The geology of railway embankments: Celticity, Liberalism, the Oxford Welsh reforms, and the word order(s) of Welsh

Abstract

Language reform movements of nineteenth century Wales derived from philological traditions that combined apparently contradictory professional commitments to language reform which were, at the same time, grounded in a model of language that held that language change was fundamentally asocial and natural. The Oxford Welsh movement used linguistic facts about ‘Celtic’ (VSO) and ‘Non-Celtic’ (SVO) word orders to construct genealogies of authentic Celticity in both political and linguistic fields to naturalize their linguistic reforms and broader political projects and authorize them against the equally naturalizing laissez-faire principles of nineteenth century Liberalism and print culture.