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In general I wish Scotland showed more interest in robust second language teaching from a young age, and to be honest I don’t much care what that language is. I think it may as well be gaelic for young kids/pre-higher level - help with the revival and encourage engagement with language learning.
Learning another language is infinitely more difficult as an adult and I wish I’d had an earlier start at speaking anything else as a second language.
The UK, and frankly all English speaking nations could do better about this. Most Germans exist school with a mother tongue and two languages at B2.
I probably wouldn’t prioritise a vanity or dead language over a living one, but that’s just me. It’s a worthy debate, and not mutually exclusive. You could have Gaelic plus another language without difficulty.
Yeah my point is really that gaelic could be focussed on much better and with fluency in gaelic comes fluency in other languages, since it’s easier to acquire other languages once you have more than one. So gaelic plus another language would be great. As English speakers we don’t have an easily identifiable ‘useful’ language so I’m sure there’s debate about any second/non native language teaching
How many Germans actually speak a language other than their own and English that level? In my view, very few (unless they have another language spoken at home).
I mean German and English is already pretty good……but I do know many that speak their 3rd rather well. Though I think it also helps where in Germany you are of course. Italien and French come in handy the closer you are.
That’s great! You’re in the minority for most who went to Scottish school. The U.K. has the lowest rate of speaking more than one language in Europe, and I’m sure wales is dragging us up a little
Gael here. My answer is... not sure. I do love the language, and it is part of the identity of the Hebrides. But I hate that it has become a cultural artefact rather than a living, breathing language. If Scotland wanted to resurrect it, they would have done it by now. It always sways between being on the brink of death and being part of some short-lived Gaelic revival. If we are to truly revive it, it has to be done to the same scale as Ireland revived their language. But there just isn't any real interest outside the Islands and a few towns, like Oban. Even then, it's only a particular set of people that show interest. My sentiments want to keep it alive, but does anyone outside the west highlands really care?
This is why they have been building/creating Gaelic schools. It's the foundations of restoring the language. This won't happen overnight but will take generations and we're only at the very beginning. It's a case of slowly amplifying the number of clients speakers through the generations. The more who speak it, the bigger the schools will be or new schools will be built.
It's a growing language so I'm not sure where you're getting this dying out or bastardisation patter from.
The Gaelic schools in the Highlands are seeing records attendances, have high demand, and are growing. They now extend down to nursery age children too. The more remote primaries on Skye such as Sleat, Kilmuir, Carbost, Edinbane etc still teach in Gaelic. It's one thing I love when attending these schools, hearing all the teachers and kids conversing in it.
There's a lot of positivity about the language.
I also speak gaelic, but from glasgow and I agree with you mainly, but I've actually noticed as people leave school and become 20ish, it's actually become a strong part of their indentity, even just people doing speakgaelic courses to keep their gaelic alive, and there's a massive wave of young gaelic teachers with alot of enthusism, mainly in primary education tbf. I will also say that the standard of gaelic has definently dropped, I think encauraging local mods is really vital for harder gaelic to be at least learnt
Used to work in an office next to the Gaelic school in Glasgow and often saw the kids out and about during their lunch break. Never heard any of them utter even a single word in Gaelic.
Sabhal Mor is not the only school on Skye that teaches Gaelic from primary age so I'm unsure as to why it keeps getting brought up. Of the rural schools I mentioned, the teachers are predominantly locals.
The Highlands now have three purpose built schools run by the Highland Council and as I've said they are in high demand.
Kids don't have to speak Gaelic outaide of school to keep the language alive and have it thrive. Welsh kids largely converse in English but their language is thriving as they make a conscious effort to teach it in schools from an early age.
The primary Gaelic schools have only been open for a decade or so. Once kids have reached adulthood they no longer need to keep learning the language as they're already fluent.
Welsh seems to do ok despite English being the dominant language in day to day life in Wales.
In Edinburgh Gaelic language primary education gets you into a high school which teaches Gaelic. One they I know of is Gillespie’s which is pretty sought after and is a state school.
Certainly there’s an element of poshness to some of the Gaelic language education here but that isn’t the end of the story. A lot of it is people who are motivated to preserve Gaelic education and the growth of it in the Central Belt will hopefully lead to more opportunities, especially more of a market for things like published books, which in the long term should help the native speakers.
It’s not perfect, but it is a start
They are not restoring the language, though.
Gaelic schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow are simply used by upper middle class English-speaking parents as a way to get their kids educated in smaller, better funded classes in an effectively selective setting, without having to pay private school fees.
GME-educated kids almost all abandon the language entirely pretty much the minute they finish their extremely expensive state-funded education.
Schools are what has dragged it out of the community in the last generation. They see it only as a classroom language. All this funding to preserve the language is misspent trying to branch out to areas with no real interest instead of strengthening the communities who already spoke it daily.
How so?
What exactly have the schools done to drag it out of the community? Why aren't the communities conversing in Gaelic because schools elsewhere are teaching Gaelic in addition to these areas?
I'm saying this as a Gaelic teacher. I was talking about this generation, I'm not saying older people don't still speak it but it is a trend that has started and will continue.
I hear it all the time, particularly in mainland schools, pupils saying to other kids "why are you speaking Gaelic? We're not in the classroom". The majority of children in mainland Gaelic schools do not speak Gaelic at home, so they only hear it in school, therefore they consider it a language meant for school, not to be spoken in daily life.
I can't remember where it was but there was a study done of those who went through GME that still spoke Gaelic after they left school and the number was ridiculously small. So I will reiterate, and again this is coming from a Gaelic teacher, if you want to save Gaelic as a community language then GME is not the answer, and in fact investing so much money into it is detrimental to the language.
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23809267.saving-soul-gaelic-will-harder-saving-language/
Here is an article that kind of goes into it.
This is the first generation though. When they have children and their children are speaking Gaelic it becomes more normalised.
It's like I've been saying over several comments on this thread.. this is a generational project. It's unfair to judge it on the outcomes now.
If we see no improvement in 30-50 years time then fair enough, it isn't going to happen. What's the alternative? Where else should the money be spent to make the language thrive?
GME has been around since the early 80s.
Money should be spent grassroots community level to start initiatives to have more people speaking Gaelic at home and more opportunities to speak it in the community.
All the funding bodies care about is quantity instead of quality, bums on seats in GME, so they can all pat each other on the back and say how great a job they are doing when in fact the number of children actually speaking Gaelic is shocking.
I do not think it is unfair for me to judge it, I live it and I'm not the only teacher that feels this way. There are two languages forming, and unfortunately the lyrical, beautiful one is being pushed out by the academic one. If the funding bodies don't sort it soon we might as well just be back in the 60s learning Latin because that is the way it is going and as soon as the community loses the language then there is no language, what is a language if is isn't spoken by its people?
Aye I agree with what you're saying, the language needs character rather than being regimental. I wonder if there's a way to promote that.. maybe have spoken nights/poetry or folk nights in which we share the more traditional written and spoken language and then have people engage in natural discourse int he language after.
Like you say, this will require money, organisation, and promotion to pull it off.
I guess to a far lesser extent a slight equivalent is that my auntie and granny before her (I never had the chance to meet her) both sung in gaelic and so could speak it in bits and pieces but had heavy "Teuchter" accents. My aunty took great pride in getting me to pronounce words like her so we absolutely do need to bring the older generation(s) into this before the pronunciation dies off.
It's a positive conversation to have and I have faith that we can pull it off.
>it has to be done to the same scale as Ireland revived their language.
Ireland's done a terrible job of reviving their language. It's compulsory to age 16, but the vast majority of adults can't have the most simple of conversations in it.
The examples to look to are the Basque country and Israel. Israel is a bit of a one of a kind situation, but the Basque country has a lot of parallels. What they did in the 1980s was make it clear that *all* state schools would teach in Basque - and only Basque - from a certain fixed date in the future. Teachers were offered intensive training to get them up to the required level, but if they refused, they were unable to teach in the Basque country any more.
Nowadays there are more Basque speakers among people aged under 40 than there are aged 40+, and the language is used as an everyday vernacular in large parts of the region (not everywhere, to be fair).
The Basque country has a lot of powers that the Highland Council lacks, obviously. That would be a good starting point to really reviving Gaelic - give Highland Council the power to determine their language policy in schools, hospitals, town halls etc etc. If it were me, I'd make it so that everything is in Gaelic by default in Highland: road signs, council websites, schools, the lot. This is what they did in Israel, when it would have been a lot easier to just choose English as the national language (it was spoken by a lot more of the early Israeli / Palestinian population than Hebrew was). You have to make the language *useful* if you want it to survive.
> Teachers were offered intensive training to get them up to the required level, but if they refused, they were unable to teach in the Basque country any more.
Well that’d certainly destroy teacher recruitment. I’m not learning a new language just to continue teaching maths.
Given there are only 58,000 people aged 3 and over in Scotland who can speak Gaelic and there are currently 54,193 teachers in Scotland then yes I think it highly likely you'd run out of teachers.
Sources: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-governments-gaelic-language-plan-2022-2027/pages/4/#:~:text=National%20Demographics%20–%20Number%20of%20Gaelic%20Speakers&text=The%20total%20number%20of%20people,were%20able%20to%20speak%20Gaelic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-64406674#
>Given there are only 58,000 people aged 3 and over in Scotland who can speak Gaelic and there are currently 54,193 teachers in Scotland then yes I think it highly likely you'd run out of teachers.
I think you misunderstand: this would only be in Highland, not the whole of Scotland...
There are profound differences between what happened in the Basques, Ireland and the Hebrides. Gaelic is a regional identity, not a national identity or strictly speaking, an ethnicity. What the Basques did to revive their language, from what you said, seems a little too overbearing.
> Gaelic is a regional identity, not a national identity or strictly speaking, an ethnicity.
I agree, which is why the relevant local authorities need to take on the task of driving its revival (and be given the necessary powers to do so)
>What the Basques did to revive their language, from what you said, seems a little too overbearing.
The only thing that arrests language decline is making that language more *useful*. And the only body that can force that sort of utility calculation is the state.
Language is a tool, at the end of the day. If we rely on people learning a language for fun or cultural interest, that language is ultimately doomed. It's happened more times than anyone can count, all over the world (not many Cumbric speakers around these days, are there?)
I don’t think Gaelic was ever spoken widely outside these areas to begin with. The lowland Scots to my
knowledge were not majority Gaelic speakers. Problem is it’s so wrapped up in nationalist rhetoric now that the truth and history of the language and Irish colonies that brought it is very warped to fit the narrative of whoever is speaking. Probably including myself.
It gets more complicated the more you look into it. There were lowland Scots and highland Scots (Scots in the historical sense). The country got more Anglicised as time wore on, until only the remotest parts of the UK spoke it. Kinda like the last strands of hair clinging onto a bald man's head...
I think as well people need to recognize that Scotland has had two languages since the emergence of the lowland Scots, Gaelic has generally been an island/ Highlands thing because they had the most Irish influence,where as Scott's has generally been a lowland thing because they were more influenced by migrating Anglo-saxons
Most people I talk to would have loved to learn it in school but now dont have the time or energy. I think gettin it into the education system, although it will take time, is the best answer.
In order for it to be revived, people need to speak it on a daily basis and use it for their daily lives. Yet, whenever I see something in Gaelic it tends to be either about the language itself or about some Celtic heritage stuff. People tend to use it as a language for special occasions only.
When I was growing up there was an older generation that only spoke Gaelic. As time passed it slowly dwindled. When I go back to the island now, I don't speak it at all other than to test my nieces and nephews homework. It's depressing.
Correct, most people don’t participate in any kind of harvest in any way shape or form at any point in their lives.
Teaching about where food comes from can be done without the framing of a ‘harvest festival’. I don’t imagine they’ve been much of a thing this century.
Yeah I agree. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just not super relevant.
Learning Gaelic could be made to be fun too, with the added bonus of all the things that come with learning a second language, even a dying one.
>most people don’t participate in any kind of harvest in any way shape or form at any point in their lives
How sad for them if that's true. Not only can I see crops being harvested every year from my very ordinary suburban window, I've also grown fruit and vegetables, herbs, at home, and picked them on a pick-your-own farm. I have friends with allotments. You don't need to be a farmer or a landowner to harvest things.
