6 ms·

Survival of Scottish Gaelic in doubt

43 points by DanBC 6y ago

beaner 6y ago
Make learning it a requirement for immigration. If the locals want to preserve it without their own effort, they can sell it in exchange for living in their country.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Countries can make language learning a requirement for immigration when they’re already attracting a large number of immigrants; it’s not uncommon to see work permits in rich European countries list fluency in the official language as a requirement. This naturally reduces the level of immigration, but that might be an acceptable trade off if you’re already an attractive country. But is Scotland really attracting enough immigrants to make that a requirement? If a country isn’t already an attractive spot for immigration, such requirements would effectively bring immigration to a complete and utter stop.
  - corty 6y ago
    The other question would be, would that really change anything? There are only few speakers of Gaelic among the natives, you may hear it on the hebrides, but the rest only speaks English or Scots. Teaching immigrants Gaelic that they will immediately be unable to use is pointless.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      If Scotland was attractive for immigrants, it would do a lot. Such a requirement would reduce immigration, but it would also rapidly increase the population of Gaelic speakers. That being said, I find it highly unlikely that there is a country that both has a country with a dying language with enough demand for immigration that immigrants would be willing to revitalize the local language. That combination seems possible, but highly improbable.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Fluency in Gaelic would be a pointless requirement thought, since the point is that very few locals speak Gaelic. Gaelic is only really spoken on the west coast, and even then very sparsely and mainly by older people. I don't like the idea of a language dieing out, but realistically I don't see Gaelic going any other way; any opportunity for a Gaelic renaissance has long since past. Disclaimer: I'm Scottish
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      I think Gaelic has finally fallen below the necessary threshold for survival; all that remains is for the last native speakers to age out of the population. There are a couple of languages that have or are going through this process on mainland Europe, including Occitan, Bavarian, and Franconian. The creation of the modern nation state and globalization have been very hard on non-major languages.
      - GordonS 6y ago
        I agree - it was on borrowed time since the 1600's when it was forbidden, and we were apathetic in modern times. A few futile efforts were made, which never seemed serious even in their conception. Scots Gaelic is all but dead. Realistically, it would be a very tough sell to try to cling on any longer - as you mentioned, globalisation has taken a toll on languages. Personally, my father spoke basic Gaelic, and his parents spoke it as a second language to English, so I don't feel particularly sentimental about it.
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        The only chance Gaelic has is the separation of Scotland from the United Kingdom. You occasionally see old languages come roaring back when a group of people is split back out from a larger political entity that they’d joined. This basically happened to modern Czech in the 1800s, with the elites rushing to revive a language that had been losing out locally to German. But that ... is a much bigger ball of wax than just Gaelic.
- yunruse 6y ago
  Interesting idea of selling the language. Paying people to learn a language in their own time might be a brilliant initiative – it would generate a lot of intrigue, for one, and it may well be useful as an aid for those who are poor.
- simias 6y ago
  If locals don't speak it what's the point? They'll reverse to English as soon as they are here. It's not like they're going to speak in within their families. They'll learn just enough to pass the entry test and that'll be the end of it. It's very hard to learn a language, it's even harder to force people to learn it if they don't want to. Integrating yourself into your country of adoption is very hard, forcing immigrants to learn a minority language would make it even harder. Can you imagine if, say, France asked Syrians refugees to learn Breton instead of French? That would be insane.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    It'd definitely be an interesting turn of events to see Scottish Gaelic kept alive by immigrant communities that needed to learn it, and then just kept using it because other immigrants also spoke the language.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  I don't like those tricks. The Netherlands has a 'inburgeringsexamen', which requires you to know all kinds of crap about our country and details about royalty which ordinary dutch people would not know and would not care for. Teach immigrating people practical things, local customs and ways in which the norms differ from elsewhere if you want them to feel at home faster, don't use them to act out your pet peeves and favorite anachronisms.
  - beaner 6y ago
    I agree with your sentiment. But I'm also hesitant to simply throw ideas like this out the window. To an extent I feel like learning a language and getting in touch with the history of a new place can help to put the other things you mentioned into context, amplify the sense of closeness with the new culture, and potentially result in better integration even if the language is archaic.
neurobashing 6y ago
Apparently Gaelic has been dying for quite some time. David Mitchell has a rant on the topic from 10 years ago https://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo https://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo
- frabbit 6y ago
  Before ranting David Mitchell would be wise to learn the difference between: - Gallic == of, or pertaining to France - Gaelic == the dialect of Irish spoken in Scotland - An Gaeilge (or just 'Irish' seeing as he's an English speaker) == the dialect of Irish spoken in Ireland Also, although I like David Mitchell's comedy (Peep Show in particular) I doubt that Scottish people are terribly interested in English people's opinions on whether their language should be destroyed. Still, it's probably good for the next independence referendum.
ruairidhc 6y ago
Scottish Gaelic has been proclaimed dying for as long as I remember. Despite my name being Gaelic (I am Scottish), the amount of "public" (tax) money that has been poured into the language by our devolved government (>£28 million/year) is appauling. The phrase "that which is falling should also be pushed" comes to mind. Edit: typo
- jfim 6y ago
  28 million GBP a year seems pretty small, budget-wise. How much is that per capita?
  - jrmg 6y ago
    £5.27 (~7.86 USD)per Scottish resident, or £488 (607.78 USD) per resident speaker of Gaelic, if you go by Wikipedia’s population statistics. [Edit: or, if you go by the article’s 11000 active speakers number, £2545, 3170 USD]
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The Scottish budget is £34B. So Scotland is spending 0.08% of their budget on Gaelic education, which seems pretty inconsequential.
