Recognition and Retrenchment

With impending legislation on official status for Gaelic in Scotland's new Parliament, the critical point is, can this now save the language? What conditions are necessary for the continuance of a living Gaelic speech-community in Scotland? In other Celtic speech-communities in our islands official recognition and supportive policies of various kinds have given some sort of boost to the language in terms of maintenance of numbers of speakers and have encouraged new domains of usage. Without such measures there might be no indigenous speech-community today in the Irish Gaeltacht, nor the stabilisation in numbers in the Welsh language-group as shown by recent censuses - with demonstrable advances in Welsh-language education and communications media. Hopes are high that 'secure status' will turn the corner for Gaelic and arrest its rapid and seemingly inexorable plunge into extinction as a community language of everyday life

The contemporary demographic situation of these languages is shown in the population pyramids accompanying Tables 1 - 6. The population structure for Irish shows a bulge at the base, indicating a potentially healthy vitality. We know of course that all is far from well in the Gaeltacht today and its prospects for maintenance are affected by many internal and extraneous factors. (1) In the remainder of the state it is clear that the advances in knowledge of Irish stem from its place in education. Without any substantial domains in other aspects of life this alone cannot produce a truly bilingual society.

The case of Welsh may be more productive. The population structures show similarities with Irish. The bulge amongst young people is greater outwith the language-heartland, indicating the education-led regeneration which is going on. The Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and 1992 gave Welsh equal validity with English within Wales, but even before this legislation, there was a strong determination for the language to be passed on and used in substantial areas of public life.

Gaelic shows little of this. Although education-led bulges amongst young people were evident in the 1971 and 1981 censuses, these flattened out in the 1991 census despite the impetus towards Gaelic-medium education from 1985 onwards. Since 1991 there has been further development of Gaelic-medium education. This and 'secure status' are the principal hopes for saving the language. But the situation is now acute, and without an overall strategy and more thorough-going and appropriately targetted measures, present policies are unlikely to achieve Irish levels of success - let alone the levels of Welsh.

The Gaelic Crisis

Recent surveys have indicated the rapidity with which Gaelic is being superseded by English even within the family. This situation is illustrated by the results of the Euromosaic survey 1994-95 - the first national Gaelic-usage sample survey ever attempted. Its results for family usage are illustrated in Figures 1 and 2. These indicate reported language-usage within the family over three generations, and graphically show the weakness of Gaelic amongst present-day parents and especially their children. Even within the fior-Ghaidhealtachd itself. This may to a large extent be explained by the census analysis of Gaelic within family structures illustrated in Figures 3 and 4. The extent of marriage and family-formation across the bilingual divide resulted in 1991 in only one Gaelic speaker in three living in a family all of whose members speak the language. In Wales this situation is more readily addressed by supports such as Welsh-language education, communications media, and other institutions reproducing the language even more successfully where only one parent is Welsh-speaking, than where both parents are Gaelic-speaking.

Earlier surveys and community studies undertaken by the author indicate rapid intergenerational decline in usage and knowledge of Gaelic. Some results are illustrated in Tables 7 and 8 and its accompanying Figure 5. This situation deserves to be much better appreciated by local authorities and central government, but there is little indication that they have much beyond a vague and unquantified impression of the problem, buoyed up with the hope that the present provision of ad hoc policies will in some way work the trick. They are highly unlikely to do so.

Education as the Answer

Since 1985 Gaelic medium education has made great progress. This is illustrated in Tables 9 - 11. In the school year just concluded (1998/99) there were 56 primary units educating 2,449 pupils through the medium of Gaelic. An estimated 155 teachers are involved in this sector. However between 1981 and 1991 there was an average annual net loss of 1,333 Gaelic speakers - or 1,527 if the 1981 population definition is used. In order to achieve Welsh levels of success the system will need to be expanded at least four-fold to recruit an intake of 1,500 annually into Primary One and continue to build up to a total of at least 10,000 over the seven primary years. This will require at least 675 effectively Gaelic-speaking teachers to operate the system. These considerations need to be appreciated by education authorities, Scottish education policy-makers and Scottish teacher education. This level of provision did not come about overnight in Wales - but will it ever come about in Scotland?

