Scottish Gaelic: dismal perspectives
Autor: Márcio Sena | Publicado: 2011-11-07T06:45:00-08:00




When
compared with other Celtic languages, the Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) is on a disadvantaged
position. While the Irish language is an official language of a country and the
Welsh share the role of administrative and legal language with English, the
Scottish is acknowledge only as an autochthonous minority language (the
definition comes from a Europe Union Treaty). 



It is not
as strange as it may look like. The central and southern regions of the nation
(the center of the political and economic power) were anglicized already during
the Norman invasions by the Saxon courts who fled of the conquerors (cf.
Bailey, R. “The Conquest of English” in Greenbaum, S. The English Language Today. Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English,
1985). The Scottish Lowlands became culturally English, utterly forsaken the
celtic roots, that were banished to the northern Highlands. 



Nowadays,
there are little more than 50 thousand native speakers of Gaelic and less than
100 thousand speakers with any degree of ability in the language (at 2001 census, cf. General Registers Office's Gaelic Report).
The Gaelic is spoken by less than 2% of Scottish population. But the Scottish
Gaelic is not necessarily a language doomed to extinction. There are revival
measures taking place at this moment.



In the
politic front, the SNP (Scottish National Party), the current majority in the Scottish Parliament aproved the
Gaelic Language Act, that
orders the creation of a “Language Board”, i.e.&nbsp;a language authority in the model of
the Welsh Language Board. (Still, the Scottish is not yet mandatory even for
public administration).



Crest of the Scottish Parliament and logo of the Scottish National Party. 

(Source: respective websites)





In the
cultural front, Scotland is living a retaking of fictional prose written in
Gaelic. An example is the Ùr-Sgeul
project (about this project, see the article Challenge and opportunity for Gaelic prose in the twenty-firstcentury,&nbsp;by John Storey, 2009).



Some
efforts are less organized and systematic, but, because of that, more dynamic.
One of these cases is the use of quite old-fashioned technology to keep contact
between Scots inside and outside the British Islands: the usenet group
Scottish Culture.
The article Online, Offline and Beyond
(hays, 2008) explains how the interaction through this group helps
Scottish-Canadians to build a Scottish imaginary and a Scottish identity.



Although,
as relevant as these efforts may be, the survival of a minority language relies
heavily on the weight of Institutions (Smith, 2003), the formal education above
them all.&nbsp; The law researcher&nbsp;Rhona K. M. Smith shows
in her paper Mother Tongue Education and the Law (op. cit) an overview of the
legal shelter offered to Gaelic by Scotland, United Kingdom and Europe Union.
The commonest access to Gaelic learning is as a “foreign language”, i.e. it is
one of the options of mandatory second language in some schools (along with
languages such as French, German and Spanish). Smith, though, recommends&nbsp;full
bilingual education for both children whose native language is Gaelic and
children whose native language is English. A hardly plausible goal, due to
resource difficulties (it would demand huge investments and there are few
teachers able to teach in Gaelic) and also because many Scots probably do not think they owe any allegiance to Gaelic.

NOTE: Some of the
articles mentioned here deal also with a language called “Scotis”. This is a
language related to English, i. e., a non-Celtic language and not approached
here because of that.

EXTRA MATERIAL

- Scene from the movie Trainspotting question Scottish Nationalism associated with the rite of visiting the Mountains of the Highlands.
- "An Eala Bhàn"&nbsp;or "The White Swan", Gaelic song&nbsp;by Julie Fowlis﻿