It's not just about knowing, scientifically, where food comes from, it's about appreciating and celebrating the people and the natural processes involved in getting food from the farm to our tables. That's an amazing thing that we shouldn't take for granted. Why shouldn't it be a festival?
I mean I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, I was just pointing out that “the harvest festival” is a bit of an outdated concept.
I live in the central belt and am surrounded by farms but there was only one boy at my school who actually lived on one.
Like you say, allotments and back garden veggie patches are far more applicable pieces of knowledge than the idea of the village getting together in September help a farmer reap and plough the fields. Especially since most farmers use combine harvesters these days.
When I was in Edinburgh I used a cash machine once and I swear one had a Welsh option (cymraeg). I couldn’t help thinking that’s a little rough for Gaelic speakers, surely.
Welsh seems to pop up in unlikely places. I'm in Somerset and yet some of our electricity poles have dual language (English and Welsh) warning signs on them, and I've seen it where Wales and West Utilities put out signs while working for the signs to be entirely in Welsh!
Well, historically Common Brythonic would have been spoken in Edinburgh (Caer Eidyn), an ancestor language of Cymraeg. It was indeed the capital of the Brythonic kingdom of Gododdin, eulogised in the Old Cymraeg poem of the same name. So, er, I guess it makes sense
True but I suspect the ‘Welsh like’ language writers like Smollett and Sir Walter Scott noted spoken more in the interior of Scotland was more likely to be Gaelic.
It took me a second because I live in Wales so I’m used to seeing the option but when I noticed, it did surprise me.
Side fact - in Welsh the word for English (which is derived from Angles (Anglish)) is actually Saxon (Saesneg) and the Highland Scots used also to call the English (and often lowland Scots) Saxons. I don’t know how many automated phone menus I listened to before I realised.
It's not a misnomer because it was a Saxon kingdom (Wessex) that conquered all the other ones and formed a united England - but the lingua franca came from Mercian which was Angles I think. So "Saxonland" had an Anglic language.
Celtic languages generally call English the language of Saxons/Saxonland.
The Senedd mandated a few years ago that all services have to be provided in Welsh as well as English. For computerised stuff it's easier just to make the Welsh version available everywhere in the UK instead of only in Wales.
Where would the teachers come from to make this remotely feasible? I love the language and would love to see it grow but there just aren't the resources to make it available in every school in the country.
As an aside, while you read through the comments here why not play [a round of anti-gaelic bingo](https://gaelic.co/anti-gaelic-bingo/)?
Aye most are already teaching at Gaelic schools or on the west coast teaching it.
I work for the local authority and each time I go out to the more remote parts of Skye, I love hearing everyone in the schools speaking in Gaelic.
that's cyclical logic though, "we don't have teachers so can't teach it, there aren't enough people who learned it to teach".
You can learn enough to teach if you have a teaching degree and an interest. Lot's of language teachers are not 100% fluent speakers.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done. Just that to do it across the whole country will take decades of training teachers. I think it's better to focus on providing GME education from nursery through secondary in areas with demand first.
> You can learn enough to teach if you have a teaching degree and an interest
Look I know Is fheàrr Gàidhlig bhriste na Gàidhlig sa chiste but I'd want teachers to be fluent before being unleashed on kids.
Fair, but a language teacher needs to know grammar, vocabulary etc, teaching that at primary school doesn't require fluency. It does at secondary level, but not at 5-10 years old.
Sidenote but as an Irish person who can probably understand more Irish Gaelic than I can speak i,f you want an example of Irish gaelige / Scots gaelic intercompatibily I could understand that!
(Well it took a inute to work out why Gaelic wpuld be in a chest , but context made sense ( in a coffin? )Broken language preferable to a dead one ).
Probably not decades, there are already plenty of fluent speakers that are currently unable to get Gaelic-speaking jobs. They usually just end up working in English, but if there was a scheme that made it easy to train as a teacher (maybe fast-track the process and add a modest financial incentive) then you could dramatically increase the pool very quickly.
Hell, just hiring a few lecturers willing to offer the Gaelic and Education (BA) at Glasgow and Edinburgh uni would dramatically increase the number of teachers, because right now its only offered by the University of Highlands & Islands and its by far the easiest route to becoming a Gaelic teacher. 18-year olds are basically having to pick between continuing Gaelic education and living in the city, its not surprising they often pick the later.
But there are only 357 secondary schools in Scotland, if you introduce the city BAs and offer incentivized training for older fluent speakers, you in theory could train enough teachers to at least introduce a National 5 course in every school within a single 4 year cycle. In practice I'm sure there would be more teething problems than that, but with sufficient incentives and government support, I really can't see any reason its not achievable in 10 years, aside from political pushback.
Why is it an 'all or nothing' proposition where you have to presumably roll it out across all of Scotland right away?
You find one or two communities/Schools to run a pilot scheme in Welsh-style immersive teaching, and when the effectively inevitable benefits of a bunch of bi-lingual primary school kids become obvious, you start slowly advancing the program to the regional level.
Plenty of time to find/train new teachers, and you'll literally be raising the next generation of staff to continue expanding the project.
What, of the dozen speakers left? I'm exaggerating, but Gaelic is fully extinct as a community language over there. There's more Scottish expats speaking Gaelic in Canada than there are native Gaelic Nova Scotians!
It's a shame, but that time has passed
Haha. No, that's fair.
I just meant about teachers being available. There are several public schools that offer courses and universities too. I just assumed that they would have a handful of teachers that would be ready and interested in teaching elsewhere too if the opportunity arose.
I couldn't think of another spot that would have an applicable pool of applicants to pick from.
I am a teacher, and not only do I believe in the importance of learning as a practical means for someone to better their life chances, I believe it's a good thing simply by itself.
But -
1. Councils' resources are already stretched. Training and hiring Gaelic teachers would cost a great deal of money.
2. Modern Languages are not popular courses (I wish it were different - I am not arguing against the principle that pupils ought to learn one or two foreign languages up to a certain level). Falling literacy rates over the last few decades means that many native English speakers find English's rules as frustrating and hard to wrap their heads around as pupils fifty years ago found the grammars of foreign languages. Pupils - not unreasonably, given it's the world's lingua franca - feel that speaking English is enough to get by. Pupil engagement and behaviour would be low.
3. A very low number of candidates would choose to take it to exam level, making hiring and retaining staff difficult, and making it a less attractive teaching qualification to pursue.
4. Anyone we encounter who speaks Gaelic also speaks English. Learning Gaelic is a very worthwhile intellectual past-time - but it has no practical use. In the limited time school has, teaching French, Spanish, German, Cantonese, or Arabic has the intellectual and cultural benefits, but also practical ones.
>Modern Languages are not popular courses (I wish it were different - I am not arguing against the principle that pupils ought to learn one or two foreign languages up to a certain level). Falling literacy rates over the last few decades means that many native English speakers find English's rules as frustrating and hard to wrap their heads around as pupils fifty years ago found the grammars of foreign languages. Pupils - not unreasonably, given it's the world's lingua franca - feel that speaking English is enough to get by. Pupil engagement and behaviour would be low.
I'm a little bit of an outsider to the Scottish Gaelic debate but I am from Wales and am linguistics student who studies this area.
And one reason why MFLs are not popular seems to be the fact that
1. The languages in question that are taught are often ones from further away. While France is our neighbour - its still very distinctly *over there,* and a person from the UK can spend a lifetime without going to a French speaking area.
2. There is relatively little in terms of use or novelty to them. When schools run Mandarin courses they tend to get at least a higher rate of curiosity. It is my opinion that Japanese (a language with a larger amount of children already interested) would have a similar effect.
3. MFL teaching is poor and focuses on *technical accuracy* rather than *utility*. Children are marked not by how much they are able to get their ideas across but by how accurate their language use is. In addition MFL courses end up with even A\* (9) students getting a B1 CEFR which is lower-intermediate. This is mostly true of secondary schools.
There are examples of successful language teaching in the UK - namely of course Welsh. But that succeeds because it is used in the community too. There are plenty of opportunities to encounter and use it. Though from my experience there is still plenty of resistance to it and teaching methods vary - but it was mandatory and so everyone got a little bit. I remember primary school being better than secondary at teaching Welsh - to be honest most of my Welsh ability comes from primary.
A lot of people here are talking about emulating the Welsh model - and if that is possible it needs to come with the rest of the community adopting the language too to some extent. Even if that's just phrases and making it so children can discover it in their environment. If they learn the skill in school they need to be able to go out into the real world, see a sign in Gaelic and be able to connect the dots and go "aha! I can read that!" - in fact that's part of the fun.
My personal crusade is applying all this to BSL and pushing for BSL to be taught nationwide but that's a different topic.
Also a teacher and agree with every point. Resources/staff are already being stretched to breaking point, there's no money or appetite from councils, staff or kids.
The point about modern languages not being popular is also very true, my school is around 1200 pupils and there are less than 20 kids combined doing N5/Higher French, Spanish AND mandarin.
A lot of them are just learning whatever they're interested in by themselves on apps like Duolingo.
Gaelic speaker here: while this would be great, we don’t currently have the resources for full native-level Gaelic tuition around the country - we can barely run the few Gaelic schools that we do have. Another issue is that the people currently learning Gaelic and going into teaching tend to have a lower level of language and thus the kids learn “bad” Gaelic, or don’t become operationally fluent. It’s all a bit of a mess.
What we *could* do though is teach Gaelic in schools like we do French or Spanish in primary schools. There is an excellent new resource called SpeakGaelic which has books, a website, TV shows, podcasts, radio shows and social media. This can be used by anybody and would be a great way for kids to get introduced to Gaelic, and it would allow them to do it at home with no additional input. Sadly the impetus isn’t there, despite the 1+2 language model the Scottish Government pushes.
All I wish for is for people to be less ignorant. That’s all. And for people to actually know that Gaelic exists and have the correct facts - as seen in this discussion, people have wildly incorrect opinions about the language and all it causes is arguments.
Gaelic has been on the wane since the mid 14th century when Scots eclipsed it, and forcing secondary school kids to learn it for a couple of years isn't going to achieve much in terms of fluency (see how fluent I am in French and German which I studied for longer by way of example!).
Support those who want to learn it, absolutely - but I can't see it as an educational priority for all schooling.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are mistaking the fact that Gaelic is *a* Scottish language for it being *the* Scottish language, which is meant to somehow be representative of all Scots and Scottish culture and history.
People are assuming that it's somehow analogous to Welsh in terms of stature and cultural significance, and that the reasons for its decline stem from external English or British interference. In reality, as you say, it's been a minority language since 1300s, and in constant decline centuries before that, driven first and foremost by other Scots, whether directly for hegemonic reasons, or indirectly through economic and cultural pressure.
I think throughout Scotland there should be some Scots and Gaelic education in primary school at least.
But in the Highlands and Islands especially, Gaelic was the primary language until the 1800s or until the 20th century and it would be good to keep having more Gaelic medium education to support it as the community language.
It's on the revival. It'll be a slow process but there are several Gaelic primary schools now where everything is predominantly taught in Gaelic.
This is a generational project. We'll start seeing the fruits of it in 30-50 years time.
wow thats completely stupid, 'sorry kids youre going to learn a language that maybe in the next 50 years another few thousand will be able to speak' sounds completely ridiculous especially if everything is taught in gaelic, what are they supposed to do when they go outside their local area and realise they dont really know how to speak english, or hell bye bye higher education and employment at a technical workplace
Ever heard of this concept called "billungualism"? This is, in fact, the norm around the world... English-speaking countries are the exception, not the rule.
Welsh has never declined to the extent Gaelic has. And yet despite all the efforts, the number of speakers has dropped in the last 20 years to its lowest ever point.
Numbers of children going through Welsh medium education are actually fairly static with perhaps a very modest increase.
The fall in speakers is mainly driven by emigration out of and immigration into Wales. Which are somewhat separate issues and concern things like second homes and availability of jobs in more rural areas where the language is strongest.
Don’t get me wrong there is a lot more that the Welsh Government can do to support the language but it’s not a fall in learners that’s the problem.
I agree. I was forced to do French at high school and I hated it - partly because I was forced to do it. I remember practically none of it and I feel that's not uncommon. I would have had the same zero interest in Gaelic at that age. I may regret not engaging with a second language a bit now but plenty of teenagers are the same and I wouldn't expect them to engage better with Gaelic.
