Manx Language in the Ohio Settlements
- Item sets
- Diaspora
- Name
- Manx Language in the Ohio Settlements
- Description
- The language lived longer in Ohio than it would live on Mann. In the 1830s and 1840s, Manx was still a living tongue in Ohio — spoken in homes, in chapel, in the fields where they cleared the American forest. Pastor Cannell, the seventy-two-year-old Wesleyan who had crossed on the Ocean, held services in Manx in his own log house. No Governor could withdraw it. No bishop could declare it unnecessary. No school board could replace it with English, because there were no schools in the Ohio settlements that the Manx had not built themselves. The language died in Ohio too, eventually. Margaret Murray remembered the same pattern as on the island: the old folks would talk Manx when they did not want the children to understand. But for a time, the institutional supports that had sustained Manx on the island and been removed by the Revestment were unnecessary in Ohio — the Manx people had each other.
- Date
- 1827–c.1900
- Period
- Emigration and Diaspora
- Type
- Language & Identity
- Source
- Kinvig; Borrow, Wild Wales (1862); manuscript research
- Book Chapter
- Chapter 17 — What They Carried