Doug Fargher
Doug Fargher also known as Doolish y Karagher or Yn Breagagh, was a Manx language activist, author, and radio personality. He is best known for his English-Manx Dictionary, the first modern dictionary for the Manx language.
Early Years with the Manx Language
Douglas Fargher was one of the several active Manx speakers who learned the language from the diminishing number of elderly native speakers on the Isle of Man in the 1940s and 1950s. Along with Manx speakers Walter Clarke and Leslie Quirk, Fargher travelled around the Manx countryside on bicycles, visiting the native Manx speakers and learning the language from them.The following year after a visit by Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to the Isle of Man in 1947, the Irish Folklore Commission was tasked with recording the remaining native speakers as the Manx Museum did not have the facilities or funds to do so. This inspired the Fargher and his group of Manx speaking friends to make their own recordings themselves, despite technical and financial restraints: "we wanted to record the old people but we didn’t, we had neither the money nor the means of doing it". Eventually they were able to make these recordings, albeit often at significant financial expense to themselves; John Gell for example, loaned them the £8 to purchase the necessary equipment.
Manx had traditionally been a low prestige language and negative attitudes by much of the Island's population towards the Manx language still posed significant difficulty for learners and established speakers alike:
A deterrent at that time would have been the aggressive attitude of most other people: ‘What do you want to waste your time with that old nonsense for? That was never a real language!’ This was like some sort of fixed mantra.Despite these deterrents, Fargher implored his fellow Manxmen and new residents of the Isle of Man to join in his "crusade for maintaining and using the Manx language". Fargher organised Methodist church services through Manx to raise the profile of the language. For much of the 1950s he was also a regular contributor to the Manx language column Coraa ny Gael in Manx newspaper Mona's Herald. Fargher often under the pen name Yn Breagagh, a name which was taken from one of his grandfathers.
Return to Mann and Later Years
Fargher and his wife left for Zambia in 1956 and did not return to the Isle of Man for several years until 1963. When he returned, he committed himself to rebuilding the Manx language revival movement which has become nearly stagnant for much of this period, as noted by Fargher's friend and fellow Manx speaker and member of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh:According to Walter Clarke of the Manx Museum, a member of the society, there is very little enthusiasm for the language in Man to-day. “People think they can pick up Manx in six easy lessons,” he said. “when they find they can’t they lose interest.” Evening classes in the main towns were abandoned recently, and so was the society’s Manx journal Coraa Ghailckagh. An effort to get Manx taught in schools also failed.After a low point in the lowest numbers of Manx speakers in the 1961 census, the 1960s and 1970s saw a renewed interested in the Manx language across the Island. Fargher also helped to reinvigorate Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh when he was elected to the committee in 1972 by organising Oieghyn Gaelgagh and publishing new learner material. He also started broadcasting a weekly 'listen and learn' radio programme where he taught the lessons from John Gell's Conversational Manx to listeners. These initiatives helped to attract new young learners to the language movement. In 1966 Irish national broadcaster RTÉ's Cathal O'Shannon interviewed Fargher as part of their Newsbeat programme to document the resurgence in interest in Manx language activity acknowledging the difficulty in the task of reviving Manx:
We're trying to give our nation back its language; it may be a long uphill struggle, but we will definitely achieve this - perhaps not in my lifetime, but definitely in those following after.
On Sunday 11 October 1970 Fargher read the first ever news report in the Manx language on Manx Radio. He released Undin, the spoken dictionary as an audio resource to help learners to pronounce Manx correctly, on behalf of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh.
Fargher spent many years compiling his dictionary, and often looked to Ireland and the Irish language for inspiration for the creation of new words and idioms. Fargher described Ireland as being the Manx language movement's "spiritual and cultural motherland". The dictionary was published in 1979 and was directly compared with Irish lexicographer Tomás de Bhaldraithe's English-Irish Dictionary.
Although Fargher wrote the first modern dictionary for the Manx language, he was not the first Manxman to write one. Reverend John Kelly has attempted to do so in his A Triglot Dictionary of the Celtic Language, as spoken in Man, Scotland, and Ireland together with the English, but much of this was destroyed in a fire during publishing in 1807. Archibald Cregeen spent decades writing his A Dictionary of the Manks Language but would not have been of Kelly's dictionary as although it was partially extant in manuscript form, it would not be published until decades later in 1866.
Other interests
In 1962, along with fellow Manx speakers Lewis Crellin and Bernard Moffatt, Fargher was one of the first members of Mec Vannin, a small political party aimed at gaining full independence and establishing the Isle of Man as an independent sovereign state. He described the early 1960s as a period of "great reawakening of national consciousness" and he believed that the language should be the basis of this new nationalist movement. He believed that the Manx people had an "inferiority complex about their own nationality and their language" and noted that the greatest enthusiasts for Manx Independence were Manx speakers.Fargher was also interested in Manx songs and music. In 1979 he provided the Manx translations for Five Manx Folk Songs, similar to Mona Douglas' Five Manx Folk Dances.
After the death of fellow Manx speaker Bill Radcliffe in 1984, Fargher took over the role of Yn Lhaihder for Tynwald until his death. This is a centuries old tradition that required him to read out new laws that were to be enacted in the Manx language on Tynwald Hill.
Legacy
Fargher's tireless work inspired a new generation of Manx speakers. Brian Stowell was motivated to learn Manx when he read an article written by Fargher passionately defending the Manx language in late 1953. After attending lessons taught by Leslie Quirk, he was then introduced in person to Fargher, and in turn to other members of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh such as Walter Clarke and Bill Radcliffe. Brian Stowell would go on to be one of the most important figures in the modern Manx revival movement.After Fargher read the first news report in Manx on Manx Radio 1970, there are now weekly radio shows and podcasts in the language, and Manx greetings are used to begin and end every news report.
In the decades since the Fargher's dictionary was published, it has became a vital source for learners of Manx, and after his death: "His great dictionary servers as a practical memorial of this great Manx patriot." The dictionary and the neologisms that he created for it, have become a source of academic debate in and of itself.