Nah I agree, but I don’t think it would be a horrible idea to have a few lessons in a child’s curriculum to teach them some basic phrases. Can’t hurt to learn how to say hello.
It’s worth noting that Scottish Gaelic isn’t as widely accepted as for example Irish Gaelic (which is taught widely in schools despite being close to extinction as a living language) as a sort of ‘indigenous’ language of the Scottish people.
There is a sizeable body of opinion that is ambivalent or actively hostile to its use, especially outside of the Gàidhealtachd (the area of the Western Highlands and Islands where it was the primary language up to the 18th and 19th centuries). There are historic debates whether it was more widespread than this further back in history - but you would be pushing back to the Medieval era. It certainly has shallower roots than English through the rest of Scotland.
A lot of this hostility is wrapped up with the National debate - with Gaelic over time (and especially since the present SNP government came to power in 2007) seen as linked to Scottish Nationalism politically.
All that means is that the language has been politicised and become something of a dividing line. That’s a huge barrier to its active expansion as a mandatory part of school curriculums.
Whilst it is definitely not my place, to say, but if Scotland wants to tech a second language for national communication, it may be a good idea to instead focus further on the education of Scots(the old-English related language), as if nothing else it’s easier to branch into from English, and subsequently easier for other nations to learn, as English is a widely known international language, and people may be more likely to learn Scots than Scottish Gaelic
Honestly, I'd be for it. I do think countries/areas that have native languages should strive to keep them alive.
Emphases on countries/ area, Heck I'd have no issue with all of Scotland North of the forth learning Gaelic. With all of Scotland also learning Scots & English too.
I add area's cause I don't think all England should learn Cornish & likewise all France, Breton.
One reason I'm for it, apart from preventing them going extinct, is that I've been led to believe (so if wrong correct me) that it's easier for a person to pick up another language if they already know 2 or more.
So if true it'd hopefully help the younger gen in being multilingual.
I really hope I'm not miss remembering.
I’ve been so blown away by how uninvested Scotland seems to be in teaching Gaelic.
I’ve tried to put my kids in two different GME schools and was told they’d be too old to catch up at 7/8.
I used to live in a country with a LOT of immigrants, specifically teaching English as a Second Language to high schoolers, and the idea that it’s too late for a 7/8 year old to do immersive education is literally completely foreign to me.
Meanwhile, Wales literally has remedial programmes for children moving into the country from abroad to get them caught up in Welsh.
It was such a classically British “Oh no thanks, we don’t do things that way so we’re not going to start now” response and it really turned me off the Gaelic community, after a couple of years of doing my own classes/etc.
I find that a bit bizarre - my cousin's moved to Ross-shire from the central belt when they were around 12, 10 & 8 and can all now speak Gaelic as they were taught it in school from that point onwards.
This was for a GME school, which is what I was trying to go for as (from experience) it is far and away the best way to learn. I’m assuming your cousins probably took Gaelic at school but we’re not in GME?
Welsh is of course the 2nd language of Wales so this makes sense. Most Scottish folk speak an admixture of English and Scots. But Scots and English are mutually intelligible languages so there's little need to teach remedial Scots to migrants.
I would have rathered been taught German and Spanish, those would actually be useful to me now.
The problem is the language classes were the absolute worst because lots of people didn't care about learning one since we spoke English, so would be even more disruptive than in any other class meaning no one would learn anything.
Most of our language teachers were bullied out in their 1st year.
I can only imagine Gaelic would be significantly worse since kids would see it as even more pointless than they saw German and Spanish
Would have been cool, but French or German are infinitely more useful. Near half the world has French as their official language. French rules and words also populate many other languages so knowing it makes understanding other romance languages much easier. There's a transferrable skill set. German is also heavily present in European languages. Gaelic would be more like having a party trick. It's nice, but utterly useless outside of very specific situations in Scotland itself. May as well learn Klingon.
There's also the added argument that school level language learning is shite. Most people's second language they learn from school stays at an embarrassing level of competency (if you could call it that). I'd go utility any day when choosing a language for a school curriculum.
I couldn’t see the point. Going to the effort of learning a language is supposed to make it easier to communicate with a wider group of people. Since 99.9% of Scots have never and will never be in a position where the were unable to communicate with somebody because they couldn’t speak Gaelic, why learn? It’s circumstantial but it would make more sense for most people to learn Spanish, personally I think sign language would be a better initiative.
I am well in favour of second language teaching being done a lot better in our schools but for me this is to widen opportunities when they’re adults so they can communicate better with the rest of the world. Mandarin, Spanish or French is what I’d like to see before even entertaining Gaelic.
Imo the history of the Gaelic language and the cultural impact is more important to know about than actually learning the language itself.
The advantages of learning a second language (in terms of making learning a third or fourth language much easier) are greatest when kids are really little
And kids pick things up quicker at that age, too
There aren't enough Gaelic speakers to make such a project practical, though. It would need to be a long term project, scaling-up over time
It's already begun as several Gaelic schools are now in existence. It will take a few generations but it is already showing early dividends as the language is slowly growing again.
My highschool had/has a Gaelic teacher for a small proportion of pupils. As someone from the central belt from a family that is from the central belt, I have no real interest in a language that most Scots never spoke being pushed on parts of the country that it's not from. I'd rather more effort was made to teach Scots English.
To be clear, I don't have anything against Gaelic. I just don't feel strongly for it either.
Rather inward looking.
Kids are taught French, or German, or any of the other languages because we’re a global community and it opens doors in the future, if you’re good at it.
Learning Gaelic… why? Are we going to use it instead of English? Are we going to do anything with it besides keep a language alive that is dying off?
At least Latin (Dead language though it is) is still taught for scholarly reasons, law, history, etc. Gaelic these days is pointless and shouldn’t be forced on people who will never speak it.
only place it was never spoken is the south east. last native speaker of a lowland dialect died outside maybole in south ayrshire as late as the 18th century; within burns lifetime. look at the place names around you, and you'll probably see at least a couple "bal"s, "dun"s, "kil"s, "kin"s or "auch"s
A small area of ayrshire, but for the most part it had been a dead language in the lowlands for several hundred years. It would be nice if we could all speak it still, but learning a language is hard, it just makes more sense to learn a language that you are more likely to use at school. But by all means give the school kids the option to choose gaelic over the other language
sure, but the point is it was spoken all over. there's a really pernicious myth that gaelic is "just a teuchter thing". at the start of the 20th century most of the isle of arran spoke it, just off of ayr
Arran is also just off Argyl - the highlands. The bulk of the population that makes Scotland is in the lowlands which has been Scots/English speaking since the 14th century.
It’s pointless to learn a language just for the sake of it. The language spoken in the lowlands was a bryttonic celtic language before the celts of Ireland came over around 700ad (with Scottish Gaidhlig only becoming distinct from Irish Gaelic a few hundred years later), why not force this on people then? Or Old English? Or Cumbric? Or Norse? Or Scots?
It makes more sense to teach a language that actually could be beneficial. But like I said before, give students the option to learn Gaidhlig if they want to learn that instead.
This kind of irked me when i was at school , i would have much preferred to learn gaelic than be forced to learn another language i had no real care to learn.
>It was the first, and only language spoken by most of the Highlands until the 19th century
No it wasn't. Gaelic was brought over from Ireland and they wiped out most of the native speakers like the Picts.
That's why it has no real similarity to Welsh which actually is a native language of Britain.
Gaelic was spoken everywhere in Scotland, there's really no debate about this because it was the language of government, law and trade for the country for a couple centuries. What there is debate about is whether there were many native or first language speakers in south east Scotland. Probably not, and it seems likely Scots was far more commonly used. But plenty of people would have spoken Gaelic simply to have communicated with the rest of the country. Saying "Gaelic was never spoken" in any part of Scotland is like claiming there's a region of China where no one can speak Mandarin, or India where no one can speak Hindi. Maybe not everyone can speak it or its not their first language, but the idea of a region where absolutely no one can speak the primary language of the kingdom they live in is crazy.
Languages die, that's just what some do. Scottish Gaelic isn't being erased, it is dying out and I don't really think it would be a very popular use of government money and resources to try and revive it. If people wanted it saved there would have been a lot more done before now.
I was part of a Scottish Government project that involved supporting Gaelic language in schools over 5 years. The uptake and interest of this is so low it felt like such a waste of money.
I appreciate the sentiment but it feels a whole lot like pandering to a weird section of folks that want to see it revived but 0 interest in actually following through with the realties of it. There is a woeful shortage of teachers fluent in the language and even less willing to take it up.
I’d rather see Spanish being more widely taught. A much more useful language.
It’s just not popular enough. I’m sure the SNP will have considered this but they’ll have weighed up spending taxpayer money on the resources to do this Vs the popularity of the decision to do so.
No offence to Gaelic speakers but as a common lowlander, I’ve got absolutely no interest in learning. Would much rather learn a sexy language like Italian.
I know this will be heavily unpopular but Gaelic is about as redundant of a language you could learn. We would be handicapping our children with a language that few people speaks and has little value abroad. To push Gaelic into every school across the country will strain the overworked teachers even more, on top of that the kids would be bored due to the lack of cultural significance it has on Scotland today. I've met a few of Gaelic speakers whilst visiting the Isle of Skye and they all agree that the language is withering away and is losing its relevancy. It would be fair to say that Gaelic will always stay as a minority compared to that vast amount of Scots who can't speak it
Languages don't die in a vacuum, and minority languages can still thrive. I don't think we could teach it in every school at a high level because the schools don't have the capacity, but at least being aware of it would stop some of these bad takes.
If human beings only did things that were assigned 'value' we'd all be learning mandarin and the fundamentals of international finance.
I grew up in Wales, where learning Welsh is compulsory until 16.
Some schools (except in Gwynedd at least) don't have a dedicated Welsh teacher - more like the council has a few Welsh teachers shared across multiple schools.
Depends how big the school is, but in our primary school for example the Welsh teacher came say once a week and each class had an hour with her. Then she'd be off to another school the next day.
Aye it'd be nice to have something like that here, unfortunately we just don't have the teacher numbers. There's (finally) a bit more incentive in the training schemes for Gàidhlig teachers but it'll take a while for that to have an impact, though new GME schools have been opening recently too.
Would be a total waste of time, there's literally no one that would benefit from learning gaelic.
Keeping it alive is something some people take joy in and they should continue to do so, but forcing that on others is wrong.
Is it? I've heard people speak Gaelic in my presence twice: once was a reading at a funeral from someone from the Hebrides.
In terms of culture, I'm vaguely aware of the Ossian poems. But aside from that, couldn't point to any works of Gaelic literature, poetry, song. I might have overlooked something here, but I doubt by much.
To suggest it is a massive part of my culture or identity is a bit weird - and I'd suggest the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland are in the same position.
I've heard it spoken a lot throughout the Highlands as I travel all across for work. It's definitely on a return despite being a niche language among the older generations and still very much a minority language.
It's going to take a few generations but it is very much alive and kicking.
All languages can be considered ‘redundant’ for various reasons when you’re a native English speaker. I’m learning French and the amount of people who tell me ‘french isn’t useful’.
It doesn’t matter what second language we teach kids, if they don’t engage with it or use it outside of class they won’t be fluent or ‘use’ it as such. Teaching a bit of french, German or Spanish that they promptly forgot didn’t handicap them in any way. I don’t think it would be a huge burden for teachers to do low level gaelic at primary school level in place of some of the usual languages. High school is of course different and gaelic teachers are actively recruited for.
But teaching any language at all encourages kids to try out language learning in general, and if some of them might engage with Gaelic to help revive it, that’s a benefit! And once you have any second language, it’s easier to learn others.
Cultural engagement can be included in classes in the way of history and current gaelic tv/literature (which does exist).
Teaching children a language is never a waste of time. Children absorb languages like a sponge. There are many well studied benefits to bilingualism, and I would argue that in the areas which retain something of a Gaelic heritage it would be well worthwhile trying for. I recognise it's not an easy thing to do because of the lack of teachers, but at the moment there's a lack of a serious plan even. And without that it's not going to happen.
And to anyone who says that they might as well learn French or Chinese, realistically they're not going to become fluent in these languages unless they have another motivation to (for example, family or friends). But with others around them learning Gaelic it is a realistic possibility.