  - daleharvey 6y ago
    Worth noting that the budget for "Gaelic" is part of education, ie 24m or so is spent on standard schooling which happens to be done in Gaelic
- prerok 6y ago
  So, do you feel that the money has been misappropriated? I mean, should it have been spent differently (for the same cause)? I am asking because I understand the issue that you feel regarding spending the money but do you think that it should not have been spent in this cause at all?
- alexitorg 6y ago
  How much do they spend on Scots? It seems odd to teach the south eastern half of the population Gaelic, if their ancestral language is Scots.
mixedCase 6y ago
Do we need every language in use to survive in an everyday setting? Latin is dead, and yet it still permeates much of the world in some form or another. It's important that we document and keep a good record of the language, the culture it accompanies and any other relevant context; I think this is obvious to most people. But to force people who don't naturally want to learn the language to do so for sentimental reasons doesn't sound like the way to preserve it as a source of joy.
- kmm 6y ago
  > Latin is dead I know what you mean, but I've always found that such a curious expression. There's an unbroken line of native speakers being taught by other speakers from every person native in French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, ... to a person speaking some variant of Latin. By that definition, every single language from more than a thousand years ago is dead. It seems to me Latin is more alive than ever, with about a billion speakers, it's just that they don't all quite understand each other.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  The majority of people learning languages are not doing it because they naturally want to. The vast majority of language learning is by humans orally teaching children, who have no say in the matter. If we left it up to desire alone, Latin study would die off very quickly as the majority of those who learn latin are required to, I would've taken more STEM instead of latin if I had the option. The root reason Latin didn't die is because it's a very historically influential language, whereas Scottish Gaelic is a small, regional dialect of a small, regional language that didnt have an influential empire associated with it. Gaelic is a nice cultural relic but it is not functionally useful to most young Scots.
  - bpodgursky 6y ago
    An interesting quirk of the US education system is that Latin is the only place most children ever learn formal grammar -- I never learned anything about subjunctives, the accusative case, intransitive verbs or the like in an English class. To be honest, I probably would have been fine without it (like the vast majority of US students who don't learn Latin). But it was certainly an interesting insight into English grammar structure in a way I would have missed otherwise.
Ologn 6y ago
On the island of Ireland, there are only three places where people regularly speak Gaelic in conversation, all of which are way at the west coast away from Dublin - in Munster, in Connacht and in Ulster. My mother's parents happen to be from the Ulster Gaeltacht, which is centered in Gweedore. I was speaking to an older relative who still lives there. She told me after the 2008 Irish banking crisis, all the local Allied Irish Bank branches there closed down, with the closest branch then 20 km away - which is still the case. The closest branch after that was and is 50 km away. Not a great harbinger for the vitality of the Gaeltacht.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- frabbit 6y ago
  By coincidence I was just watching an 8 year old Teilifís na Gaeilge (TG4) program in which the protagonist attempts to travel the length and breadth of Ireland speaking only 'as Gaeilge'. The scenes in which he attempts to get state-run tourist services to communicate with him in one of the official lanaguages of Ireland are painful. In particular his visit to the prison cell in which his grandmother (one of the 1916 revolutionaries) was incarcerated starts off badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk
- I_complete_me 6y ago
  In Ireland we are taught Irish in school from about 4years to 17 years. Most people leave school with a hatred of Irish and the fact that it is compulsory. If there is ever a research study being done to find ways to get people to NOT learn their native language, Ireland is a great source of material.
pessimizer 6y ago
I would guess that because the Scottish accents are so distinct (to the point of being unintelligible to many English speakers unless the speaker is making an effort rather than just speaking in a relaxed manner) and well known, it provides a lot of the identity that the effort to preserve Scottish Gaelic needs to rely on. And Scottish accents don't seem to be weakening much.
- phonypc 6y ago
  Worth noting the Scots language is also a thing, separate from Scottish English and Gaelic.
- sweeneyrod 6y ago
  Gaelic speakers actually tend to have very clear accents in English (in comparison to typical Glaswegians), possibly because many of them learned English as a second language in school.
- maaarghk 6y ago
  It's a separate thing really, the English accents in the western isles are completely, totally different than the one you're thinking of. It is itself unintelligible to many people from Glasgow :)
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I think the other part of it is that Scottish culture really has had its heyday since mixing with (middle) English. The proudest Scottish language is on the continuum between Scots and English.
daleharvey 6y ago
Its quite curious seeing this headline, Duolingo recently added Gaelic and alongside the Scottish Independence movement it seems at least within my bubble to be having somewhat of a revival, 396k active learners @ https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/gd/en/Learn-Scottish-Gaelic https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/gd/en/Learn-Scottish-Gaelic including a large amount of people I know, I havent started yet but have been tempted
- maaarghk 6y ago
  The headline does feel surprising but then it goes on to mention on the ground research that people who learn the language the "normal" way (i.e. from parents and the community) are the population in scope for the study.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The definition of a language being “living” or “dead” is centered around native speakers. I would bet that a tiny percentage of Gaelic duolingo learners will ever use it in conversation.
- prerok 6y ago
  Personal anecdote: I have had the privilege of meeting a person teaching Gaelic as a second language. I think we can still learn a lot of nuances of expression from dying (or dead) languages and they will always provide us with insights for those willing to learn. That said, I think there is no artificial way in preventing a language from dying. If everybody in your neighbourhood speeks a different language then it's near impossible to cling to a different language.
tyingq 6y ago
Are there any similar articles about Gaelic in Ireland? I'm curious where it stands as a language.
sys_64738 6y ago
Do they teach this language in British schools like they teach Irish Gaelic in Irish schools?

