Edward "Ned" Maddrell (1877?–December 27, 1974) was a fisherman from the Isle of Man who was arguably the last surviving native speaker of the Manx language.

Following the death of Mrs. Sage Kinvig (c. 1870–1962), he was the only remaining person who could claim to have spoken Manx Gaelic from childhood (according to one source, he had some knowledge of English before he learned Manx, and learned Manx from his great-aunt¹), although some others at the time also spoke it as a second language, having learned it later in life.

Maddrell recorded some of his speech for the sake of linguistic preservation; for example, in 1948 he recorded the following about fishing (in Manx, with the English translation):

Dooyrt "Ballooilley" rish:

"Ballooilley" said to him:

"Vel ny partanyn snaue, Joe?"

"Are the crabs crawling, Joe?"

"Cha nel monney, cha nel monney," dooyrt Joe. "T'ad feer ghoan."

"Not much, not much," said Joe. "They're very scarce."²

A newspaper article about the decline of Manx from about 1959 (it gives Maddrell's age as 82) mentions and quotes him, since at the time he was, along with Kinvig, one of only two native speakers:

Ned Maddrell, who went to sea at 13, found he was able to keep his Manx "alive" by talking to Gaelic-speaking sailors on British ships. He was brought up in the remote village of Cregneash, where "unless you had the Manx you were a deaf and dumb man and no good to anybody."

This was not the case in the towns. "Nobody there wanted to talk Manx, even those who had it well. They were ashamed, like. It will never earn a penny for you," they said. Ned is a sprightly old man, a trifle deaf but very proud of his role as one of the last native speakers. "They have tape recordings of me telling legends and stories in Manx," he said "in Ireland and in America and in places you never heard of."³

In contrast to some other native speakers, Ned appears to have enjoyed his minor celebrity status, and was very willing to teach younger language revivalists such as the recently deceased Leslie Quirk, and the still active Brian Stowell. When the famous taoiseach Eamon de Valera visited the island he called upon Ned personally. De Valera had been angered some years before at the inaction of the British and Manx governments over the language, and had sent over sound recording vans to preserve what was left.

Objections to Ned as last native speaker

As with Dolly Pentreath, who was supposedly the last native speaker of Cornish, there appears to be some controversy as to whether Ned was actually the very last native speaker of Manx.

The first objection to this claim is that a number of small children speak Manx as a first language right now, as they have been raised in the language. The counterargument to this is that they speak "Neo-Manx" and are "native speakers" in the sense that young Israelis are new "native speakers" of neo-Hebrew rather than Classical Hebrew.

The second objection to the claim is that many Manx native speakers often did not openly announce themselves due to some social stigma attached to the language, and/or emigrated. For example, an unverified story claims that a native speaker died in Chicago in the 1980s, the best part of ten years after Ned.

The third objection is quite different, claiming that Ned was not a true native speaker at all, but had acquired it as a very young child from his great-aunt rather than his parents. However, Ned was fluent in Manx from a very early age, which would have made him a near-native speaker.

References

1. Language Decline and Language Revival in the Isle of Man: Ned Maddrell Memorial Lecture, November 28, 1996.
2. Manx Language Samples (with audio): "Are the Crabs Crawling?"
3. "Newspaper clipping from the 1950s", quoted in a Usenet post from September 2, 1993. (scroll down)