty has repeatedly called attention to (e.g., 2019: 2; 2021: 2).

Nonetheless, various available data points illustrate the precariousness of material security for many of the island’s inhabitants. Figures show, for instance, that between 2010 and 2020 there was a 29% increase in the number of students receiving free school meals (Tynwald 2020: 839) – a widely used proxy for economic disadvantage, and something surely since exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis (McCartney 2023: 1136). The Tynwald Select Committee on Poverty’s report for 2019–2020 stated that

Estimates based on the most commonly used measurement of poverty in the UK, 60% of median household income, suggest that 7,582 (21.2%) households in the Isle of Man earn less than 60% of the median household income. . . In the “Difficulty affording household expenses” section of the Isle of Man Social Attitudes Survey 2018, 32.5% of survey respondents had difficulty in affording three or more deprivation indicator items from the list. (Tynwald Select Committee on Poverty 2019: 6)

The annual Earnings Survey Report 2022 noted that “16.9% of employees in 2022 earned less than the Isle of Man Living Wage, up from an estimated 10.1% [in 2021]” – more than triple the 2017 rate of 5.6% (Statistics Isle of Man 2023: 2, 19).

The provision of other fundamental material needs such as healthcare and housing are also substandard in the island. In 2022 the BBC reported that “the emergency department had about 50% of the required staff over a given month” (BBC 2022), which a retired healthcare worker I interviewed corroborated, telling me, “we were chronically understaffed”, and that this had worsened considerably as a result of post-2008 austerity. Shockingly, McCartney reports that the island has “[o]ne of the highest [suicide] rates in the world”, and that “[i]n 2020 there were 22 suicides. . . which for a population of 85,000 is 25.8 per 100,000” (2023: 1141–1142).

As with many other neoliberalised states, the benefits safety net in the island is very weak. A recent report states that “benefits are not enough to live on, and often lack any policy basis”, and submissions from those in receipt of social welfare makes for very uncomfortable reading (Tynwald Select Committee on Poverty 2021: 1, 29, 83–94). Also in common with many other polities where housing is heavily commodified, the housing crisis is severe in Mann (McCartney 2023: 1152), meaning that securing the fundamental need of shelter is also an immense struggle for many, including several of those I interviewed. One interviewee, a diligent Manx speaker and activist with young children, commented as follows during our interview:

I was really lucky that I locked in my mortgage before Kwasi Kwarteng [the Conversative Party finance minister in Westminster in 2022] fucked the economy. I’d have had to sell my house. I mean that, I’d have had to sell the house if I’d waited another month . . . I’d have had to reapply with a rate twice what I’d just locked in. I’d actually have been homeless.

While lucky to have avoided such a fate, such sentiments illustrate the precarity many live with, which is far from conducive to higher levels of voluntarism, despite this being key to the Manx revival (Wilson et al. 2015: 175). As famed political scientist Robert Putnam states “[a]s my economic situation becomes more dire my focus narrows to personal and family survival”, with voluntarism of all types dropping for all income brackets due to financial anxiety (2000: 193).

This picture of financial hardship, perhaps shocking to those familiar with the Isle of Man’s reputation as a prosperous centre of financial services, is, unfortunately, characteristic of life in neoliberal societies for huge swathes of the population (Standing 2014), including those living in much of the rest of the Celtic periphery (Ó Ceallaigh 2024). As noted, these conditions are far from favourable for the sort of postmaterialist understanding of the world which drove much progressive social change in the past, at a time when people had a sense of security that allowed them to pursue causes likely to be of little or no financial benefit, such as the revival of Manx.

Although, of course, material security is not the sole causal factor behind language revival efforts, it should be emphasised that a robust body of literature in political science, while not generally acknowledged in the field of language revitalisation, demonstrates that such conditions are unlikely to see the emergence of greater numbers of activists for the Manx revival. Nonetheless, my emphasising of postmaterialism aims to highlight a general trend, rather than an iron law. Doing more than this could risk ignoring the impressive language revitalisation efforts embarked upon by some impoverished groups, despite them suffering from high levels of material deprivation. This includes, for instance, some native groups in countries such as the United States that are far worse off economically than broader US society, as well as various examples in the Global South. Commenting on the situation in the North of Ireland, I have elsewhere noted that connection to broader anti-colonial campaigns can be an important driver of such efforts in these exceptional cases (Ó Ceallaigh 2024).