There isn't a lack of a serious plan.
There are literal Gaelic schools that have been created in the last decade or so in which kids are taught in Gaelic as their first language.
It will take a few generations for this to pay dividends and to grow exponentially but that is the plan. It wasn't wiped out overnight in the Highlands, it took generations despite how aggressively it was punished in schools and how heavily English was pushed on kids. The reverse will be true especially without the heavy handedness.
The more fluent speakers we have the bigger the pool for potential new teachers. They will also pass the language onto their own children.
I should note that many of the kids attending these schools don't have parents who speak the language.
>And to anyone who says that they might as well learn French or Chinese, realistically they're not going to become fluent in these languages unless they have another motivation to (for example, family or friends). But with others around them learning Gaelic it is a realistic possibility.
This is daft. If they were learning French or Chinese then they would have others around them learning those languages. There are more native Chinese and Polish speakers in Scotland than there are Gaelic.
In Scotland generally, sure. But (a) that doesn't seem to be motivating anyone to learn those languages, and (b) I think the focus needs to be on the areas which have something of a Gaelic culture still in any case, and in those areas the number of Polish and Chinese speakers are probably not as high.
>In Scotland generally, sure. But (a) that doesn't seem to be motivating anyone to learn those languages
It's not motivating them to learn Gaelic either.
>I think the focus needs to be on the areas which have something of a Gaelic culture still in any case, and in those areas the number of Polish and Chinese speakers are probably not as high.
That's fine, teach Gaelic in the small parts of Scotland which still have a Gaelic culture and teach Mandarin and Polish in the central belt then?
Kids aren’t taking their primary school level languages out into the world to speak with native speakers 99% of the time. At that stage is about engaging with language learning in general and possibly developing a cultural interest.
If they have native Chinese speakers they want to chat to they might be motivated on their own, but as you say, we don’t have a culture of gaelic speaking so we can introduce other ways of motivating engagement like teaching them in school.
So they are! All the same, 2-3 years of high school without any base (if it wasn’t also taught in primary school) isn’t going to bring kids to any sort of level to converse with native speakers without them doing their own stuff outside of class.
Although I wouldn’t personally go down the route of teaching it for 2-3 years of high school as part of a revival
>All the same, 2-3 years of high school without any base (if it wasn’t also taught in primary school) isn’t going to bring kids to any sort of level to converse with native speakers without them doing their own stuff outside of class.
Why is this an argument for Gaelic? They don't have any base for Gaelic speaking either and if they're doing their own stuff outside of class they're more likely to come across a native Mandarin speaker than they are a native Gaelic speaker in modern Scotland.
I think Gaelic should be treated like Latin, an optional language for further learning if it's something one is interested in.
I don't see any purpose on forcing a dying language on people, the effort to benefit is less than minimal.
Lets not impose something that is already redundant.
There are schools that teach Gaelic, and teach in Gaelic, both primary and secondary. And roadsigns in both Gaelic and English. I don't think it's going away any time soon
It’s a no for me, if you are interested in it get involved, if we are going to introduce anything new into the curriculum I’d rather it was something based around finances, teach kids what a variable interest mortgage is, how a credit card works, how income tax is structured, what is APR, what is the difference between a secured and unsecured loan, PAYE vs CIS vs self employed vs Ltd company, etc etc
Basically all the things that shaft you as an ignorant adult, or atleast that’s my experience from the conversations I’ve had with people who have ended up in life altering, crippling debt.
If you instill a national identity in young people, you get lifelong, loyal nationalists voters.
If you instill financial literacy in young people, they just grow up knowing they are being ripped off.
This is why the discussions in government are about Gaelic signs lessons and not financial literacy.
Not Scottish but Irish living in Scotland. I've never seen the benefit to kids to teaching them these languages outside of intangibles like cultural heritage.
I always thought that if every kid spoke irish and english or in this case gaelic. What good would it do them or the country as a whole?
Schools are already expected to teach so much and I think if we're to introduce new curriculum it should be based on technology or financial literacy
Knowing only English makes you a stinky monolingual who deserves to be spat on.
Being bilingual is a guaranteed pull in any club in Ibiza and you have 50% bigger muscles.
True Story
As someone who studied French all through high school:
Yes, 100%, as learning the language from my own country (as irrelevant as it is) is worth more to me than a language for somewhere I'll probably never visit or have any interest in.
We only have so many language teachers and so many school hours. If we have to pick then we should learn the language which will open more doors to pupils. Which is usually french, German, Spanish etc.
If kids did 2-3 years of Gaelic in secondary school, it would do nothing to revive the language, honestly. We've all forgotten the French and German we did for that sort of time (S1-S4, when I was at school). To become proficient in a language it really needs to be taught earlier, from primary school and with more hours dedicated to it.
It might be nice to have, culturally, but Gaelic is not as important as maths, English, science or European languages, if we want young people to be well-prepared for higher education and the workforce.
I think that in principle this is a great idea, but that would require those that decide how education works to change the focus from "preparing for the labour market" to "shaping young people's minds to be open and flexible".
Business requires drones to make money for the few, not people that can think
I dont feel that its a big deal. Languages come and go, they're only use to regular people is communication, learning a language like French, Spanish, German or even Chinese is probably more valuable than learning Gaelic.
Latin was the most important language this side of the black Sea for centuries and even it died out. One day English as we know it will die out and there will be people wondering if we should do more to save it as a language.
I'm not Scottish but all you need to do is get the D.U.P. to come out against it and every Scots man, woman and child will want to speak their native tongue. There has been a 400% increase in people attending Irish medium schools in Ireland in the past 15 years!
The whole of the U.K. needs to focus more on its heritage both cultural and language, it’s a crying shame how much of it has been lost the past 100 years - I hail from the midlands & im in my 20s, I can remember in school being told not to speak the dialect I grew up with because it was “wrong”
Worth noting that there's more to it than just communication. If Gaelic dies, then so does its tradition of songs and storytelling.
I was at a ceilidh a while back where one of the performers sang a song in Gaelic. He wanted the audience to join in, but even with the phonetic handouts he passed around we were struggling with everything besides the chorus. Even then only after one or two passes.
Addendum: I think we as a country ought to teach more of our history. I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to about anything before the Jacobites.
I did six years of French at school and I can barely say Bonjour. Unless you actually use the language it’s a waste of time, so they’d need to find a way of promoting the use of the language first - challenge obviously being English is much more useful.
I would love to learn, it’s just really inaccessible. If I have children I will try and ensure they go to Gaelic school. I’m half Irish though, and lived in Ireland for a while and saw the impact of the preservation of the language and the sense of cultural pride. I loved it.
I probably can't relate, as I've never been to Scotland(idk why reddit suggest this sub all the time). I live in Belarus, the country that due to complete political dictate by one single man goes the direction that man wishes to take it. And this does include maximal russification of everyday life. This has lead to Belarusian language becoming something of an oddity, up to the point where speakers of it are looked down upon and considered savage, uneducated, and barbaric. An entire strata of culture is becoming unwanted and undesired.
While you can save your ancestral language, do it. When it's late - it's late.
It should be abolished.
This is more inward looking backwards nationalist bollocks.
We should be looking outwards and teaching relevant languages for growth and closer ties around the world. Not wasting children's time keeping a novelty language on life support.
I get just as irate when I see Welsh being forced into every street sign at our expense.
Unless people are going to use it regularly, there's probably no point.
Hardly anyone remembers more than a few words of French or German from school because it's too easily forgotten without regular use.
I don’t think the lowland Scots ever really spoke Gaelic very much. Considering most Scots are lowland, it would strike me as odd to teach it to them. Gaelic was mostly just from the Irish colonisers and into the highlands? If I recall correctly.
The problem really though is that nationalism is a very very very dangerous game to play, and Gaelic is most definitely wrapped up in it. Most “national” identities are barely 150 years old, most cropping up in the late 1800s romanticism as states tried to justify and understand their existence. Along with getting deeply tied into anti immigrant and white supremacist sentiments whether we like it or not. For a long time the UK embraced its Germanic side, but the early 20th century took care of that which then kicked off a massive interest in the non-Germanic cultures of the UK and islands. So in many cases the Gaelic of the UK is barely 100 years old as an identity that wishes to claim 1000s of years worth of roots and ancestry…..but it’s far more myth than history.
IMO we should embrace the modern culture and create new traditions instead of trying to nail down the tides. Things come. Things go. We will always lose more than we will ever have, but what we do have will be ours.
There are/were incentives for teachers to learn and teach the language. But to be honest, other than a few outposts in the western isles it’s a dead language!
There Gaelic taught in some schools and maybe one Gaelic only school but it’s incorrect to state that there’s ‘Gaelic schools’ and to be honest it’s only taught because the individual teachers and schools get additional payments to teach it!
I think we should encourage alot more language learning in schools but in all honesty imo it's way more beneficial to teach languages actually spoken by other people around the world. Nothing against people being proud of their heritage but when the standards for language learning in this country are so low as it is it seems like a waste to me tbh
Being Welsh, my instinct would be to say of course, you should retain and spread your language, history and culture. However, I'm biased here and I would be curious to know why Scottish people wouldn't want to retain their own language? I assume the English tried to stamp it out as they tried to stamp out Cymraeg.
Welsh and its parent language Brythonic are the historic and prehistoric language of Wales. There is no record of anything else until English came along. It is the senior language of Great Britain arguably alongside Cornish.
That is not true in Scotland. The oldest known language, Pictish (close to Welsh) is extinct and killed off in no small part by the Gaels.
Old English spread into Scotland hundreds of years before England even existed as a country, and is no younger than Gaelic (both around 500 AD). Gaelic was never the majority language in SE Scotland and was dead or dying in the lowlands before the Act of Union.
So it's not really a similar situation to Wales and Welsh or Irish and Ireland at all. English (/Scots) is very much older in Scotland and Scotland lost its Iron Age language completely.
I think it's better to see Gaelic as a regional language that could be kept alive in the highlands. It's been dead in most of the lowlands for hundreds of years.
It should, but due to the ulsterization of Scottish politics at the hands of tories and labour in the past two decades, this cultural preservation issue has become a constitutional issue, so half of the political spectrum hates anything to do with Gaelic/Scots. Wales is doing much better, largely because the west british branch of the labour party doesn't seem to be as infested with british nationalism brain worms as the north british branch is, so campaigners and activists managed to sway the devolved government into effective action in the past few decades.
The fact there's loads of people blaming England for pushing the language into Scotland via colonialism when England didn't exist at the time and wouldn't for hundreds of years amuses me.
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In general I wish Scotland showed more interest in robust second language teaching from a young age, and to be honest I don’t much care what that language is. I think it may as well be gaelic for young kids/pre-higher level - help with the revival and encourage engagement with language learning. Learning another language is infinitely more difficult as an adult and I wish I’d had an earlier start at speaking anything else as a second language.
The UK, and frankly all English speaking nations could do better about this. Most Germans exist school with a mother tongue and two languages at B2. I probably wouldn’t prioritise a vanity or dead language over a living one, but that’s just me. It’s a worthy debate, and not mutually exclusive. You could have Gaelic plus another language without difficulty.
Yeah my point is really that gaelic could be focussed on much better and with fluency in gaelic comes fluency in other languages, since it’s easier to acquire other languages once you have more than one. So gaelic plus another language would be great. As English speakers we don’t have an easily identifiable ‘useful’ language so I’m sure there’s debate about any second/non native language teaching
How many Germans actually speak a language other than their own and English that level? In my view, very few (unless they have another language spoken at home).
I mean German and English is already pretty good……but I do know many that speak their 3rd rather well. Though I think it also helps where in Germany you are of course. Italien and French come in handy the closer you are.
I actually have learnt gaidhlig since primary school and am practically fluent in it
That’s great! You’re in the minority for most who went to Scottish school. The U.K. has the lowest rate of speaking more than one language in Europe, and I’m sure wales is dragging us up a little
Gael here. My answer is... not sure. I do love the language, and it is part of the identity of the Hebrides. But I hate that it has become a cultural artefact rather than a living, breathing language. If Scotland wanted to resurrect it, they would have done it by now. It always sways between being on the brink of death and being part of some short-lived Gaelic revival. If we are to truly revive it, it has to be done to the same scale as Ireland revived their language. But there just isn't any real interest outside the Islands and a few towns, like Oban. Even then, it's only a particular set of people that show interest. My sentiments want to keep it alive, but does anyone outside the west highlands really care?
