The Crisis of Gaelic in na h-Eileanan Siar / the Western Isles
First of all, while some media outlets pretended to be surprised, much of this has been long-predicted. The minority language expert Conchúr Ó Giollagáin writes: “As predicted in #GaelicCrisis analysis in 2020 (pg. 72), % of Gaelic speakers in #WesternIsles has fallen to 45% of pop. as in #census2022. One result of 4 years of not facing reality. #LanguageDeath in #Gaelic vernacular communities.” He offers an open access version of Aberdeen University Press’s ground-breaking “Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community” (of which he was co-author).
Conchúr Ó Giollagáin is one of a group of academics who are highly critical of the current gaelic policy, legislation and bodies. He writes of the current legislation: “The primary question we need to pose about this draft legislation, the Scottish Languages Bill (2023), is whether the legislation is relevant to the primary issue facing Gaelic speakers and learners, that of sustaining Scottish Gaelic as a lived and viable social and cultural identity in Scotland.”
He continues:
“The Bill, as it stands, is sufficient to promote Gaelic as a school language and as a secondary language with publicly sponsored civic visibility. It is insufficient, however, to protect Gaelic as a community language of native speakers, and against their social and cultural assimilation into English-speaking society. The Scottish Government must, therefore, determine if this is the outcome they desire.”
Their book, ‘Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community’ would seem to have been vindicated by the census results. In short, their argument is that gaelic is growing (marginally) in urban settings – but dying, and in a critical state in the Gàidhealtachd.
This analysis suggests that current legislation is failing badly, even terminally and attempts to suggest otherwise are wilfully ignorant or a form of denialism. This here, by the Minister for Gaelic would most certainly come under that definition:
“I do not like the word crisis, but I do like the word urgency.”@_KateForbes Deputy First Minister, Cabinet Secretary for Economy & Gaelic, responding to @ConchurOG‘s evidence, as we considered the Scottish Languages Bill yesterday.
Watch the meeting: https://t.co/kXr9cS2tqk pic.twitter.com/5JmsD07BKL
— Education, Children and Young People Committee (@SP_ECYP) May 23, 2024
Ealasaid MacDonald, from South Uist told the Education Children and Young People Committee that “There is an investment crisis in Gaelic that does not match the policy aspirations which have been set out for the language.” This argument: “we need much more money” is reinforced by the petition PE2098: ‘Provide essential investment in the Gaelic language to secure its future’, which argues:
Writers like Conchúr Ó Giollagáin suggest suspending the current gaelic language legislation as currently proposed. He argues: “This would allow for consideration of developing community mechanisms among Gaelic communities to build their collective capacity to address their actual challenges, as opposed to symbolic ones.”
“This community-focused approach would entail identifying structures to establish some local democratic control over the distribution of resources to give practical socio-economic assistance to promote and protect the use of Gaelic in families, in communities, in schools and in other civic institutions serving them.”
We asked a number of people from the Western Isles their thoughts.
Catriona Murray from Stornoway replied: “The crisis is multi-faceted and historical in origin. People talk about Gaelic having been beaten out of the Gaels, but it wasn’t, it was educated out of us. We were so successfully taught to despise our own language and culture that any Gaelic policy now is attempting to reverse decades of that negative psychology; not an easy ask. People of my generation (I’m 48) and the previous one tended to see Gaelic as old-fashioned and backward. Much of the criticism of Gaelic policy is, I feel, unfair. There HAS been growth, there has been a slowing of decline.”