Since 1982 the Gaelic playgroups Comhairle nan Sgoiltean Araich has made considerable progress. In the last year for which figures are available (1996/97) the organisation was overseeing 144 pre-school groups providing for 2,550 children. This together with 3 education authority nurseries with 59 children was effecting a level of provision matching the rate of language-loss. Were this level to be maintained throughout schooling, it could be regarded as potentially regenerating the language-group demographically. But it isn't. Numbers in pre-school fail to translate into Primary One intake. And neither do the numbers in Gaelic-medium primary units follow on into Gaelic secondary streams. In this last case such streams have only begun to develop since 1994/95 in the wake of an official report into Gaelic education which concluded that Gaelic-medium secondary provision was 'neither desirable nor feasible', and that 'availablity of teachers of quality... will be a continuing obstacle' (2) - which indeed it will be until official reports make recommendations to address the problem.

Until Gaelic-medium education is regarded as a system and is developed by coherent policies which take all aspects into account: pre-school, primary, secondary, teacher supply, recruitment and training, the lack of system will fail to deliver what is hoped from it. The only part of the system which has functioned at the requisite level, pre-school, has been under-funded and has been faced with periodic crisis. The present government has transferred funds from the voluntary to the public sector which has produced a down-turn in proactive voluntary groups and recruitment, with a lack of correspondence from reactive and poorly recruiting public sector groups. What has been announced as support for Gaelic has been the reverse.

Teacher supply is crucial for the continued expansion of Gaelic-medium education. Census data indicate that in 1991 there were then about 1,850 Gaelic-speaking teachers in Scotland. (3) Some recruitment from this number into Gaelic-medium education may be possible, but most will be committed to other career paths. Initial teacher education recruiting from amongst the numbers of today's Gaelic-speaking young people is unlikely to be able to produce the numbers required unless non-native Gaelic-speakers are regarded as a potential solution. Such do exist already and are regarded as a suitable stopgap for want of native-speakers. They will cease even to be this if the word gets out that - despite whatever your commitment and calibre - unless you are a native speaker promotion may well elude you. Gaelic education could learn from Wales how to attract and to train non-native-speakers into such service. Gaelic education will not succeed in Scotland unless this is effectively addressed.

However Gaelic education does show some successes and strengths. Highland Region and Council have developed successful bilingual and Gaelic-medium schooling over many years. This has shown up in successive census returns. The numbers of Gaelic speakers aged 3-15 has increased from around 1,600 in 1971 to 1,800 in 1981 and to 2,000 in 1991. Areas with Gaelic-medium schooling show some vitality of Gaelic speaking youngsters compared with areas without. However, the authority is experiencing acute difficulties in teacher supply to Gaelic-medium schooling. Unless it can attract both native and non-native-speaking Gaelic-medium teachers and promote both equally, will its continuing successful impetus show up in the 2001 census returns - or suffer reverse.? A figure of 2,500 may be hoped for. A reversal to 1,750 may be the result.

In Western Isles, despite its earlier bilingual policies it made a slowish start with Gaelic-medium schooling. In the school year just concluded (1998/99) only some 643 of its 2,449 primary pupils were being educated through the medium of Gaelic - or 26.3%. On falling school rolls this figure has been increasing by only about 1% annually in recent years. The numbers of Gaelic speakers amongst young people aged 3-15 has fallen from around 4,400 in 1971 and 1981 to 2,500 in 1991 - a drop from just over two-thirds of the whole age-group to just under one-half. This process will not be reversed by present policies. All that can be hoped from the present provision of Gaelic-medium education is that it may slow the process slightly if we are lucky. In order to reverse the process and enable all its children to achieve fluency, policies similar to those in the main Welsh-speaking education authority areas would need to be adopted. These authorities provide language development not only in the language which the child brings to its schooling but in the other language of the bilingual community as well.

What future for the language-community?