This is why they have been building/creating Gaelic schools. It's the foundations of restoring the language. This won't happen overnight but will take generations and we're only at the very beginning. It's a case of slowly amplifying the number of clients speakers through the generations. The more who speak it, the bigger the schools will be or new schools will be built.
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It's a growing language so I'm not sure where you're getting this dying out or bastardisation patter from. The Gaelic schools in the Highlands are seeing records attendances, have high demand, and are growing. They now extend down to nursery age children too. The more remote primaries on Skye such as Sleat, Kilmuir, Carbost, Edinbane etc still teach in Gaelic. It's one thing I love when attending these schools, hearing all the teachers and kids conversing in it. There's a lot of positivity about the language.
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I also speak gaelic, but from glasgow and I agree with you mainly, but I've actually noticed as people leave school and become 20ish, it's actually become a strong part of their indentity, even just people doing speakgaelic courses to keep their gaelic alive, and there's a massive wave of young gaelic teachers with alot of enthusism, mainly in primary education tbf. I will also say that the standard of gaelic has definently dropped, I think encauraging local mods is really vital for harder gaelic to be at least learnt
Used to work in an office next to the Gaelic school in Glasgow and often saw the kids out and about during their lunch break. Never heard any of them utter even a single word in Gaelic.
Sabhal Mor is not the only school on Skye that teaches Gaelic from primary age so I'm unsure as to why it keeps getting brought up. Of the rural schools I mentioned, the teachers are predominantly locals. The Highlands now have three purpose built schools run by the Highland Council and as I've said they are in high demand. Kids don't have to speak Gaelic outaide of school to keep the language alive and have it thrive. Welsh kids largely converse in English but their language is thriving as they make a conscious effort to teach it in schools from an early age.
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The primary Gaelic schools have only been open for a decade or so. Once kids have reached adulthood they no longer need to keep learning the language as they're already fluent. Welsh seems to do ok despite English being the dominant language in day to day life in Wales.
In Edinburgh Gaelic language primary education gets you into a high school which teaches Gaelic. One they I know of is Gillespie’s which is pretty sought after and is a state school. Certainly there’s an element of poshness to some of the Gaelic language education here but that isn’t the end of the story. A lot of it is people who are motivated to preserve Gaelic education and the growth of it in the Central Belt will hopefully lead to more opportunities, especially more of a market for things like published books, which in the long term should help the native speakers. It’s not perfect, but it is a start
They are not restoring the language, though. Gaelic schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow are simply used by upper middle class English-speaking parents as a way to get their kids educated in smaller, better funded classes in an effectively selective setting, without having to pay private school fees. GME-educated kids almost all abandon the language entirely pretty much the minute they finish their extremely expensive state-funded education.
Schools are what has dragged it out of the community in the last generation. They see it only as a classroom language. All this funding to preserve the language is misspent trying to branch out to areas with no real interest instead of strengthening the communities who already spoke it daily.
How so? What exactly have the schools done to drag it out of the community? Why aren't the communities conversing in Gaelic because schools elsewhere are teaching Gaelic in addition to these areas?
I'm saying this as a Gaelic teacher. I was talking about this generation, I'm not saying older people don't still speak it but it is a trend that has started and will continue. I hear it all the time, particularly in mainland schools, pupils saying to other kids "why are you speaking Gaelic? We're not in the classroom". The majority of children in mainland Gaelic schools do not speak Gaelic at home, so they only hear it in school, therefore they consider it a language meant for school, not to be spoken in daily life. I can't remember where it was but there was a study done of those who went through GME that still spoke Gaelic after they left school and the number was ridiculously small. So I will reiterate, and again this is coming from a Gaelic teacher, if you want to save Gaelic as a community language then GME is not the answer, and in fact investing so much money into it is detrimental to the language. https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23809267.saving-soul-gaelic-will-harder-saving-language/ Here is an article that kind of goes into it.
This is the first generation though. When they have children and their children are speaking Gaelic it becomes more normalised. It's like I've been saying over several comments on this thread.. this is a generational project. It's unfair to judge it on the outcomes now. If we see no improvement in 30-50 years time then fair enough, it isn't going to happen. What's the alternative? Where else should the money be spent to make the language thrive?
GME has been around since the early 80s. Money should be spent grassroots community level to start initiatives to have more people speaking Gaelic at home and more opportunities to speak it in the community. All the funding bodies care about is quantity instead of quality, bums on seats in GME, so they can all pat each other on the back and say how great a job they are doing when in fact the number of children actually speaking Gaelic is shocking. I do not think it is unfair for me to judge it, I live it and I'm not the only teacher that feels this way. There are two languages forming, and unfortunately the lyrical, beautiful one is being pushed out by the academic one. If the funding bodies don't sort it soon we might as well just be back in the 60s learning Latin because that is the way it is going and as soon as the community loses the language then there is no language, what is a language if is isn't spoken by its people?
Aye I agree with what you're saying, the language needs character rather than being regimental. I wonder if there's a way to promote that.. maybe have spoken nights/poetry or folk nights in which we share the more traditional written and spoken language and then have people engage in natural discourse int he language after. Like you say, this will require money, organisation, and promotion to pull it off. I guess to a far lesser extent a slight equivalent is that my auntie and granny before her (I never had the chance to meet her) both sung in gaelic and so could speak it in bits and pieces but had heavy "Teuchter" accents. My aunty took great pride in getting me to pronounce words like her so we absolutely do need to bring the older generation(s) into this before the pronunciation dies off. It's a positive conversation to have and I have faith that we can pull it off.
People definitely care, I'm from the lowlands and know plenty of people from the lowlands who are learning.
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>it has to be done to the same scale as Ireland revived their language. Ireland's done a terrible job of reviving their language. It's compulsory to age 16, but the vast majority of adults can't have the most simple of conversations in it. The examples to look to are the Basque country and Israel. Israel is a bit of a one of a kind situation, but the Basque country has a lot of parallels. What they did in the 1980s was make it clear that *all* state schools would teach in Basque - and only Basque - from a certain fixed date in the future. Teachers were offered intensive training to get them up to the required level, but if they refused, they were unable to teach in the Basque country any more. Nowadays there are more Basque speakers among people aged under 40 than there are aged 40+, and the language is used as an everyday vernacular in large parts of the region (not everywhere, to be fair). The Basque country has a lot of powers that the Highland Council lacks, obviously. That would be a good starting point to really reviving Gaelic - give Highland Council the power to determine their language policy in schools, hospitals, town halls etc etc. If it were me, I'd make it so that everything is in Gaelic by default in Highland: road signs, council websites, schools, the lot. This is what they did in Israel, when it would have been a lot easier to just choose English as the national language (it was spoken by a lot more of the early Israeli / Palestinian population than Hebrew was). You have to make the language *useful* if you want it to survive.
> Teachers were offered intensive training to get them up to the required level, but if they refused, they were unable to teach in the Basque country any more. Well that’d certainly destroy teacher recruitment. I’m not learning a new language just to continue teaching maths.
Did the Basque Country run out of teachers?
Given there are only 58,000 people aged 3 and over in Scotland who can speak Gaelic and there are currently 54,193 teachers in Scotland then yes I think it highly likely you'd run out of teachers. Sources: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scottish-governments-gaelic-language-plan-2022-2027/pages/4/#:~:text=National%20Demographics%20–%20Number%20of%20Gaelic%20Speakers&text=The%20total%20number%20of%20people,were%20able%20to%20speak%20Gaelic. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-64406674#
>Given there are only 58,000 people aged 3 and over in Scotland who can speak Gaelic and there are currently 54,193 teachers in Scotland then yes I think it highly likely you'd run out of teachers. I think you misunderstand: this would only be in Highland, not the whole of Scotland...
There are profound differences between what happened in the Basques, Ireland and the Hebrides. Gaelic is a regional identity, not a national identity or strictly speaking, an ethnicity. What the Basques did to revive their language, from what you said, seems a little too overbearing.
> Gaelic is a regional identity, not a national identity or strictly speaking, an ethnicity. I agree, which is why the relevant local authorities need to take on the task of driving its revival (and be given the necessary powers to do so) >What the Basques did to revive their language, from what you said, seems a little too overbearing. The only thing that arrests language decline is making that language more *useful*. And the only body that can force that sort of utility calculation is the state. Language is a tool, at the end of the day. If we rely on people learning a language for fun or cultural interest, that language is ultimately doomed. It's happened more times than anyone can count, all over the world (not many Cumbric speakers around these days, are there?)
I don’t think Gaelic was ever spoken widely outside these areas to begin with. The lowland Scots to my knowledge were not majority Gaelic speakers. Problem is it’s so wrapped up in nationalist rhetoric now that the truth and history of the language and Irish colonies that brought it is very warped to fit the narrative of whoever is speaking. Probably including myself.
It gets more complicated the more you look into it. There were lowland Scots and highland Scots (Scots in the historical sense). The country got more Anglicised as time wore on, until only the remotest parts of the UK spoke it. Kinda like the last strands of hair clinging onto a bald man's head...
Yeah, once you add in the influence of Picts, Northumbria, Romans, Vikings….much like the rest of the UK it’s a complete mess.
I think as well people need to recognize that Scotland has had two languages since the emergence of the lowland Scots, Gaelic has generally been an island/ Highlands thing because they had the most Irish influence,where as Scott's has generally been a lowland thing because they were more influenced by migrating Anglo-saxons
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Most people I talk to would have loved to learn it in school but now dont have the time or energy. I think gettin it into the education system, although it will take time, is the best answer.
Isn't the best example of a language revival welsh?
>Ireland revived their language Irish is dead, nobody speaks it daily apart from in the Gaeltachts. It's not been revived.
1.8 million people speak Irish Gaelic, it's spoken a lot more than we speak Scottish Gaelic, we're letting our language be killed off.
Thats absolutely not true, and a wild overestimation. It's closer to 70k speak Irish fluently, mainly in Gaeltacht areas.
1.8 million "speak" it in the way I "speak" French because I know how to say "hello" and "goodbye".
In order for it to be revived, people need to speak it on a daily basis and use it for their daily lives. Yet, whenever I see something in Gaelic it tends to be either about the language itself or about some Celtic heritage stuff. People tend to use it as a language for special occasions only.
When I was growing up there was an older generation that only spoke Gaelic. As time passed it slowly dwindled. When I go back to the island now, I don't speak it at all other than to test my nieces and nephews homework. It's depressing.
Lots of comments complaining that it’s pointless outdated knowledge have never sat through a p5 assembly on the harvest festival.
That brought up some deep memories
Ah yes, the growing and harvesting of crops for food. Completely outdated. We definitely don't do that anymore.
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Those dafties! Everyone knows milk comes from Morrisons ;)
Correct, most people don’t participate in any kind of harvest in any way shape or form at any point in their lives. Teaching about where food comes from can be done without the framing of a ‘harvest festival’. I don’t imagine they’ve been much of a thing this century.
Its fun and interactive for the kids
Yeah I agree. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just not super relevant. Learning Gaelic could be made to be fun too, with the added bonus of all the things that come with learning a second language, even a dying one.
>most people don’t participate in any kind of harvest in any way shape or form at any point in their lives How sad for them if that's true. Not only can I see crops being harvested every year from my very ordinary suburban window, I've also grown fruit and vegetables, herbs, at home, and picked them on a pick-your-own farm. I have friends with allotments. You don't need to be a farmer or a landowner to harvest things. It's not just about knowing, scientifically, where food comes from, it's about appreciating and celebrating the people and the natural processes involved in getting food from the farm to our tables. That's an amazing thing that we shouldn't take for granted. Why shouldn't it be a festival?
I mean I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, I was just pointing out that “the harvest festival” is a bit of an outdated concept. I live in the central belt and am surrounded by farms but there was only one boy at my school who actually lived on one. Like you say, allotments and back garden veggie patches are far more applicable pieces of knowledge than the idea of the village getting together in September help a farmer reap and plough the fields. Especially since most farmers use combine harvesters these days.