“What we haven’t cracked, however, is how to shore Gaelic up in the islands, its traditional heartland. For me, it’s the same as conserving a species like the corncrake; that was done successfully through habitat management. Gaelic needs the same, which means stopping looking at Gaelic as ‘just’ a language. We have to look at the habitat, we have to integrate economic, language, land, education, health and social policy in the islands to foster a habitat where Gaelic can grow and thrive. There has to be multi-agency cooperation, and we need to focus on population retention. Why educate kids in GME only to lose them when they leave for education or work?” [We don’t educate kids in GME! – Ed]
“Let’s be ambitious about keeping them in the islands for tertiary education and for vocational training. We need to shift the emphasis from a low-hanging fruit tourist economy to something that provides for our population. There are unprecedented economic opportunities on the horizon for the islands with the realisation of several renewables infrastructure projects, and we need to see the community benefit channelled into a sustainable future for these islands. All of that will help foster an environment where Gaelic can grow again. Lets get the Crofting Commission, HIE, UHI NWH, NHS W Isles, community land trusts, Taighean Innse Gall, CnES etc round the table with Bòrd na G and CnaG.”
Siân Swinton, from Uist wrote: “Speaking personally, I grew up and went through primary school entirely in Gaelic in Uist and spoke it all the time. By the time I got to secondary school Gaelic became a school subject rather than a part of my life and being and, as a rebellious teenager, I fought back against it. As an adult now who has returned to live in Uist I am desperate to reclaim that part of my identity but many aspects of adult life don’t include Gaelic. There is really good Gaelic education in primary schools, in fact my old primary school just received a really glowing report just this week, but it tends to taper off for older children and adults as we become more self-conscious. There needs to be more encouragement to keep up with extra curricular Gaelic activities as we progress through our lives.”
This was repeated by many respondents, which begs the question, why is GME not mandatory throughout the Gàidhealtachd? Some have argued that the areas are already so anglicised that their would be opposition from parents. I think this is true, but like anything it is a matter of political will. What gaelic desperately needs is a political profile, a powerful campaign to fight its corner and develop a multi-agency response adequate to the scale of the crisis. This, in my mind would put compulsory GME education in vernacular communities as a central plank.
Swinton writes, as do many others of the jobs and housing crisis that is a central aspect of the de-population problem. Social cleansing is cultural cleansing:
She concludes: “We need more affordable housing, we need childcare, we need more reliable jobs, we need investment in the arts – music, poetry, dancing and every other aspect of the arts is an integral part of Gaelic culture. We can’t improve one of these aspects without the others and expect improvement.”
However, older, wiser heads have warned about simply offering ‘more jobs and houses’ as a solution: “Mainstream” economic development – that is economic development that is not accompanied by explicit language planning – will not, in and of itself, secure Gaelic, and may indeed add to its insecurity.”
If you want to destroy a people, destroy their language and get them to speak your language. You’re half roads there. Had the whole of Scotland been easily accessible, there would have been no Gaelic by now. It’s been preserved in pockets by the inaccessibility of the Western Isles but our attitude has mainly been to hope for the best. That would work fine if people lived forever but people get old and die. These people are the ones who were totally immersed in the language with none of the dilution we have today with social media, television, radio etc.
There is no point in tinkering around the edges in the hope that we can slow the decline. There are a very small number of Gaelic schools where the curriculum is taught in Gaelic. These schools are fantastic for they outperform the English language schools in all subjects because of the super rewiring of the mind that the Gaelic language gives. It truly is a no-brainer and a win win situation all round. We need to invest, we need to have the political will and we need to have a bit of faith in ourselves.
There are positive signs, approximately 600,000 people are currently learning Gaelic in Scotland at the moment largely due to the popularity of Duolingo. This makes people want to go further so Holyrood should be putting the resources into making it as easy as possible to become fluent in Gaelic. Most people learning Gaelic from the Duolingo app use Google Translate to cross reference, some of the translations are pretty weird which leads to frustration. One thing that is sorely needed is a really good and accurate translation app with standardised Gaelic pronunciation, that would be a Godsend. If we can get the Gaelic learners to 30% of the population, the process will then become self perpetuating and added money will just accelerate the process.
None of this will hold sway if the doom and gloom merchants are allowed to dominate the narrative. If you generate a spark and get a wee flame burning away nicely, a big bucket of water is going to win every time. We need to protect and nourish Scottish Gaelic and it will reward us many times over.