Unfortunately, space constraints prevent further discussion of this phenomenon here. I must, however, note that this paper is not arguing that things were better in all ways for all people under the Keynesian economic model. Nonetheless, it is the case that young people in particular had a higher level of autonomy granted to them by pre-neoliberal redistributionist policies. Contrasting this are the disproportionate effects of neoliberalism on the young (who were central to much of the social progress of the Ethnic Revival period). Milburn comments on this in an impassioned piece which is worth quoting at length:

The high wages and State-backed social security of the [pre-neoliberal] era provided the material and psychic security that enabled young people’s exploration of freedom. As the era went on, the counterculture tried to spread the properties of “youth” across the whole of life. The neoliberal counter-revolution destroyed these experiments by reasserting the link between private property and adulthood. As home ownership was the central inducement, the restoration of the nuclear family followed in its wake.

Do young people still experience “youth” as a time of self-reinvention and freedom? The time and space available to them certainly seems diminished […] [S]tudent and youth debt brings forward the responsibilities of a supposed future adulthood which then colonizes the present. Astronomical property prices, low wages, student fees and the elimination of unemployment benefit have severely squeezed the traditional means through which young people gain time free from work. Young adults are trapped working long hours at badly paid jobs just to make enough money to pay the rent. That costs the average 18- to 36-year-old over a third of their post-tax income. In the 1960s and 1970s their grandparents spent just 5–10 per cent of income on housing. Indeed, the un-freedom of Generation Rent doesn’t just reveal the present circumstances of youth; it also provides a glimpse into a possible future model of adulthood. (Milburn 2019: 113–115)

A conversation I had with a young Manx speaker about his frustration at getting paid very poorly for an important role in the revival movement is brought to mind by this quote. While anonymity requirements limit the amount of detail I can give about his situation, this interviewee was very disgruntled at being overworked and underpaid, and despite wanting to do more for Manx was very unhappy and pessimistic about both his and the language’s prospects. “T’eh cho lag creeagh … Cha noddym tannaghtyn ayns Mannin, eer dy vel mee laccal sauail y Gaelg” [It’s so disheartening … I can’t stay in Mann, even though I want to save Manx], he dejectedly stated. Notably, he also mentioned the major challenges facing Manx-language educational efforts, something I discuss in the following section.

4 Education and Manx

In the context of a language such as Manx, which has undergone language shift to the degree that there are no traditional native speakers remaining, educational provision to allow people to acquire it is inevitably of crucial importance to any revitalisation effort. Over the last several decades, an impressive diversity of Manx-language education has been developed, with the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh (‘Manx-medium primary school’), which was founded in 2001, often being seen as the jewel in the revival’s crown. Preschool provision has also been offered for several decades, as have options for secondary level and adult learners (McArdle and Teare 2016). While the achievements of those involved in Manx-language education are tremendous, they have been hard won and face some notable challenges at the present which can be related to the overarching themes of this article, as the following sections describe.

5 Funding for Manx-language revitalisation in an era of austerity

As alluded to in Section 2, a major cause of the reduction in public expenditure under neoliberalism is the tax cuts for high income earners that are a key part of promoting business under supply-side economics. With higher earners being asked to pay proportionately less into the collective tax pool, the burden of funding society’s infrastructure comes to fall more heavily on those with lower incomes – ultimately meaning that states have less to spend on public services. This situation has, of course, been exacerbated due to intensified austerity since 2008, which is ongoing at the time of writing, with notable implications for organisations involved in Manx revitalisation.

During my fieldwork I attended a talk by an employee of government-funded body Manx National Heritage. This person is responsible for the organisation’s Manx-language plan. She spoke at length about the debilitating effects of austerity on the work that the organisation can do for the language:

What are our future plans and ambitions? Well, it really just depends on funding. We are being told every single year we’ve got less money and we have to do the same things [with] less money every year. We’re having to turn our attention to more commercial things, so obviously that makes you wonder about what you can do with Manx in a commercial sense. It’s not that we care any less about the other less kind of commercial aspects of our business, it’s just in order to keep the lights on we’re having to make some really tough decisions. We’re losing staff unfortunately which is really sad. So we’re having to do more on a smaller team. And we still have these ambitions, but resourcing them is really what makes them happen. Having the money and having the team is what makes them happen. We’re running a lot on good will, we’re asking volunteers to do a lot, we are doing a lot ourselves, working overtime in our spare time. And we love what we do, we care about what we do, but that good will can only carry you so far … The message that we are getting from senior management is just Treasury are not willing. I mean all government departments are having to make cuts. It’s not just us, it’s not that the government all of a sudden don’t care about their culture, it’s just all departments, their budgets are being slashed. And we’re no exception.

