An introductionAncient Celts before Modern CeltsModern Celtic identity and languageIrish Language: from Gaeltacht to the dream of bilingualismWelsh language: The city, the country and the colonyScottish Gaelic: dismal perspectivesManx Gaelic: its many revivalsCornish: Identity issuesBreton: the "French Cousin"Some conclusions Whencompared with other Celtic languages, the Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig) is on a disadvantagedposition. While the Irish language is an official language of a country and theWelsh share the role of administrative and legal language with English, theScottish is acknowledge only as an autochthonous minority language (thedefinition comes from a Europe Union Treaty). It is notas 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 duringthe 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 theceltic roots, that were banished to the northern Highlands. Nowadays,there are little more than 50 thousand native speakers of Gaelic and less than100 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 ScottishGaelic is not necessarily a language doomed to extinction. There are revivalmeasures taking place at this moment.In thepolitic front, the SNP (Scottish National Party), the current majority in the Scottish Parliament aproved theGaelic Language Act, thatorders the creation of a Language Board, i.e. a language authority in the model ofthe Welsh Language Board. (Still, the Scottish is not yet mandatory even forpublic administration).Crest of the Scottish Parliament and logo of the Scottish National Party. (Source: respective websites)In thecultural front, Scotland is living a retaking of fictional prose written inGaelic. An example is the Ur-Sgeulproject (about this project, see the article Challenge and opportunity for Gaelic prose in the twenty-firstcentury, by John Storey, 2009).Someefforts 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 contactbetween Scots inside and outside the British Islands: the usenet groupScottish Culture.The article Online, Offline and Beyond(hays, 2008) explains how the interaction through this group helpsScottish-Canadians to build a Scottish imaginary and a Scottish identity.Although,as relevant as these efforts may be, the survival of a minority language reliesheavily on the weight of Institutions (Smith, 2003), the formal education abovethem all. The law researcher Rhona K. M. Smith showsin her paper Mother Tongue Education and the Law (op. cit) an overview of thelegal 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 isone of the options of mandatory second language in some schools (along withlanguages such as French, German and Spanish). Smith, though, recommends fullbilingual education for both children whose native language is Gaelic andchildren whose native language is English. A hardly plausible goal, due toresource difficulties (it would demand huge investments and there are fewteachers able to teach in Gaelic) and also