43 points by DanBC 6y ago

Make learning it a requirement for immigration. If the locals want to preserve it without their own effort, they can sell it in exchange for living in their country.

ashtonkem 6y ago
Countries can make language learning a requirement for immigration when they’re already attracting a large number of immigrants; it’s not uncommon to see work permits in rich European countries list fluency in the official language as a requirement. This naturally reduces the level of immigration, but that might be an acceptable trade off if you’re already an attractive country. But is Scotland really attracting enough immigrants to make that a requirement? If a country isn’t already an attractive spot for immigration, such requirements would effectively bring immigration to a complete and utter stop.
- corty 6y ago
  The other question would be, would that really change anything? There are only few speakers of Gaelic among the natives, you may hear it on the hebrides, but the rest only speaks English or Scots. Teaching immigrants Gaelic that they will immediately be unable to use is pointless.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    If Scotland was attractive for immigrants, it would do a lot. Such a requirement would reduce immigration, but it would also rapidly increase the population of Gaelic speakers. That being said, I find it highly unlikely that there is a country that both has a country with a dying language with enough demand for immigration that immigrants would be willing to revitalize the local language. That combination seems possible, but highly improbable.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Fluency in Gaelic would be a pointless requirement thought, since the point is that very few locals speak Gaelic. Gaelic is only really spoken on the west coast, and even then very sparsely and mainly by older people. I don't like the idea of a language dieing out, but realistically I don't see Gaelic going any other way; any opportunity for a Gaelic renaissance has long since past. Disclaimer: I'm Scottish
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I think Gaelic has finally fallen below the necessary threshold for survival; all that remains is for the last native speakers to age out of the population. There are a couple of languages that have or are going through this process on mainland Europe, including Occitan, Bavarian, and Franconian. The creation of the modern nation state and globalization have been very hard on non-major languages.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      I agree - it was on borrowed time since the 1600's when it was forbidden, and we were apathetic in modern times. A few futile efforts were made, which never seemed serious even in their conception. Scots Gaelic is all but dead. Realistically, it would be a very tough sell to try to cling on any longer - as you mentioned, globalisation has taken a toll on languages. Personally, my father spoke basic Gaelic, and his parents spoke it as a second language to English, so I don't feel particularly sentimental about it.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        The only chance Gaelic has is the separation of Scotland from the United Kingdom. You occasionally see old languages come roaring back when a group of people is split back out from a larger political entity that they’d joined. This basically happened to modern Czech in the 1800s, with the elites rushing to revive a language that had been losing out locally to German. But that ... is a much bigger ball of wax than just Gaelic.
yunruse 6y ago
Interesting idea of selling the language. Paying people to learn a language in their own time might be a brilliant initiative – it would generate a lot of intrigue, for one, and it may well be useful as an aid for those who are poor.
simias 6y ago
If locals don't speak it what's the point? They'll reverse to English as soon as they are here. It's not like they're going to speak in within their families. They'll learn just enough to pass the entry test and that'll be the end of it. It's very hard to learn a language, it's even harder to force people to learn it if they don't want to. Integrating yourself into your country of adoption is very hard, forcing immigrants to learn a minority language would make it even harder. Can you imagine if, say, France asked Syrians refugees to learn Breton instead of French? That would be insane.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  It'd definitely be an interesting turn of events to see Scottish Gaelic kept alive by immigrant communities that needed to learn it, and then just kept using it because other immigrants also spoke the language.
jacquesm 6y ago
I don't like those tricks. The Netherlands has a 'inburgeringsexamen', which requires you to know all kinds of crap about our country and details about royalty which ordinary dutch people would not know and would not care for. Teach immigrating people practical things, local customs and ways in which the norms differ from elsewhere if you want them to feel at home faster, don't use them to act out your pet peeves and favorite anachronisms.
- beaner 6y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. But I'm also hesitant to simply throw ideas like this out the window. To an extent I feel like learning a language and getting in touch with the history of a new place can help to put the other things you mentioned into context, amplify the sense of closeness with the new culture, and potentially result in better integration even if the language is archaic.

