Survival of Scottish Gaelic in doubt | Hacker News Reader

Survival of Scottish Gaelic in doubt

rte.ie

43 pointsDanBC50 comments

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.

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

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.

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 including a large amount of people I know, I havent started yet but have been tempted

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.

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.

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.

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.

Worth noting the Scots language is also a thing, separate from Scottish English and Gaelic.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

28 million GBP a year seems pretty small, budget-wise. How much is that per capita?

£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]

The Scottish budget is £34B. So Scotland is spending 0.08% of their budget on Gaelic education, which seems pretty inconsequential.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never had the chance to take Latin in school, but I became interested in historical languages later in life (I’ve self-studied middle egyptian, neo-Babylonian, and Greek) and found the following book to be very helpful.

Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0813218667/

> Latin is dead

Latin isn't dead. School children all around the world still learn it. It's still taught at universities. It's still used as the living language of the Catholic Church. I wouldn't be surprised if Latin is fairly high up the list of second-languages people learn.

Latin has no native speakers, which is what defines a dead language.

Latin is a dead language by definition:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinct_language

It is not extinct though, which I guess is the point of your post ;)

School children learning latin is very high on the list of pointless drudgery our school system imposes on our children. We do waste lots of money, teachers and childrens' lifetime and attention.

Learning a language is a skill; it’s been shown that you learn your second foreign language much easier than your first. Teaching students a years worth of Latin and then transitioning to another living language is actually a fairly effective teaching strategy.

You might as well teach multiple living languages. Using a dead to teach language learning is a waste of a good opportunity.

The first language is lost; there’s no need for it to be “useful”. In some ways it’s mildly preferable for it to be a language that no student is likely to return to, but that is incredibly unlikely no matter what the first language is.

Then again, given the incredibly low level of bilingual native born Americans, one should probably examine the purpose of second language education given that it basically doesn’t stick.

My first language at school was english, same as for the majority of german children. It stuck sufficiently for me to talk to you right now.

My second language, Latin, didn't really stick, I couldn't order a meal if I were starving in latin...

> 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.

Latin is not a good comparison in this case.

Latin is a dead language, but it never died. It slowly evolved into Late Latin, then Proto-Romance, then free of the unifying influence of the Roman Empire the languages started becoming mutually unintelligible across long distances and evolved into their own things, eventually becoming Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan etc... I over-simplify of course, but that's the idea.

At no point was Latin replaced by anything else. If you had a time machine and went to Rome, then started to slowly rewind back in time you'd slowly see the language morphing back into Latin. If you did that in Paris, you'd hear the same thing[1].

On top of that Latin was the lingua franca for science and arts for over a thousand years. Through that route many words were loaned back into other languages, sometimes forming doublets of words having a different meaning but coming from the same Latin word through different routes. Take English "chair", coming from Latin "cathedra" (seat) through Old French and "cathedral" coming from... the same word, also through Old French but this time taking a detour through the ecclesiastic language.

Gaelic's situation is utterly different. It hasn't evolved organically into a different language that eventually became different enough as to be mutually unintelligible, instead it's being replaced. It also has very little chance to survive as a lingua franca like Latin because the language that replaces it already does that better too. It's not a high prestige language that's used by many 2nd language speakers like Latin was and English is.

[1] As a side note, that's why I can't stand ultra-prescriptivists. When a fellow French speaker starts harping on about how the "kids can't speak right" and the usual reactionary crap I usually ask them why they feel that way when they speak such a broken mess of a low dialect of Latin themselves. I mean if it doesn't have ablatives and deponent verbs it's not a real language as far as I'm concerned.

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