Gaelic discussed by Royal Society of Edinburgh

LSI Director, Professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin gave a talk entitled “Present but not counted: addressing the societal condition of the Gaelic vernacular community in the islands” at the RSE’s “Islands Present” event in Stornoway. Gaelic’s place in the community was also highlighted in a presentation from the North Uist Historical Society.

Professor Ó Giollagáin’s paper presents key data from The Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community: A Comprehensive Sociolinguistic Survey of Scottish Gaelic (Ó Giollagáin et al. 2020) in the context of its societal vulnerability. Despite being subject to various forms of institutional support and official recognition, the vernacular Gaelic group in Scotland is approaching societal collapse. This paper analyses the effectiveness of the official dispensation for the Gaelic language communities as strategic policy supports to resist the assimilation to English-speaking norms in the last remaining social geographies of the Gaelic vernacular communities (Ó Giollagáin et al. 2020; Ó Giollagáin et al. 2007; Ó Giollagáin and Charlton 2015; Taylor 2016; MacKinnon 2011; Ó Giollagáin and Ó Curnáin 2016; Ó Curnáin 2016; Ó Giollagáin and Caimbeul, 2021; Ó Curnáin and Ó Giollagáin 2023). We argue for an alternative strategic approach to the conceptual limitations of promoting minority aspirational bilingualism without sufficient regard for societal processes of minority subordination and disempowerment. The paper suggests a more productive strategic approach to protecting the societal presence of minority-language groups and to sustaining the cultural diversity that they contribute to the world.

You can see the live presentation in the RSE video of the full Saturday morning session below, in which it starts at 02:58:57. A written summary has also been published in the Stornoway Gazette.

Also available to view in the same video (at 48.33) is the earlier presentation, with discussion, from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath on “A survey of community wellbeing, heritage, and sustainability”. This reports on local work by CEUT, with support from the LSI via CIALL alongside other university partners, in which the place of Gaelic is seen as a key factor in considerations of community wellbeing.