Britain's accidental massive week for language rights
And why you need to channel your inner Italian more
It’s been a bumper time for language rights in Britain - something I rarely get a chance to say - so I had to write to you to let you know what has happened with Scottish, Gaelic and Cornish this month. But I’ve also got some other exciting developments for you in the world of language rights, research and resources, which includes The Glottal Stop’s very first sponsored message (which helps me make this free newsletter sustainable - wahoo!).
So, let’s get stuck in…
Scots and Gaelic are official! It only took…hundreds of years!
The Scottish Languages Act 2025 is now in force, granting Gaelic and Scots formal “official language” status in Scotland. For Gaelic, a Celtic language, this boosts the support the language was granted in another act in 2005 which technically made it official with English, though without granting Gaelic-speaking citizens the right to use their language across all public services. Gaelic now enjoys this uplift - and Scots, a sister language of English and therefore of West Germanic heritage, gets to revel in officialdom for the very first time.
The Act requires Scottish ministers to produce language strategies for both languages and it promotes Gaelic- and Scots-medium education. Local authorities can also now designate “areas of linguistic significance.” £35.7 million has been earmarked for expanding the use of both languages, which have experienced catastrophic declines in speaker numbers due to the word you’ll hear me bang on about next year when my book is out: linguicide. Today, there are around 70,000 confident speakers of Gaelic and 1.5m speakers of Scots, according to the 2022 census, with many more having some level of skill in the languages. There would be many more, had there not been multi-century efforts to delegitimise and devalue the speaking of these languages in Scotland.
I know that some in my comments section this week have suggested that even this law may be more symbolic than effective - but I am sure it is a welcome step forward to the language activists who’ve spent years fighting for language recognition.
And when it comes to Celtic languages - don’t forget Cornish
Poor old Cornish which, a few decades ago, was decidedly extinct. But revivalists have worked so hard that their enthusiasm and development of Cornish learning opportunities meant that UNESCO changed their status from extinct to “critically endangered” in 2010.
In more recent news, Cornish’s status has changed again - but this time under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It now gets to claim “Part III”, joining the same position Welsh, Irish and Gaelic have. When it was Part II, the obligations of the UK state were limited in terms of protecting Cornish, or Kernewek as its speakers call it. Under Part III, the UK is compelled to implement measures that will promote Cornish in public life in Cornwall, such as in education, government services and the media.
The UK has signed and ratified the Charter, so here’s hoping Cornish speakers can now access more opportunities to keep this language alive. Countries that haven’t ratified the Charter include Italy and France - countries with extensive histories of linguicide - so, if you’re feeling depressed about the UK right now, at least find solace in the small glimmer of light that our country has promised at what is practically the highest level possible to protect our regional languages.
About today’s sponsor, and their very cool new project: Mozilla Data Collective
Who should profit from an endangered language’s data: a random tech bro… or the community who actually speak the language? If you care about transparency, data rights and languages - this one is for you.
A big problem that’s been happening in the AI space is that companies have been scraping the internet for data on different languages. There is bad data out there, as well as good, but what there usually isn’t is payment. Many companies are not licensing how the language has been used and, if they use that information to turn a profit, the speakers who originally produced that information receive nothing.
But we can stop that happening if we get louder about ethical alternatives that can support data holders, especially those who speak minority languages.
Mozilla have launched Mozilla Data Collective, which lets you license your data and get paid for it if you want payment - you get 100% of the fee.
Already there are resources like a parallel corpus between French and Ewondo in Cameroon, magazines in Saraiki, a language in Pakistan, and even testimonial recordings from Armenian refugees and immigrants.
There are no excuses now if you’re a company developing tech, and you’re intending on reaching audiences who speak the world’s minority languages. There is now a wild amount of data on Mozilla between this project and their broader Common Voice initiative and the more people who know about it, hopefully the more can upload data that they’re happy to share.
Mozilla sponsored today’s edition of The Glottal Stop. Thank you!!!
Prettier words are easier to remember
An experiment with “pseudowords” - words that researchers made up like clisious, smanious, drikious - suggested that people were most likely to remember the words they considered the most beautiful.
But what was really interesting about this study led by Theresa Matzinger at the University of Vienna was that the participants’ personal favourite words weren’t necessarily the ones that the researchers had predicted would be the most pleasant - suggesting we all have individual concepts of what makes a word sound nice.
A gap remains: did the participants find beautiful word forms easier to remember - or were the word forms beautiful because they were easy to remember?
You’ll be more persuasive if you talk with your hands
Italians rejoice as a researcher discovers that “illustrator” hand gestures appear to lead to more likes on Ted Talks videos.
Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo’s team used AI to analyze 200,000 video segments from more than 2,000 TED Talks, automatically detecting “illustrator” gestures: movements that visually map onto content, such as spreading hands to show distance or tracing an up-and-down curve to show volatility.
Talks with more illustrative gestures received more positive audience responses, measured in tens of millions of online likes. These results were mirrored in experiments where people had to rate entrepreneurs pitching to them, with and without these hand gestures.
Speakers who gestured illustratively were judged as more competent, understandable and persuasive, probably because their messages felt easier to process - an effect known as processing fluency. No such luck for the fidgeters, or non-illustrative hand gesturers, whose maneuvers distracted from the point they were making.
Britain’s most mispronounced words of 2025 revealed
Last one from me this week before I write up an interview I did before my honeymoon - I really hope you’ll like it, as it comes from one of my favourite rising linguistics content creators. By the way, I’d love to do more interviews in The Glottal Stop in 2026 - who do you think I should chat to?
Anyway, the Louvre? Michelle Agyemang? Havaianas? If you can pronounce all those names correctly then you’re doing a lot better than many of your British counterparts. Who knew that Babbel and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters (how is that a thing?) publish an annual list of the most common mispronounced words in the UK.
Compare your attempts with Babbel’s pronunciation guide, and let me know what you scored out of 10.
Michelle Agyemang
Denzel Washington
Storm Éowyn
Glyndŵr National Park
Havaianas
Can’t Get Knafeh of It
Louvre
Mounjaro
Rayquaza
Alexander Skarsgård
Fantastic roundup of language policy wins! The processing fluency angle on illustrator gestures is super interesting tho. It basically means the gesture isn't just decoration but actualy reduces cognitive load for listeners, which explains why TED speakers who map their hands to concepts get better engagement. Wonder if this efect scales differently across cultures with varying gesture norms.