Reviving Gaelic

The decline of Gaelic in Scotland has been uniform across the whole country for hundreds of years now. According to The Herald about 1% of the population of Scotland speaks Gaelic today. The map to the left indicates the concentration of Gaelic speakers in Scotland in 2001. It is interesting to note how in the Western Isles the majority of the population still speak Gaelic. The preservation of Gaelic in the Western Isle could possibly be attributed to the isolation of the farming communities that are present in that area that have retained a similar culture over the centuries. Ewan Innes suggests that much of the decline of Gaelic was caused by the growth of formal education. As more material was present in English than in Gaelic, there was a push for education in English in order to access these resources.

Now in many parts of Scotland there is a push in the opposite direction to restore the Gaelic Language. In 2005, the Scottish Parliament passed the Gaelic Language Act that officially recognized Scottish Gaelic as an official language of Scotland. Within the last couple of days Glasgow released their own plan to promote Gaelic in their city and schools. Their plan includes redoing signs throughout the city to reflect both the English and Gaelic languages. More importantly, however, the plan includes a second Gaelic school in the city. They hope to detach the bad stigma that many people associate with speaking Gaelic because it was not included as a part of the higher education system.

Their plan in ernest is to completely reverse the process that led Scottish Gaelic to its diminished state. Where as once society saw Gaelic as an uneducated form of speech, now the government hopes that Gaelic will be a study of it's own. At the moment the question that comes to mind, however, is whether or not the government can artificially construct social pressures that can bring a language back in its natural form. The government's efforts are nobel however as they try to preserve the culture that they see as intrinsically connected to Gaelic. The Herald also notes the opposition to this revival is based on the financial cost to institute all these changes. In order to really make this act effective the government will estimates that it will have to spend £21.7 in 2010-11. The Scottish government has made a huge statement by passing this expensive bill. To them preserving the Gaelic language will preserve the culture attached to it and that is worth millions of man-hours and euros.