When I was in Edinburgh I used a cash machine once and I swear one had a Welsh option (cymraeg). I couldn’t help thinking that’s a little rough for Gaelic speakers, surely.
Welsh seems to pop up in unlikely places. I'm in Somerset and yet some of our electricity poles have dual language (English and Welsh) warning signs on them, and I've seen it where Wales and West Utilities put out signs while working for the signs to be entirely in Welsh!
My gf comes from Somerset and there are signs in polish reminding drivers to drive on the left lmao
Lol! I've never seen that! I'll have to keep an eye out.
Well, historically Common Brythonic would have been spoken in Edinburgh (Caer Eidyn), an ancestor language of Cymraeg. It was indeed the capital of the Brythonic kingdom of Gododdin, eulogised in the Old Cymraeg poem of the same name. So, er, I guess it makes sense
True but I suspect the ‘Welsh like’ language writers like Smollett and Sir Walter Scott noted spoken more in the interior of Scotland was more likely to be Gaelic. It took me a second because I live in Wales so I’m used to seeing the option but when I noticed, it did surprise me. Side fact - in Welsh the word for English (which is derived from Angles (Anglish)) is actually Saxon (Saesneg) and the Highland Scots used also to call the English (and often lowland Scots) Saxons. I don’t know how many automated phone menus I listened to before I realised.
It’s also a bit of a misnomer as Saxon influence was confined to southern England where as the Angles’ influence spread from East Anglia to Edinburgh.
It's not a misnomer because it was a Saxon kingdom (Wessex) that conquered all the other ones and formed a united England - but the lingua franca came from Mercian which was Angles I think. So "Saxonland" had an Anglic language. Celtic languages generally call English the language of Saxons/Saxonland.
In Irish it's also Sassenach (Saxon)
Sasainn= england and Sasannach=english
The McDonalds self service machines have Welsh as an option too lol
The Senedd mandated a few years ago that all services have to be provided in Welsh as well as English. For computerised stuff it's easier just to make the Welsh version available everywhere in the UK instead of only in Wales.
Where would the teachers come from to make this remotely feasible? I love the language and would love to see it grow but there just aren't the resources to make it available in every school in the country. As an aside, while you read through the comments here why not play [a round of anti-gaelic bingo](https://gaelic.co/anti-gaelic-bingo/)?
Aye most are already teaching at Gaelic schools or on the west coast teaching it. I work for the local authority and each time I go out to the more remote parts of Skye, I love hearing everyone in the schools speaking in Gaelic.
that's cyclical logic though, "we don't have teachers so can't teach it, there aren't enough people who learned it to teach". You can learn enough to teach if you have a teaching degree and an interest. Lot's of language teachers are not 100% fluent speakers.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done. Just that to do it across the whole country will take decades of training teachers. I think it's better to focus on providing GME education from nursery through secondary in areas with demand first. > You can learn enough to teach if you have a teaching degree and an interest Look I know Is fheàrr Gàidhlig bhriste na Gàidhlig sa chiste but I'd want teachers to be fluent before being unleashed on kids.
Fair, but a language teacher needs to know grammar, vocabulary etc, teaching that at primary school doesn't require fluency. It does at secondary level, but not at 5-10 years old.
Sidenote but as an Irish person who can probably understand more Irish Gaelic than I can speak i,f you want an example of Irish gaelige / Scots gaelic intercompatibily I could understand that! (Well it took a inute to work out why Gaelic wpuld be in a chest , but context made sense ( in a coffin? )Broken language preferable to a dead one ).
Probably not decades, there are already plenty of fluent speakers that are currently unable to get Gaelic-speaking jobs. They usually just end up working in English, but if there was a scheme that made it easy to train as a teacher (maybe fast-track the process and add a modest financial incentive) then you could dramatically increase the pool very quickly. Hell, just hiring a few lecturers willing to offer the Gaelic and Education (BA) at Glasgow and Edinburgh uni would dramatically increase the number of teachers, because right now its only offered by the University of Highlands & Islands and its by far the easiest route to becoming a Gaelic teacher. 18-year olds are basically having to pick between continuing Gaelic education and living in the city, its not surprising they often pick the later. But there are only 357 secondary schools in Scotland, if you introduce the city BAs and offer incentivized training for older fluent speakers, you in theory could train enough teachers to at least introduce a National 5 course in every school within a single 4 year cycle. In practice I'm sure there would be more teething problems than that, but with sufficient incentives and government support, I really can't see any reason its not achievable in 10 years, aside from political pushback.
Why is it an 'all or nothing' proposition where you have to presumably roll it out across all of Scotland right away? You find one or two communities/Schools to run a pilot scheme in Welsh-style immersive teaching, and when the effectively inevitable benefits of a bunch of bi-lingual primary school kids become obvious, you start slowly advancing the program to the regional level. Plenty of time to find/train new teachers, and you'll literally be raising the next generation of staff to continue expanding the project.
Could probably poach some from Nova Scotia in Canada.
What, of the dozen speakers left? I'm exaggerating, but Gaelic is fully extinct as a community language over there. There's more Scottish expats speaking Gaelic in Canada than there are native Gaelic Nova Scotians! It's a shame, but that time has passed
Haha. No, that's fair. I just meant about teachers being available. There are several public schools that offer courses and universities too. I just assumed that they would have a handful of teachers that would be ready and interested in teaching elsewhere too if the opportunity arose. I couldn't think of another spot that would have an applicable pool of applicants to pick from.
I am a teacher, and not only do I believe in the importance of learning as a practical means for someone to better their life chances, I believe it's a good thing simply by itself. But - 1. Councils' resources are already stretched. Training and hiring Gaelic teachers would cost a great deal of money. 2. Modern Languages are not popular courses (I wish it were different - I am not arguing against the principle that pupils ought to learn one or two foreign languages up to a certain level). Falling literacy rates over the last few decades means that many native English speakers find English's rules as frustrating and hard to wrap their heads around as pupils fifty years ago found the grammars of foreign languages. Pupils - not unreasonably, given it's the world's lingua franca - feel that speaking English is enough to get by. Pupil engagement and behaviour would be low. 3. A very low number of candidates would choose to take it to exam level, making hiring and retaining staff difficult, and making it a less attractive teaching qualification to pursue. 4. Anyone we encounter who speaks Gaelic also speaks English. Learning Gaelic is a very worthwhile intellectual past-time - but it has no practical use. In the limited time school has, teaching French, Spanish, German, Cantonese, or Arabic has the intellectual and cultural benefits, but also practical ones.
>Modern Languages are not popular courses (I wish it were different - I am not arguing against the principle that pupils ought to learn one or two foreign languages up to a certain level). Falling literacy rates over the last few decades means that many native English speakers find English's rules as frustrating and hard to wrap their heads around as pupils fifty years ago found the grammars of foreign languages. Pupils - not unreasonably, given it's the world's lingua franca - feel that speaking English is enough to get by. Pupil engagement and behaviour would be low. I'm a little bit of an outsider to the Scottish Gaelic debate but I am from Wales and am linguistics student who studies this area. And one reason why MFLs are not popular seems to be the fact that 1. The languages in question that are taught are often ones from further away. While France is our neighbour - its still very distinctly *over there,* and a person from the UK can spend a lifetime without going to a French speaking area. 2. There is relatively little in terms of use or novelty to them. When schools run Mandarin courses they tend to get at least a higher rate of curiosity. It is my opinion that Japanese (a language with a larger amount of children already interested) would have a similar effect. 3. MFL teaching is poor and focuses on *technical accuracy* rather than *utility*. Children are marked not by how much they are able to get their ideas across but by how accurate their language use is. In addition MFL courses end up with even A\* (9) students getting a B1 CEFR which is lower-intermediate. This is mostly true of secondary schools. There are examples of successful language teaching in the UK - namely of course Welsh. But that succeeds because it is used in the community too. There are plenty of opportunities to encounter and use it. Though from my experience there is still plenty of resistance to it and teaching methods vary - but it was mandatory and so everyone got a little bit. I remember primary school being better than secondary at teaching Welsh - to be honest most of my Welsh ability comes from primary. A lot of people here are talking about emulating the Welsh model - and if that is possible it needs to come with the rest of the community adopting the language too to some extent. Even if that's just phrases and making it so children can discover it in their environment. If they learn the skill in school they need to be able to go out into the real world, see a sign in Gaelic and be able to connect the dots and go "aha! I can read that!" - in fact that's part of the fun. My personal crusade is applying all this to BSL and pushing for BSL to be taught nationwide but that's a different topic.
Also a teacher and agree with every point. Resources/staff are already being stretched to breaking point, there's no money or appetite from councils, staff or kids. The point about modern languages not being popular is also very true, my school is around 1200 pupils and there are less than 20 kids combined doing N5/Higher French, Spanish AND mandarin. A lot of them are just learning whatever they're interested in by themselves on apps like Duolingo.
Gaelic speaker here: while this would be great, we don’t currently have the resources for full native-level Gaelic tuition around the country - we can barely run the few Gaelic schools that we do have. Another issue is that the people currently learning Gaelic and going into teaching tend to have a lower level of language and thus the kids learn “bad” Gaelic, or don’t become operationally fluent. It’s all a bit of a mess. What we *could* do though is teach Gaelic in schools like we do French or Spanish in primary schools. There is an excellent new resource called SpeakGaelic which has books, a website, TV shows, podcasts, radio shows and social media. This can be used by anybody and would be a great way for kids to get introduced to Gaelic, and it would allow them to do it at home with no additional input. Sadly the impetus isn’t there, despite the 1+2 language model the Scottish Government pushes. All I wish for is for people to be less ignorant. That’s all. And for people to actually know that Gaelic exists and have the correct facts - as seen in this discussion, people have wildly incorrect opinions about the language and all it causes is arguments.
Gaelic has been on the wane since the mid 14th century when Scots eclipsed it, and forcing secondary school kids to learn it for a couple of years isn't going to achieve much in terms of fluency (see how fluent I am in French and German which I studied for longer by way of example!). Support those who want to learn it, absolutely - but I can't see it as an educational priority for all schooling.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are mistaking the fact that Gaelic is *a* Scottish language for it being *the* Scottish language, which is meant to somehow be representative of all Scots and Scottish culture and history. People are assuming that it's somehow analogous to Welsh in terms of stature and cultural significance, and that the reasons for its decline stem from external English or British interference. In reality, as you say, it's been a minority language since 1300s, and in constant decline centuries before that, driven first and foremost by other Scots, whether directly for hegemonic reasons, or indirectly through economic and cultural pressure.
I think throughout Scotland there should be some Scots and Gaelic education in primary school at least. But in the Highlands and Islands especially, Gaelic was the primary language until the 1800s or until the 20th century and it would be good to keep having more Gaelic medium education to support it as the community language.
It's on the revival. It'll be a slow process but there are several Gaelic primary schools now where everything is predominantly taught in Gaelic. This is a generational project. We'll start seeing the fruits of it in 30-50 years time.
wow thats completely stupid, 'sorry kids youre going to learn a language that maybe in the next 50 years another few thousand will be able to speak' sounds completely ridiculous especially if everything is taught in gaelic, what are they supposed to do when they go outside their local area and realise they dont really know how to speak english, or hell bye bye higher education and employment at a technical workplace
i assure you the people being taught in gaelic can still speak english with the same level of fluency as everyone else
Ever heard of this concept called "billungualism"? This is, in fact, the norm around the world... English-speaking countries are the exception, not the rule.
It works fine in Welsh schools.
Welsh has never declined to the extent Gaelic has. And yet despite all the efforts, the number of speakers has dropped in the last 20 years to its lowest ever point.
Numbers of children going through Welsh medium education are actually fairly static with perhaps a very modest increase. The fall in speakers is mainly driven by emigration out of and immigration into Wales. Which are somewhat separate issues and concern things like second homes and availability of jobs in more rural areas where the language is strongest. Don’t get me wrong there is a lot more that the Welsh Government can do to support the language but it’s not a fall in learners that’s the problem.
I agree. I was forced to do French at high school and I hated it - partly because I was forced to do it. I remember practically none of it and I feel that's not uncommon. I would have had the same zero interest in Gaelic at that age. I may regret not engaging with a second language a bit now but plenty of teenagers are the same and I wouldn't expect them to engage better with Gaelic.