Although activists all too often misperceive cuts to language revitalisation funding as evidence of state hostility to the language (Ó Ceallaigh 2023: 184), as this quote makes clear, such measures are just one part of the much larger project of retrenchment which is hegemonic at this stage in the history of capitalism. One of my interviewees who worked for a non-language related public body for many years told me of similar measures in his workplace. He said that the “freedom to flourish” government motto for the island was cynically reworked by his colleagues as “freedom to submit a business case” and that “All you could do was submit a business case [to the Treasury to fund necessary expenditure] and it’d be turned down. And we were all in the same boat”. In the same way that Wright has described Irish as surviving in a “state-funded cocoon” (2016: 481), so too is Manx very heavily dependent on public subsidy, and as such this sort of public sector rationalisation intensifies the challenges faced by those hoping to see the revival effort thrive.

Notably, funding for Culture Vannin – an organisation which promotes a wide variety of cultural activities, not just Manx – has not been cut as severely as other bodies dependent on the public purse. This, however, is largely because much of their budget comes from the UK National Lottery (which is also played in Mann, despite it not being part of the UK), rather than the Manx exchequer. Nonetheless, Culture Vannin’s 2016–2017 annual report stated that “[p]robably the main challenge has been financial, particularly the declining and unpredictable annual lottery revenue”, which was also felt likely to be the main challenge for the following year (2017: 8, 5). Their 2021–2022 report noted that while the lottery subvention is crucial to them, an increase in state funding would benefit their work greatly (Culture Vannin 2022: 3). Although budgets for all manner of cultural endeavours are often provided by the lottery’s “good cause” fund, this innovation was pioneered by Margaret Thatcher, a central figure in the history of neoliberalism, “to reduce the public sector and radically expand the power of big business” (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2014: 100). Furthermore, “[p]olicy-makers inevitably must come to see lottery as a potential substitution for other (usually more progressive) forms of taxation” (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2014: 101). The franchise for the National Lottery is currently owned by a Czech billionaire, and the budget it provides – as noted in the annual report quote above – is unstable and likely to decline as the cost-of-living crisis sees lottery ticket sales fall (Financial Times 2024; also Culture Vannin 2021: 4). One interviewee noted the tensions around dependence on lottery funding, saying that “Chossyn [Mooinjer Veggey] argid voish lottery trust, ta shen feer scanshoil … Fegooish shen veagh shin ayns drogh stayd … agh ta shen moral dilemma” [Mooinjer Veggey got a lot of money from the lottery trust, that is very important … Without that we’d be in a bad way … but it’s a moral dilemma].

Tensions of this nature were visible at several times during my fieldwork, including during a presentation given by a Mooinjer Veggey director who talked about the need to look for alternative funding streams and help the government save money. When he received some pushback on this from an audience member he said, “I’m not pro it, but in the absence of anything else, in the absence of government giving us the hundreds of thousands of pounds that we need, we have to look at different models. We have to do that. Well, Mooinjer Veggey does anyway”. These discussions were reminiscent of an online gambling conglomerate providing sponsorship to keep two libraries in the island open in the face of cuts in 2012–2015 (3FM 2012) and very similar to developments I have seen in Irish-speaking areas. While potentially offering some short-term benefit, such decisions also, I believe, come with significant risks (Ó Ceallaigh 2023: 191–193). Needs must when the devil drives, however, and limited public funding clearly forces language activists to pursue avenues they might otherwise prefer to avoid and which, in line with the Thatcherite intention noted above, significantly increase the power and influence big businesses have over our societies.

While I have argued throughout this article that a less austere economic paradigm would be beneficial for Manx, this was not a universally held position amongst those I talked to. In one notable conversation I had with two informants – who live, it must be noted, a precarious economic existence, and embody some of the ideological positions that this often creates (Evans 2023) – they complained about Culture Vannin appearing to them to have enormous funding:

John: Is it half a million they get from the government each year?

Mary: It’s insane the amount of money they have, it’s not like they don’t have enough … I’m not going to have pity for them … There’s not a lot of extra money but Culture Vannin has money, it’s not like they don’t have anything. It’s not like they’re this massively underfunded tiny non-profit struggling, it’s not like that. So it doesn’t make sense to me … for people to be advocating for voluntary work or activism when there is enough money to throw a few quid at people.

