As a Gaelic speaker, I also find the bilingual signs offensive

Apparently, Andrew Marr finds the Gaelic on signage in Scotland offensive. Yes, the signs are offensive. Because the Gaelic isn’t big enough. I am fed up with the ignorance towards the history of Gaelic in Scotland, and so you won’t get another history lesson and dictionary of placenames from me showing how Gaelic is a big part of Scottish life and culture. I am going to take a different angle: ‘the mountain of a molehill’ angle.

So, let’s get one thing straight. You will barely see any Gaelic in the Lowlands. You won’t go on the M8 and see a single word of Gaelic. You won’t be inside the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and see a single word of Gaelic. You won’t be in a police station or courtroom or gallery or theatre or supermarket and see a single word of Gaelic. If you do see Gaelic, it’ll be the tokenistic fàilte on a welcome sign or the word ambaileans on an ambulance, but it won’t be on direction signage, warning signage, information signage, or temporary signage. If you see one Gaelic word on a sign in a train station and have the sort of meltdown that Andrew Marr had, then you need help. You are completely exaggerating the presence of Gaelic and you need to gabhail air do shocair ‘calm down’. 

And don’t tell us you that more people speak Polish or Urdu than Gaelic (not true) because you’ll be raging if Polish or Urdu started appearing on signs.

Okay, so now that we’ve got that out of the way. Let’s talk about the Gaelic signs that are there. Margadh an Fheòir is below ‘Haymarket’, which is itself also larger than the Gaelic and in bold. There are two issues with this. (1) It’s a message to us Gaelic speakers. (2) It doesn’t work for us Gaelic speakers.

Let me start with issue number one. If something that is supposed to be so important that the notion of its existence is so offensive to many Labour members (this is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that a Labour member has raged at Gaelic – I’m still waiting for an apology from a former Mayor of Sheffield), then surely that thing should be commanding equal size, colour, and boldness as the thing it’s supposed to be equal to. If you don’t understand what I’m getting at as I am being rather convoluted: having Gaelic smaller, below, and less visible than the English is a visual message that Gaelic is below, less important, and less deserving than English! These people who get angry with Gaelic signage because ‘Scotland never spoke Gaelic’ or whatever are angry at the implication that we’re not as important as they are. What more do you want? For it to be actually explicitly written out, “Gaelic is not important”? These anti-Gaelic cranks sound like the same sort of people who don’t want to see rainbow flags. “I don’t want to see that other people exist because their existence makes me uncomfortable”.

When it comes to issue number two, we have to think about what a sign is. Signs give us information. The whole purpose and definition of a sign is to give information. If it’s not giving information – what is it? The sign ‘M8’ isn’t there because it was the sign-maker’s favourite letter and number. The sign ‘entrance’ isn’t a description of the judge’s dramatic walk into a courtroom. The sign ‘milk’ in a supermarket isn’t an edgy take on modern art. So, if the Gaelic is less visible than the English, which version of the name of the station in Edinburgh do you think Gaelic speakers see first? All Gaelic speakers can read English, so, by the time that they have seen the Gaelic word, they already know where they are. So, if the Gaelic word isn’t giving them information, then the sign isn’t doing its job. At best, it’s just an additional snippet of interesting information about the placename, *if* you’re interested in Scottish placenames. At worst, it’s tokenism.

If you don’t like bilingual signs, you should be arguing to get rid of the English transliteration that doesn’t tell you what the name means or how to pronounce it, given that so many Scottish placenames originate from Gaelic. I use Gaelic all day every day in my work (An Taigh Cèilidh: the Gaelic cultural centre and community café in Stornoway, Outer Hebrides), and we were recently discussing Kingussie. What does it mean? How do you pronounce it? Even I get the pronunciation of English names of Scottish places wrong. But I never get the pronunciation of Ceann a’ Ghiùthsaich wrong, and I know what it means. And you would, too. Imagine if, instead of big meaningless English with small tokenistic Gaelic underneath, you had Ceann a’ Ghiùthsaich and ‘Head of the pine forest’ under it. We’d learn so much more about ourselves, and we’d feel rooted in our place and in our heritage. Don’t tell me visitors won’t know how to pronounce it, because you’ll also be the same people who laugh at people mispronouncing ‘Milngavie’ (Meall na Gaoithe) or ‘Kirkcudbright’ (Cille Chùithbeirt). And, be not vexed, nobody is forcing you to speak Gaelic as nothing would stop you from saying ‘Kingussie’, just as seeing Firenze in Florence doesn’t stop you from saying ‘Florence’, Eryri stops you from saying ‘Snowdonia’, or Москва stops you from saying ‘Moscow’. Monolingual signs in Gaelic are never going to happen, so I’m not genuinely arguing for that. But just food for thought for people who pretend to be upset at bilingualism.

Ultimately, people like Andrew Marr just need stop being so angry about something that doesn’t exist. An invisible bogeyman coming to rob you of your fragile sense of self is nothing to have a heart attack over. Your loved ones will suffer so much if you die over something so meaningless (I’m always telling my loved ones to look after themselves for my sake). So, stop making a mountain out of molehill!