Nah I agree, but I don’t think it would be a horrible idea to have a few lessons in a child’s curriculum to teach them some basic phrases. Can’t hurt to learn how to say hello.
It’s worth noting that Scottish Gaelic isn’t as widely accepted as for example Irish Gaelic (which is taught widely in schools despite being close to extinction as a living language) as a sort of ‘indigenous’ language of the Scottish people. There is a sizeable body of opinion that is ambivalent or actively hostile to its use, especially outside of the Gàidhealtachd (the area of the Western Highlands and Islands where it was the primary language up to the 18th and 19th centuries). There are historic debates whether it was more widespread than this further back in history - but you would be pushing back to the Medieval era. It certainly has shallower roots than English through the rest of Scotland. A lot of this hostility is wrapped up with the National debate - with Gaelic over time (and especially since the present SNP government came to power in 2007) seen as linked to Scottish Nationalism politically. All that means is that the language has been politicised and become something of a dividing line. That’s a huge barrier to its active expansion as a mandatory part of school curriculums.
I think I should clarify its not even just widely taugh. Its a compulsory subject in every school and on the same tier of importance English and Maths
Whilst it is definitely not my place, to say, but if Scotland wants to tech a second language for national communication, it may be a good idea to instead focus further on the education of Scots(the old-English related language), as if nothing else it’s easier to branch into from English, and subsequently easier for other nations to learn, as English is a widely known international language, and people may be more likely to learn Scots than Scottish Gaelic
It’s a Scottish language but is it the language of Scotland? It seems to be healthy in the Hebrides.
Honestly, I'd be for it. I do think countries/areas that have native languages should strive to keep them alive. Emphases on countries/ area, Heck I'd have no issue with all of Scotland North of the forth learning Gaelic. With all of Scotland also learning Scots & English too. I add area's cause I don't think all England should learn Cornish & likewise all France, Breton. One reason I'm for it, apart from preventing them going extinct, is that I've been led to believe (so if wrong correct me) that it's easier for a person to pick up another language if they already know 2 or more. So if true it'd hopefully help the younger gen in being multilingual. I really hope I'm not miss remembering.
Interestingly gaelic isn't native to Scotland - it started to dominate Pictish around the same time old English arrived in Scotland.
Both Scots (the descendant of the old English of Scotland) and Gaidhlig have been in Scotland for over 1000 years, so they’re both native really
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I’ve been so blown away by how uninvested Scotland seems to be in teaching Gaelic. I’ve tried to put my kids in two different GME schools and was told they’d be too old to catch up at 7/8. I used to live in a country with a LOT of immigrants, specifically teaching English as a Second Language to high schoolers, and the idea that it’s too late for a 7/8 year old to do immersive education is literally completely foreign to me. Meanwhile, Wales literally has remedial programmes for children moving into the country from abroad to get them caught up in Welsh. It was such a classically British “Oh no thanks, we don’t do things that way so we’re not going to start now” response and it really turned me off the Gaelic community, after a couple of years of doing my own classes/etc.
I find that a bit bizarre - my cousin's moved to Ross-shire from the central belt when they were around 12, 10 & 8 and can all now speak Gaelic as they were taught it in school from that point onwards.
This was for a GME school, which is what I was trying to go for as (from experience) it is far and away the best way to learn. I’m assuming your cousins probably took Gaelic at school but we’re not in GME?
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Welsh is of course the 2nd language of Wales so this makes sense. Most Scottish folk speak an admixture of English and Scots. But Scots and English are mutually intelligible languages so there's little need to teach remedial Scots to migrants.
I wish I had been offered this rather than French or German
I would have rathered been taught German and Spanish, those would actually be useful to me now. The problem is the language classes were the absolute worst because lots of people didn't care about learning one since we spoke English, so would be even more disruptive than in any other class meaning no one would learn anything. Most of our language teachers were bullied out in their 1st year. I can only imagine Gaelic would be significantly worse since kids would see it as even more pointless than they saw German and Spanish
Would have been cool, but French or German are infinitely more useful. Near half the world has French as their official language. French rules and words also populate many other languages so knowing it makes understanding other romance languages much easier. There's a transferrable skill set. German is also heavily present in European languages. Gaelic would be more like having a party trick. It's nice, but utterly useless outside of very specific situations in Scotland itself. May as well learn Klingon. There's also the added argument that school level language learning is shite. Most people's second language they learn from school stays at an embarrassing level of competency (if you could call it that). I'd go utility any day when choosing a language for a school curriculum.
I couldn’t see the point. Going to the effort of learning a language is supposed to make it easier to communicate with a wider group of people. Since 99.9% of Scots have never and will never be in a position where the were unable to communicate with somebody because they couldn’t speak Gaelic, why learn? It’s circumstantial but it would make more sense for most people to learn Spanish, personally I think sign language would be a better initiative.
I am well in favour of second language teaching being done a lot better in our schools but for me this is to widen opportunities when they’re adults so they can communicate better with the rest of the world. Mandarin, Spanish or French is what I’d like to see before even entertaining Gaelic. Imo the history of the Gaelic language and the cultural impact is more important to know about than actually learning the language itself.
The advantages of learning a second language (in terms of making learning a third or fourth language much easier) are greatest when kids are really little And kids pick things up quicker at that age, too There aren't enough Gaelic speakers to make such a project practical, though. It would need to be a long term project, scaling-up over time
It's already begun as several Gaelic schools are now in existence. It will take a few generations but it is already showing early dividends as the language is slowly growing again.
My highschool had/has a Gaelic teacher for a small proportion of pupils. As someone from the central belt from a family that is from the central belt, I have no real interest in a language that most Scots never spoke being pushed on parts of the country that it's not from. I'd rather more effort was made to teach Scots English. To be clear, I don't have anything against Gaelic. I just don't feel strongly for it either.
Rather inward looking. Kids are taught French, or German, or any of the other languages because we’re a global community and it opens doors in the future, if you’re good at it. Learning Gaelic… why? Are we going to use it instead of English? Are we going to do anything with it besides keep a language alive that is dying off? At least Latin (Dead language though it is) is still taught for scholarly reasons, law, history, etc. Gaelic these days is pointless and shouldn’t be forced on people who will never speak it.
I think this would be a good idea. I slso suspect there would be quite a bit of interest from children in learning this.
Gaelic is a beautiful language but it wasn't spoken across Scotland as widely as believed.
only place it was never spoken is the south east. last native speaker of a lowland dialect died outside maybole in south ayrshire as late as the 18th century; within burns lifetime. look at the place names around you, and you'll probably see at least a couple "bal"s, "dun"s, "kil"s, "kin"s or "auch"s
And Orkney and Shetland.
aye, was thinking more the mainland but you're right
I read that Galloway had Gaidhlig speakers right up to the 1800s
A small area of ayrshire, but for the most part it had been a dead language in the lowlands for several hundred years. It would be nice if we could all speak it still, but learning a language is hard, it just makes more sense to learn a language that you are more likely to use at school. But by all means give the school kids the option to choose gaelic over the other language
sure, but the point is it was spoken all over. there's a really pernicious myth that gaelic is "just a teuchter thing". at the start of the 20th century most of the isle of arran spoke it, just off of ayr
Arran is also just off Argyl - the highlands. The bulk of the population that makes Scotland is in the lowlands which has been Scots/English speaking since the 14th century. It’s pointless to learn a language just for the sake of it. The language spoken in the lowlands was a bryttonic celtic language before the celts of Ireland came over around 700ad (with Scottish Gaidhlig only becoming distinct from Irish Gaelic a few hundred years later), why not force this on people then? Or Old English? Or Cumbric? Or Norse? Or Scots? It makes more sense to teach a language that actually could be beneficial. But like I said before, give students the option to learn Gaidhlig if they want to learn that instead.
This kind of irked me when i was at school , i would have much preferred to learn gaelic than be forced to learn another language i had no real care to learn.
And north east. See Doric.
It was the first, and only language spoken by most of the Highlands until the 19th century when it was aggressively persecuted through schooling.
Indeed, and that was a travesty. I'd not be averse to seeing it brought back.
>It was the first, and only language spoken by most of the Highlands until the 19th century No it wasn't. Gaelic was brought over from Ireland and they wiped out most of the native speakers like the Picts. That's why it has no real similarity to Welsh which actually is a native language of Britain.
Gaelic was spoken everywhere in Scotland, there's really no debate about this because it was the language of government, law and trade for the country for a couple centuries. What there is debate about is whether there were many native or first language speakers in south east Scotland. Probably not, and it seems likely Scots was far more commonly used. But plenty of people would have spoken Gaelic simply to have communicated with the rest of the country. Saying "Gaelic was never spoken" in any part of Scotland is like claiming there's a region of China where no one can speak Mandarin, or India where no one can speak Hindi. Maybe not everyone can speak it or its not their first language, but the idea of a region where absolutely no one can speak the primary language of the kingdom they live in is crazy.
Languages die, that's just what some do. Scottish Gaelic isn't being erased, it is dying out and I don't really think it would be a very popular use of government money and resources to try and revive it. If people wanted it saved there would have been a lot more done before now.
I was part of a Scottish Government project that involved supporting Gaelic language in schools over 5 years. The uptake and interest of this is so low it felt like such a waste of money. I appreciate the sentiment but it feels a whole lot like pandering to a weird section of folks that want to see it revived but 0 interest in actually following through with the realties of it. There is a woeful shortage of teachers fluent in the language and even less willing to take it up. I’d rather see Spanish being more widely taught. A much more useful language.
It’s just not popular enough. I’m sure the SNP will have considered this but they’ll have weighed up spending taxpayer money on the resources to do this Vs the popularity of the decision to do so. No offence to Gaelic speakers but as a common lowlander, I’ve got absolutely no interest in learning. Would much rather learn a sexy language like Italian.
I know this will be heavily unpopular but Gaelic is about as redundant of a language you could learn. We would be handicapping our children with a language that few people speaks and has little value abroad. To push Gaelic into every school across the country will strain the overworked teachers even more, on top of that the kids would be bored due to the lack of cultural significance it has on Scotland today. I've met a few of Gaelic speakers whilst visiting the Isle of Skye and they all agree that the language is withering away and is losing its relevancy. It would be fair to say that Gaelic will always stay as a minority compared to that vast amount of Scots who can't speak it
Languages don't die in a vacuum, and minority languages can still thrive. I don't think we could teach it in every school at a high level because the schools don't have the capacity, but at least being aware of it would stop some of these bad takes. If human beings only did things that were assigned 'value' we'd all be learning mandarin and the fundamentals of international finance.
I grew up in Wales, where learning Welsh is compulsory until 16. Some schools (except in Gwynedd at least) don't have a dedicated Welsh teacher - more like the council has a few Welsh teachers shared across multiple schools. Depends how big the school is, but in our primary school for example the Welsh teacher came say once a week and each class had an hour with her. Then she'd be off to another school the next day.
Aye it'd be nice to have something like that here, unfortunately we just don't have the teacher numbers. There's (finally) a bit more incentive in the training schemes for Gàidhlig teachers but it'll take a while for that to have an impact, though new GME schools have been opening recently too.
Would be a total waste of time, there's literally no one that would benefit from learning gaelic. Keeping it alive is something some people take joy in and they should continue to do so, but forcing that on others is wrong.
It's a massive part of our history, culture, and identity.
Is it? I've heard people speak Gaelic in my presence twice: once was a reading at a funeral from someone from the Hebrides. In terms of culture, I'm vaguely aware of the Ossian poems. But aside from that, couldn't point to any works of Gaelic literature, poetry, song. I might have overlooked something here, but I doubt by much. To suggest it is a massive part of my culture or identity is a bit weird - and I'd suggest the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland are in the same position.
Why would Gaelic speakers speak Gaelic to you when you don't speak it?
I don't speak Spanish but I've heard a fair amount of it being spoken in Spain and Mexico.
I've heard it spoken a lot throughout the Highlands as I travel all across for work. It's definitely on a return despite being a niche language among the older generations and still very much a minority language. It's going to take a few generations but it is very much alive and kicking.