At this stage in the conversation someone who was more informed about the realities of language revitalisation and who had been listening to our exchange interjected by saying: “You can’t revive a language on £100k a year, which is what they actually have. Culture Vannin has £400k a year, £100,000 I think goes for the language. Even if they were on meagre salaries, how many people can you employ with that?”, a point which these two interviewees seemed not to have previously considered. As Sallabank (2013: 156–157) explains, it is quite difficult to work out what the total expenditure in support for the language is, spread over various institutions as it is. Regardless, straitened economic circumstances clearly mean that some people, even when supportive of Manx, come to view those who are seen to benefit from what limited funding is available with a degree of suspicion, and feel that they should be doing more, even if this is unrealistic considering the actual resources available.

By contrast to the two informants for whom Culture Vannin’s budget seemed huge – surely more a reflection of their own economic position than the realities of the funding of public bodies – it must be stressed that many informants said increasing funding was crucial. One person told me that rather than depending on dwindling volunteer numbers, “a lot of the things we are doing are important and should be funded and would create jobs for Manx speakers and there’d be a point to Manx”. The lack of any significant economic benefit to speaking Manx was, notably, something the two interviewees who felt Culture Vannin had no right to complain about their budget also mentioned to me, and which could easily be addressed were more job opportunities created. Aligning with the sentiments of the Manx National Heritage employee quoted above, another interviewee when asked what was needed most for the language revival to progress unhesitatingly replied “Argid. T’eh ooiley mychione argid, ghoinney” [Money. It’s all about money, man] – something which seems hard to deny in light of the data I have presented throughout this article.

6 Conclusion: Manx, tax havens and the loss of linguistic diversity globally

The issues discussed throughout this article are Manx inflections of wider international trends in the way public policy is made, and which are characteristic of the global neoliberal order in which the Isle of Man, as one of the world’s main tax havens, plays a key role. Some of the challenges that this economic paradigm provides for the revival of the Manx language have been discussed above. Neoliberalism, while enriching a tiny percentage of the population enormously, places huge numbers of people in increasingly precarious positions, meaning that fundamental needs such as shelter, income, healthcare etc. are far from guaranteed, even in the Global North. This has profound implications for social attitudes, as is well established in political science literature on postmaterialism. The fact that material needs are not secure for many people in the Isle of Man is an important factor limiting the emergence of a cohort of people who are likely to commit their time to the Manx revival, as has been seen. Widespread precarity is, most unfortunately, very likely to increase as we enter a period of worsening ecological crisis and geopolitical instability. Notwithstanding a large degree of interest in language ideologies, postmaterialism is rarely discussed by sociologists of language or sociolinguists, even though the revitalisation of a minoritised language is an excellent example of a postmaterialist cause.

Although education is of great importance in most language revitalisation contexts, this too is far from untouched by the rationalisation of public spending that is so typical of neoliberal capitalism. There are many points of interaction between increased transport costs, a lack of well paid, secure employment opportunities, etc. and the likelihood that parents will be committed to their children learning Manx. Even for those young people who do acquire the language, unless housing, employment and so on are available to them in the island they are likely to be lost to the revival, as several of my interviewees lamented. The austere fiscal climate of the present moment also limits the work of institutions such as Manx National Heritage and Culture Vannin, which are crucially important for the revival of Manx. As with other languages which I have written about elsewhere (Ó Ceallaigh 2023), neoliberalism seems to clearly pose major challenges for the long-term sustainability of Manx-language revitalisation.

While I have focused in this article on the ways in which neoliberal hegemony impacts the revival of Manx and life in the island, it must also be remembered that by being such a major player in global capitalism, the economic policies of the Isle of Man have huge implications for the world beyond this small island’s shores. Tax havens are one of the main reasons that poor countries stay poor, with enormous quantities of wealth being funnelled from the Global South into these jurisdictions for the benefit of very few people (Shaxson 2012; Oxfam n.d.). It is, of course, well known that it is in the Global South that most of the world’s linguistic diversity is to be found – imperilled as it is – and also that poverty is a key driver of language shift worldwide (Harbert et al. 2009; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000: 26–49). Not only does the poverty thus caused prompt people to shift to dominant languages, but these policies also mean that funding for language revitalisation is not going to be forthcoming in anything like the quantity which is needed in most of the world, considering so many countries are impoverished through capital flight to tax havens like Mann.

The Manx case, then, is one more reminder of the need to understand language revitalisation “ecologically” (Spolsky 2004: 218), as part of an interconnected whole that encompasses not just society in general in the Isle of Man, but also the global networks in which we are all embedded. Great as the challenges facing those involved in reversing language shift are, thinking in ecological terms with an awareness of the macro-level economic forces which shape all our lives can only benefit Manx. So too can this way of viewing things support efforts to secure justice – linguistic, economic, and otherwise – on both the local and global scale.