But if we did compare Scottish Gaelic and standardised English, as functional languages, not to each other, but to the features of an ideal human language, what would we find? I am aware that English has various problematic features, such as irregular spellings. On materials discovered during a language-oriented I found the claim that this may in part have originated in foreign-language translations into English during early modern Bible contests.
I have heard claims that Gaelic is feature-complete enough to write international scientific papers in, but I have a hard time believing that since the language apparently isn’t feature-complete enough for a literal translation of a Yes/No vote answer to an Independence question. Plus there’s the relative lack of letters and maybe corresponding sounds. Is Gaelic more unnecessarily gendered than English, not the world’s greatest offender?
Perhaps the evil work of colonialism has been done, and the language has lost the critical mass of speakers/writers, lost the ability of a living language to grow and adapt to the times, been unfairly shut out of the large-language models and corpuses of published works in favour of English. But suppose for a moment this presents an opportunity. With a smaller base, Gaelic may be more agile and open to radical overhaul. What might be done with the language to make it more future-fit in a way other European languages would struggle to match? I mean, give people new reasons to adopt Gaelic rather than old ones, just as English began to thrive on the growth-mediums of print technology and play culture and public demand for access to the secrets of liturgy.
I like your glass half full attitude, that’s great. There’s no reason why Gaelic shouldn’t be updated and streamlined, that’s what happens to language.
I do fear though, that none of this is going to happen while we’re still in the clutches of colonialism
I visited Mull with my wife a few years back. On the return journey in to Oban my wife got chatting to an older woman (probably in her 70s). She was a native Gaelic speaker but confessed that she was running out of places to speak it. Her local shop had been taken over by non Gaelic speakers and her conversation opportunities had disappeared. As many other local facilities were also owned by non Gaelic speakers and her contemporaries were passing away she said she barely spoke a word of Gaelic from one week to the next.
Over half of the shops and pubs are run or staffed by people from England let alone Scotland or native Gaelic speakers I had quite a few chats with locals who said that they can’t compete, there getting bought out, if you want to look for a way out of this mess you have to look to places like wales in the 1970s for a way out of this mess, being a nice victim doesn’t work.
The Welsh nationalists only burned holiday homes. Are you suggesting radicals burn down homes English people are actually living in permanently? Better if they are actually inside even?
I think someone is losing the plot here. The Gaelic language needs to be resurrected and nurtured into the vibrant and rich language that it is for the sake of it. It’s got nothing to do with holiday homes or businesses. Gaelic was once part of the fabric of Scotland and it should be again.
It’s got EVERYTHING to do with holiday homes. Everything. Many people would move back to islands who left. They can’t compete with wealth from the south east. Sorry but Gaelic schools teaching English speakers the language doesn’t replace it as a community language. Also learning it ina school is not the same as having it in the home and in your family. It’s totally done. People can say they are ‘fluent in Gaelic’ and they just don’t have the cultural connection.
On Mull that is.
It would indeed be sad if Gaelic were to wither further, but it seems that the decline is related to the lack of opportunities where it can be used in preference over English. To create opportunities and situations where Gaelic is preferred over English is going to mean discriminating in favour of Gaelic and that comes with political and legal trouble.
That’s not really going to do anything for Gaelic. Providing crutches and discriminating against English is only going to damage the already fragile language. What’s needed is grass roots regeneration and everything else will take care of itself.