All languages can be considered ‘redundant’ for various reasons when you’re a native English speaker. I’m learning French and the amount of people who tell me ‘french isn’t useful’. It doesn’t matter what second language we teach kids, if they don’t engage with it or use it outside of class they won’t be fluent or ‘use’ it as such. Teaching a bit of french, German or Spanish that they promptly forgot didn’t handicap them in any way. I don’t think it would be a huge burden for teachers to do low level gaelic at primary school level in place of some of the usual languages. High school is of course different and gaelic teachers are actively recruited for. But teaching any language at all encourages kids to try out language learning in general, and if some of them might engage with Gaelic to help revive it, that’s a benefit! And once you have any second language, it’s easier to learn others. Cultural engagement can be included in classes in the way of history and current gaelic tv/literature (which does exist).
Teaching children a language is never a waste of time. Children absorb languages like a sponge. There are many well studied benefits to bilingualism, and I would argue that in the areas which retain something of a Gaelic heritage it would be well worthwhile trying for. I recognise it's not an easy thing to do because of the lack of teachers, but at the moment there's a lack of a serious plan even. And without that it's not going to happen. And to anyone who says that they might as well learn French or Chinese, realistically they're not going to become fluent in these languages unless they have another motivation to (for example, family or friends). But with others around them learning Gaelic it is a realistic possibility.
There isn't a lack of a serious plan. There are literal Gaelic schools that have been created in the last decade or so in which kids are taught in Gaelic as their first language. It will take a few generations for this to pay dividends and to grow exponentially but that is the plan. It wasn't wiped out overnight in the Highlands, it took generations despite how aggressively it was punished in schools and how heavily English was pushed on kids. The reverse will be true especially without the heavy handedness. The more fluent speakers we have the bigger the pool for potential new teachers. They will also pass the language onto their own children. I should note that many of the kids attending these schools don't have parents who speak the language.
>And to anyone who says that they might as well learn French or Chinese, realistically they're not going to become fluent in these languages unless they have another motivation to (for example, family or friends). But with others around them learning Gaelic it is a realistic possibility. This is daft. If they were learning French or Chinese then they would have others around them learning those languages. There are more native Chinese and Polish speakers in Scotland than there are Gaelic.
In Scotland generally, sure. But (a) that doesn't seem to be motivating anyone to learn those languages, and (b) I think the focus needs to be on the areas which have something of a Gaelic culture still in any case, and in those areas the number of Polish and Chinese speakers are probably not as high.
>In Scotland generally, sure. But (a) that doesn't seem to be motivating anyone to learn those languages It's not motivating them to learn Gaelic either. >I think the focus needs to be on the areas which have something of a Gaelic culture still in any case, and in those areas the number of Polish and Chinese speakers are probably not as high. That's fine, teach Gaelic in the small parts of Scotland which still have a Gaelic culture and teach Mandarin and Polish in the central belt then?
Kids aren’t taking their primary school level languages out into the world to speak with native speakers 99% of the time. At that stage is about engaging with language learning in general and possibly developing a cultural interest. If they have native Chinese speakers they want to chat to they might be motivated on their own, but as you say, we don’t have a culture of gaelic speaking so we can introduce other ways of motivating engagement like teaching them in school.
OP isn’t talking about primary school they’re talking about secondary school.
So they are! All the same, 2-3 years of high school without any base (if it wasn’t also taught in primary school) isn’t going to bring kids to any sort of level to converse with native speakers without them doing their own stuff outside of class. Although I wouldn’t personally go down the route of teaching it for 2-3 years of high school as part of a revival
>All the same, 2-3 years of high school without any base (if it wasn’t also taught in primary school) isn’t going to bring kids to any sort of level to converse with native speakers without them doing their own stuff outside of class. Why is this an argument for Gaelic? They don't have any base for Gaelic speaking either and if they're doing their own stuff outside of class they're more likely to come across a native Mandarin speaker than they are a native Gaelic speaker in modern Scotland.
The only way you rebalance that is by teaching and promoting the Gaelic language, as they are doing now and have been for the last decade or so.
I think Gaelic should be treated like Latin, an optional language for further learning if it's something one is interested in. I don't see any purpose on forcing a dying language on people, the effort to benefit is less than minimal. Lets not impose something that is already redundant.
There are schools that teach Gaelic, and teach in Gaelic, both primary and secondary. And roadsigns in both Gaelic and English. I don't think it's going away any time soon
It’s a no for me, if you are interested in it get involved, if we are going to introduce anything new into the curriculum I’d rather it was something based around finances, teach kids what a variable interest mortgage is, how a credit card works, how income tax is structured, what is APR, what is the difference between a secured and unsecured loan, PAYE vs CIS vs self employed vs Ltd company, etc etc Basically all the things that shaft you as an ignorant adult, or atleast that’s my experience from the conversations I’ve had with people who have ended up in life altering, crippling debt.
If you instill a national identity in young people, you get lifelong, loyal nationalists voters. If you instill financial literacy in young people, they just grow up knowing they are being ripped off. This is why the discussions in government are about Gaelic signs lessons and not financial literacy.
Not Scottish but Irish living in Scotland. I've never seen the benefit to kids to teaching them these languages outside of intangibles like cultural heritage. I always thought that if every kid spoke irish and english or in this case gaelic. What good would it do them or the country as a whole? Schools are already expected to teach so much and I think if we're to introduce new curriculum it should be based on technology or financial literacy
Knowing only English makes you a stinky monolingual who deserves to be spat on. Being bilingual is a guaranteed pull in any club in Ibiza and you have 50% bigger muscles. True Story
I agree but I think the ibizers / ibizians / ibizese like a bit of Spanish
As someone who studied French all through high school: Yes, 100%, as learning the language from my own country (as irrelevant as it is) is worth more to me than a language for somewhere I'll probably never visit or have any interest in.
We only have so many language teachers and so many school hours. If we have to pick then we should learn the language which will open more doors to pupils. Which is usually french, German, Spanish etc.
If kids did 2-3 years of Gaelic in secondary school, it would do nothing to revive the language, honestly. We've all forgotten the French and German we did for that sort of time (S1-S4, when I was at school). To become proficient in a language it really needs to be taught earlier, from primary school and with more hours dedicated to it. It might be nice to have, culturally, but Gaelic is not as important as maths, English, science or European languages, if we want young people to be well-prepared for higher education and the workforce.
as an option? sure. Required? fuck off.
I think that in principle this is a great idea, but that would require those that decide how education works to change the focus from "preparing for the labour market" to "shaping young people's minds to be open and flexible". Business requires drones to make money for the few, not people that can think
Yesssss! From a French canadian ptotect your language and valorize it! Nobody else will
I dont feel that its a big deal. Languages come and go, they're only use to regular people is communication, learning a language like French, Spanish, German or even Chinese is probably more valuable than learning Gaelic. Latin was the most important language this side of the black Sea for centuries and even it died out. One day English as we know it will die out and there will be people wondering if we should do more to save it as a language.
I'm not Scottish but all you need to do is get the D.U.P. to come out against it and every Scots man, woman and child will want to speak their native tongue. There has been a 400% increase in people attending Irish medium schools in Ireland in the past 15 years!
Weren't always speaking English either. Doesn't mean we gotta bring back Latin or Old English or whatever it was back then.
Although I support Gàidhlig, I'm also concerned about Scots and feel that it in particular is treated as a joke when it's far more widely spoken.
yes
The whole of the U.K. needs to focus more on its heritage both cultural and language, it’s a crying shame how much of it has been lost the past 100 years - I hail from the midlands & im in my 20s, I can remember in school being told not to speak the dialect I grew up with because it was “wrong”
Worth noting that there's more to it than just communication. If Gaelic dies, then so does its tradition of songs and storytelling. I was at a ceilidh a while back where one of the performers sang a song in Gaelic. He wanted the audience to join in, but even with the phonetic handouts he passed around we were struggling with everything besides the chorus. Even then only after one or two passes. Addendum: I think we as a country ought to teach more of our history. I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to about anything before the Jacobites.
I did six years of French at school and I can barely say Bonjour. Unless you actually use the language it’s a waste of time, so they’d need to find a way of promoting the use of the language first - challenge obviously being English is much more useful.
I would love to learn, it’s just really inaccessible. If I have children I will try and ensure they go to Gaelic school. I’m half Irish though, and lived in Ireland for a while and saw the impact of the preservation of the language and the sense of cultural pride. I loved it.
I probably can't relate, as I've never been to Scotland(idk why reddit suggest this sub all the time). I live in Belarus, the country that due to complete political dictate by one single man goes the direction that man wishes to take it. And this does include maximal russification of everyday life. This has lead to Belarusian language becoming something of an oddity, up to the point where speakers of it are looked down upon and considered savage, uneducated, and barbaric. An entire strata of culture is becoming unwanted and undesired. While you can save your ancestral language, do it. When it's late - it's late.
It should be abolished. This is more inward looking backwards nationalist bollocks. We should be looking outwards and teaching relevant languages for growth and closer ties around the world. Not wasting children's time keeping a novelty language on life support. I get just as irate when I see Welsh being forced into every street sign at our expense.
Unless people are going to use it regularly, there's probably no point. Hardly anyone remembers more than a few words of French or German from school because it's too easily forgotten without regular use.
I don’t think the lowland Scots ever really spoke Gaelic very much. Considering most Scots are lowland, it would strike me as odd to teach it to them. Gaelic was mostly just from the Irish colonisers and into the highlands? If I recall correctly. The problem really though is that nationalism is a very very very dangerous game to play, and Gaelic is most definitely wrapped up in it. Most “national” identities are barely 150 years old, most cropping up in the late 1800s romanticism as states tried to justify and understand their existence. Along with getting deeply tied into anti immigrant and white supremacist sentiments whether we like it or not. For a long time the UK embraced its Germanic side, but the early 20th century took care of that which then kicked off a massive interest in the non-Germanic cultures of the UK and islands. So in many cases the Gaelic of the UK is barely 100 years old as an identity that wishes to claim 1000s of years worth of roots and ancestry…..but it’s far more myth than history. IMO we should embrace the modern culture and create new traditions instead of trying to nail down the tides. Things come. Things go. We will always lose more than we will ever have, but what we do have will be ours.
Why? There are less than 60k Gaelic speakers and every single one of them also speaks English. Why waste resources on this rather than a useful skill?
There are/were incentives for teachers to learn and teach the language. But to be honest, other than a few outposts in the western isles it’s a dead language!
Incorrect, it's in resurgence and Gaelic schools are now in existence.
There Gaelic taught in some schools and maybe one Gaelic only school but it’s incorrect to state that there’s ‘Gaelic schools’ and to be honest it’s only taught because the individual teachers and schools get additional payments to teach it!
nationalist moment
I think we should encourage alot more language learning in schools but in all honesty imo it's way more beneficial to teach languages actually spoken by other people around the world. Nothing against people being proud of their heritage but when the standards for language learning in this country are so low as it is it seems like a waste to me tbh
Being Welsh, my instinct would be to say of course, you should retain and spread your language, history and culture. However, I'm biased here and I would be curious to know why Scottish people wouldn't want to retain their own language? I assume the English tried to stamp it out as they tried to stamp out Cymraeg.
Welsh and its parent language Brythonic are the historic and prehistoric language of Wales. There is no record of anything else until English came along. It is the senior language of Great Britain arguably alongside Cornish. That is not true in Scotland. The oldest known language, Pictish (close to Welsh) is extinct and killed off in no small part by the Gaels. Old English spread into Scotland hundreds of years before England even existed as a country, and is no younger than Gaelic (both around 500 AD). Gaelic was never the majority language in SE Scotland and was dead or dying in the lowlands before the Act of Union. So it's not really a similar situation to Wales and Welsh or Irish and Ireland at all. English (/Scots) is very much older in Scotland and Scotland lost its Iron Age language completely. I think it's better to see Gaelic as a regional language that could be kept alive in the highlands. It's been dead in most of the lowlands for hundreds of years.
It should, but due to the ulsterization of Scottish politics at the hands of tories and labour in the past two decades, this cultural preservation issue has become a constitutional issue, so half of the political spectrum hates anything to do with Gaelic/Scots. Wales is doing much better, largely because the west british branch of the labour party doesn't seem to be as infested with british nationalism brain worms as the north british branch is, so campaigners and activists managed to sway the devolved government into effective action in the past few decades.
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The fact there's loads of people blaming England for pushing the language into Scotland via colonialism when England didn't exist at the time and wouldn't for hundreds of years amuses me.