neurobashing 6y ago

Apparently Gaelic has been dying for quite some time. David Mitchell has a rant on the topic from 10 years ago https://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo https://youtu.be/OvlQXPNwrqo

frabbit 6y ago
Before ranting David Mitchell would be wise to learn the difference between: - Gallic == of, or pertaining to France - Gaelic == the dialect of Irish spoken in Scotland - An Gaeilge (or just 'Irish' seeing as he's an English speaker) == the dialect of Irish spoken in Ireland Also, although I like David Mitchell's comedy (Peep Show in particular) I doubt that Scottish people are terribly interested in English people's opinions on whether their language should be destroyed. Still, it's probably good for the next independence referendum.

ruairidhc 6y ago

Scottish Gaelic has been proclaimed dying for as long as I remember. Despite my name being Gaelic (I am Scottish), the amount of "public" (tax) money that has been poured into the language by our devolved government (>£28 million/year) is appauling. The phrase "that which is falling should also be pushed" comes to mind. Edit: typo

jfim 6y ago
28 million GBP a year seems pretty small, budget-wise. How much is that per capita?
- jrmg 6y ago
  £5.27 (~7.86 USD)per Scottish resident, or £488 (607.78 USD) per resident speaker of Gaelic, if you go by Wikipedia’s population statistics. [Edit: or, if you go by the article’s 11000 active speakers number, £2545, 3170 USD]
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The Scottish budget is £34B. So Scotland is spending 0.08% of their budget on Gaelic education, which seems pretty inconsequential.
- daleharvey 6y ago
  Worth noting that the budget for "Gaelic" is part of education, ie 24m or so is spent on standard schooling which happens to be done in Gaelic
prerok 6y ago
So, do you feel that the money has been misappropriated? I mean, should it have been spent differently (for the same cause)? I am asking because I understand the issue that you feel regarding spending the money but do you think that it should not have been spent in this cause at all?
alexitorg 6y ago
How much do they spend on Scots? It seems odd to teach the south eastern half of the population Gaelic, if their ancestral language is Scots.

mixedCase 6y ago

Do we need every language in use to survive in an everyday setting? Latin is dead, and yet it still permeates much of the world in some form or another. It's important that we document and keep a good record of the language, the culture it accompanies and any other relevant context; I think this is obvious to most people. But to force people who don't naturally want to learn the language to do so for sentimental reasons doesn't sound like the way to preserve it as a source of joy.

