Blog Post VI: From Conceptualization to Fruition

The main topic of my thesis has remained the same, but throughout the past few weeks, I’ve gained more clarity on how to approach my research project. At the beginning, I knew I wanted to focus on endangered languages in the United Kingdom and Ireland for the case studies of the main body of my thesis. Therefore, I wasn’t quite sure what case studies or examples to discuss in my literature review without being redundant. I decided to just do some general research on language preservation and revitalization as a general subject/area of study. Ultimately, this ended up being a successful strategy because I found some great core readings on the subject which helped shape my lit review. A couple of my sources were written by linguist Leanne Hinton, who mentioned a few workshops here in the U.S. involving Native American tribes and museum institutions, which I discuss in Blog Post V. I had heard of these before in my own personal research during the past year, so I thought it would be great to discuss them as examples of current museums efforts in the U.S. which will set up a nice segway into a discussion comparing and contrasting them to my case studies in the U.K. Furthermore, I’ve been inspired by one of my linguistics classes, Evolving English Language, to include a section about the spread of English and how it affects other languages. Overall, not overthinking or narrowing my initial research and keeping my mind open have really helped my process.

I can see my thesis evolving quite a bit as I uncover how much information there is about Celtic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh). If there ends up being a lot of information to work with (concerning policy, community programs, museum efforts) I may end up just focusing on one of the languages and delving in deep. If there is not a significant amount of information, I will have to figure out how to best survey language preservation and revitalization efforts. However it ends up, I’m excited to see how cultural institutions can help and hopefully present some novel ideas and methods to both fields (museums/linguistics).

This is a diagram I found after searching in Google "Celtic Languages." The map, from the Brilliant Maps site, is helpful to situate oneself as to where the languages in my case studies are mainly located. It also includes some statistics, although they are not cited.