Meme #2: Gaelic in the Vernacular Community

glinda asked: I’d like your opinions about the recent controversy around the whole Gaelic in the Vernacular Community book. Does it tell us anything useful about the state of the language? How does it look from the perspective of urban adult Gaelic learners outside the Gaidhealtachd? ( ie is it remotely relevant to you and your classmates?)

This is such a big and good and important question, and I have been thinking about it a lot. It finally occurred to me that rather than feel like I have to write a whole dissertation on it and then not write anything at all, I’m going to make some random observations and hope that those are interesting.

(for background: Gaelic in the Vernacular Community is the product of a several-year study recently published that sets out that Gaelic as a community language will be dead within ten years. It has raised a lot of questions about whether the Gaelic revitalisation movement, which has been wildly successful on some metrics but has often focused on places and people at some distance removed from the remaining Gaelic-speaking communities, has really achieved its purpose.)

(Where I come at this: a Gaelic learner with some personal connections to the language but certainly not from a family that has/had any speakers, and I’m not myself from the Highlands or islands. I have a Gaelic-speaking community, though (including glinda, of course, who knew she’d get a wall of text in asking me this question!) and I call myself a speaker as well as a learner because I choose to use the language in my day-to-day life, notwithstanding my complete lack of fluency.)

Here are the random observations:

* Ultimately, I think the postcolonial lesson is this: it’s always too late. Gaelic as a community language has been dying since the early seventeenth century, and in some ways it was too late even then. If I can be a complete dick about it and quote myself for a minute: "Relearning it is possible; decolonisation of the mind is possible. But [we] have been changed, first by the forgetting and the relearning. What is left is post-glacial, a landscape irrevocably altered." You know? I wasn't actually talking about Gaelic there, but I kind of was, and anyway it's too late, and there's nothing we can do about it.

* Gaelic’s decline in its heartlands is also a function of the loss of an old way of life. It’s not just the language that’s dying; it’s an old world. This is the bit where I got worried about possibly having to write a dissertation to say anything at all on this, but the decline of the language can’t be untangled from everything else about colonisation: poverty, clearances, land loss, lack of education and mobility, urbanisation, gender and history. So while I do agree that more could be done for the vernacular communities - I really do! I feel like that’s not coming across, I really do think that - in some ways there’s no way to reverse the damage to the language in a way that solely focuses on the language.

* Part of the criticism is about the modern lexis that has been created for the language that didn’t exist when it was solely a vernacular (the word I almost used there was “sanskritisation” of the language, which, another story). But actually I do feel strongly about that. I have one Gaelic-speaking friend who is always trying to smooth off my rather formal Gaelic and make it more colloquial (“what we actually say!”), which I really do appreciate, but I still believe a living language needs a formal and literary register. If we don't want the language to be “just” a language of house and home (and I'm not saying that’s not valuable; languages without hearth and home become Sanskrit and Latin) then we need to outfit it for the public sphere. If we have to lapse into English for, say, "equality and diversity policy”, then are we saying that those things are only important through the coloniser’s lens?

* (Now I come to think of it, this is exactly the same reasoning for as preserving it as a language of a community. To really be a living language, it has to be the language of all everyday life, going to the shops and tweeting at your friends and doing your taxes and all.)

* If we do lose it as a community language, leaving only a language of heritage and of revival (like Cornish and Manx) then that will be a tragedy. But if this is the choice we get, between a world with no Gaelic and a world with Gaelic - then there’s no contest. There’s nothing noble about refusing what we have left.

* Finally: I have paid for lessons where I can, of course. But the vast majority of the Gaelic I have has come to me for free, from the friends who found out I loved it and took it upon themselves to give it to me as a gift. I have another friend who talks a lot about creating a “native space” for the language, places where it’s spoken, even if that space is as small as one table at a party or one night in a coffee shop, once a week. (Tuesdays, 6pm, Caffe Nero in Covent Garden, you’re welcome.) I think there’s something precious and beautiful and kind of awful about a language that is treasured and cherished in such small increments.

Sin an òraid bheag a th’ agam. A bheil i feumail, cudromach, ’s docha nach eil. But that’s my opinion for what it’s worth, and tapadh leat airson a' cheist seo.

I’m going to answer your other question as well, cos that was very depressing.

On a lighter note, what’s the silliest/most charming encounter you’ve had with Gaelic in the wild - perhaps the least likely place you’ve encountered the language?

Lake Tekapo, Aotearoa (!) A. and I were on the South Island in 2017 and came across a little statue of a collie that had been raised as a monument to the local sheepdogs, and they’d inscribed it with "Beannachdan air na cù caorach”! I was so charmed.


(If you want to ask me something, you still can.)