There’s a parallel to this in New Zealand. and that’s the revival of the Māori language. If you come to New Zealand now you will find most government bodies are called by Māori names, and Auckland is referred to as Tamaki-Makaurau, and other cities are given Māori names, New Zealand as Aotearoa, and the North and South Islands by Māori names. European news readers and commentators in Radio NZ are required to be fluent in Maori and you will hear Māori regularly throughout news items from European radio announcers etc. I believe this is actually having some success and the proportion of Māori who are now fluent in the language and use it in their homes has definitely risen over the last few years. (The level of this increase is debated)
This success comes from a deep and abiding need for Māori to resuscitate their culture and language and their own efforts, strongly supported by the government, to achieve Māori literacy in the majority of the population by 2040. I think it is likely that within fifty years, this will be a fully bilingual country, and that most other races, growing up here, will be familiar and understand the language as well as English“
https://www.tpk.govt.nz/documents/download/documents-5540/tpk-maihi-karauna-strategy-en-2019.pdf
https://www.teaonews.co.nz/2022/07/05/significant-increase-in-proficient-te-reo-maori-speakers-stats-nz-survey/
`https://time.com/5922833/new-zealand-maori-language/
There are many other references on the internet. The problem is, as in Gaelic, is identifying any increase in those that use the language in their homes as their primary method of communication, or in marae (Māori meeting houses and communities) etc. It is my impression after having lived here for nearly forty years that more Māori and a considerable number of Europeans are now fluent in the language and can read, write and communicate in the language as well as they can in English. Ultimately New Zealand English itself will likely `change considerably and diverge from the English spoken in other countries. Basically the European, non Māori support for the language is high despite some politicians and others more reactionary views and this has been a major factor in the early success of this effort.
I am not sure how our experience here can translate to Scotland and Gaelic, but it is obviously very urgent or Gaelic will become a “dead” language like Latin
As someone here has commented, it can only come from the will of Scottish people to revive the language. Is that will there? First place must be the islands, surely, and investment in schooling in Gaelic as the primary teaching language in primary and secondary schools throughout the islands. All newcomers are welcome, but they should be expected to learn Gaelic and accept before they arrive that their children will be taught in Gaelic. All TV programme snd films etc should be in Gaelic with subtitles and films with versions dubbed in Gaelic. All official documents, titles of facilities etc in Gaelic. Remove English street and road signs etc. However, I am a pessimist, I was in Scotland last year and the year prior, my impression is that any support for the language is desultory and begrudged by many Scots. I didn’t hear a world of Gaelic in my ten days camping in the Outer Hebrides one year or on Colonsay the next..
But good luck, I do hope that Scotland wakes up to what the loss of the language would mean. But then Scotland’s urgently needed land reforms are also desultory and inadequate – I think we all now live in post-sovereign countries in the west..
@John Monro, and games, of course, especially future-looking ones which provide players with vital ethical active roles within that culture and language, perhaps like the forthcoming
“Guardian Maia is a hybrid historical/science-fiction story that draws on the mythology of the Māori culture in Aotearoa, New Zealand.”
https://www.theguardiangame.com
Who wouldn’t want to be an emu-riding forest-guardian in 2750 fighting a toxin-spreading tyrant? I’m not sure there is a Scottish Gaelic equivalent in the works. The developers apparently work with the Ministry of Education, but that’s all I’ve gleaned from the websites. Perhaps making such games free to play will increase uptake.
There are a handful of Māori-language games and expansion packs on the gaming platform Steam (which unfortunately confuses Scots and Scottish Gaelic). Not every game that reaches demo stage will ever appear, however, nor necessarily be worth playing.
Well Said John and that’s fantastic news about the Māori language. My wife and I emigrated to New Zealand in 1981 and it was a very different country then. I’m encouraged that Kate Forbes is the Gaelic Minister, a step in the right direction, small steps ???
Fascinating programme on R4 just now about the Irish language (Gaelic), part of Michael Rosen’s long running Word of Mouth series.
Right at the end he asks the Irish guest if Gaelic can survive and he said that he was very unsure it would in the heartlands of the language with its roots stretching back into antiquity and thus preserving the ancient meanings and sense of the language (which is what much of the programme was about and goes way beyond prosaic meanings of words). But the flourishing of it amongst new speakers in the cities and away from those heartlands is undergoing somewhat of a boom. So quite a similar picture to Scottish Gaelic. He sounded fairly upbeat about things so maybe food for thought to those who say the loss / revival of Gaelic in the Western Isles is the be all and end all.
Really fascinating programme btw well worth a listen.