kmm 6y ago
> Latin is dead I know what you mean, but I've always found that such a curious expression. There's an unbroken line of native speakers being taught by other speakers from every person native in French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, ... to a person speaking some variant of Latin. By that definition, every single language from more than a thousand years ago is dead. It seems to me Latin is more alive than ever, with about a billion speakers, it's just that they don't all quite understand each other.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
The majority of people learning languages are not doing it because they naturally want to. The vast majority of language learning is by humans orally teaching children, who have no say in the matter. If we left it up to desire alone, Latin study would die off very quickly as the majority of those who learn latin are required to, I would've taken more STEM instead of latin if I had the option. The root reason Latin didn't die is because it's a very historically influential language, whereas Scottish Gaelic is a small, regional dialect of a small, regional language that didnt have an influential empire associated with it. Gaelic is a nice cultural relic but it is not functionally useful to most young Scots.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  An interesting quirk of the US education system is that Latin is the only place most children ever learn formal grammar -- I never learned anything about subjunctives, the accusative case, intransitive verbs or the like in an English class. To be honest, I probably would have been fine without it (like the vast majority of US students who don't learn Latin). But it was certainly an interesting insight into English grammar structure in a way I would have missed otherwise.

Ologn 6y ago

On the island of Ireland, there are only three places where people regularly speak Gaelic in conversation, all of which are way at the west coast away from Dublin - in Munster, in Connacht and in Ulster. My mother's parents happen to be from the Ulster Gaeltacht, which is centered in Gweedore. I was speaking to an older relative who still lives there. She told me after the 2008 Irish banking crisis, all the local Allied Irish Bank branches there closed down, with the closest branch then 20 km away - which is still the case. The closest branch after that was and is 50 km away. Not a great harbinger for the vitality of the Gaeltacht.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
frabbit 6y ago
By coincidence I was just watching an 8 year old Teilifís na Gaeilge (TG4) program in which the protagonist attempts to travel the length and breadth of Ireland speaking only 'as Gaeilge'. The scenes in which he attempts to get state-run tourist services to communicate with him in one of the official lanaguages of Ireland are painful. In particular his visit to the prison cell in which his grandmother (one of the 1916 revolutionaries) was incarcerated starts off badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk
I_complete_me 6y ago
In Ireland we are taught Irish in school from about 4years to 17 years. Most people leave school with a hatred of Irish and the fact that it is compulsory. If there is ever a research study being done to find ways to get people to NOT learn their native language, Ireland is a great source of material.

pessimizer 6y ago

I would guess that because the Scottish accents are so distinct (to the point of being unintelligible to many English speakers unless the speaker is making an effort rather than just speaking in a relaxed manner) and well known, it provides a lot of the identity that the effort to preserve Scottish Gaelic needs to rely on. And Scottish accents don't seem to be weakening much.

phonypc 6y ago
Worth noting the Scots language is also a thing, separate from Scottish English and Gaelic.
sweeneyrod 6y ago
Gaelic speakers actually tend to have very clear accents in English (in comparison to typical Glaswegians), possibly because many of them learned English as a second language in school.
maaarghk 6y ago
It's a separate thing really, the English accents in the western isles are completely, totally different than the one you're thinking of. It is itself unintelligible to many people from Glasgow :)
microcolonel 6y ago
I think the other part of it is that Scottish culture really has had its heyday since mixing with (middle) English. The proudest Scottish language is on the continuum between Scots and English.

daleharvey 6y ago

Its quite curious seeing this headline, Duolingo recently added Gaelic and alongside the Scottish Independence movement it seems at least within my bubble to be having somewhat of a revival, 396k active learners @ https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/gd/en/Learn-Scottish-Gaelic https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/gd/en/Learn-Scottish-Gaelic including a large amount of people I know, I havent started yet but have been tempted

maaarghk 6y ago
The headline does feel surprising but then it goes on to mention on the ground research that people who learn the language the "normal" way (i.e. from parents and the community) are the population in scope for the study.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The definition of a language being “living” or “dead” is centered around native speakers. I would bet that a tiny percentage of Gaelic duolingo learners will ever use it in conversation.
prerok 6y ago
Personal anecdote: I have had the privilege of meeting a person teaching Gaelic as a second language. I think we can still learn a lot of nuances of expression from dying (or dead) languages and they will always provide us with insights for those willing to learn. That said, I think there is no artificial way in preventing a language from dying. If everybody in your neighbourhood speeks a different language then it's near impossible to cling to a different language.

tyingq 6y ago

Are there any similar articles about Gaelic in Ireland? I'm curious where it stands as a language.

sys_64738 6y ago

Do they teach this language in British schools like they teach Irish Gaelic in Irish schools?