The prospects of regeneration through Gaelic-medium playgroups and schooling are being rapidly overtaken by massive demographic loss of speakers. The nature of this loss can be assessed through analysis of survey and census data. Official rhetoric and aspirations of language development agencies may be failing to appreciate the scale and nature of this 'demographic deficit'. Without adequate understanding of the problem, effective policies will not be capable of being applied in time, and a point of no return will be very shortly evident.

In Scotland we shall need not only 'secure status' for the language - which is the present priority - but a national strategy based upon an understanding of current realities and trends. Without a substantial base in family and community life, the language will rapidly cease to be spoken. We need new initiatives in research to find out what turns people on to speaking language and what turns them off. Ideally some form of language commission will be desirable to stimulate, direct and oversee this. A national strategy should inform policy-making and this needs to be concerted between central and local government, enterprise, media, arts and education. In this last respect I have argued for a Gaelic aquisition agency to co-ordinate the various policies - or lack of them - at the different levels of aquisition: pre-school, primary and secondary schooling, community, adult, further and higher education. These fields comprise the area for language status-planning. Others have argued the needs for language corpus-planning, such as a Gaelic Academy, in providing for the lexical and other linguistic needs of a modernising language extending into new domains of people's lives.

However, all these considerations raise the problem of community in a rapidly globalising and post-modernising age. On what basis can a living minority language group be maintained and what indications are there of feasible principles of social cohesion in the forthcoming millenium? We have means to hand which we never had before and these could be made to work for us rather than against us. The indigenous minority languages of our islands have faced extinction over a long period and have shown quite surprising tenacity. Against all the adversities Irish, Welsh and Gaelic do still exist as community languages and have not as yet gone the way of Cornish and Manx, which nevertheless still maintained themselves until comparatively recently. In the European Union smaller member-state languages such as Dutch and Swedish, are already fearful for their futures and we may find allies here. Even French and German have shown unease faced with the inexorable advance of English. They might still rely on numbers and 'muscle' but they too may soon have to make common cause with Breton, Basque, Occitan, Frisian, Sorb, and the rest.

Basic concepts of community in the social sciences actually came out of the Gaelic experience. Adam Ferguson, from then Gaelic-speaking Logierait laid the foundations of our understanding of civil society at the end of the 18th century, and Robert MacIver, native of Stornoway, with extended family in Shawbost, laid the foundations of our 20th century understanding of the sociology of community and family. Will the successful formulation of a strategy for survival amongst today's Gaelic speakers lay the foundations for the survival and understanding of lesser-used language-communities of the new millenium.?

Tomorrow's minority speech-communities may not accord with De Valera's dream in 1943 of 'a countryside bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens: whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.' (4) Neither may they accord with Robert MacIver's contemporaneous definition of 1937 'that the mark of community is that one's life may be lived wholly within it' (5) Tomorrow's Gaidhealtachd - if it is successfully able to maintain and transform itself - will be part of the global village, and having leap-frogged the industrial revolution, its telecrofts will be as post-modern as any other successfully adapting institution anywhere As one of the original leaders into acquisition of the world language, it will be a leader too in maintaining its own language of social identity and cultural heritage as an asset in an increasingly bilingualising world.

References

1. O Tuathaigh, Gearoid, in Irish Times, Dublin 08/02/98, and West Highland Free Press, Isle of Skye, 20/02/98, reporting the chairman of Udaras na Gaeltachta as saying at a recent 'Crisis Conference' in Westport, 'The linguistic basis for the Gaeltacht is fast eroding...Even in the strongest parishes...English is the home language of more and more parents. They rely on schools to give Irish to their children...who relate to each other through English.' Professor O Tuathaigh regarded neither the state nor language enthusiasts as 'able to stop this erosion, never mind put in place a strategy to renew the language.'

2. Scottish Office (1994) Provision for Gaelic Education in Scotland, Edinburgh: HMSO, para 1.12, p. 3

3. General Register Office (Scotland) (1994) Census 1991: Gaelic Language, Edinburgh: HMSO, pp. 214-215 Table 7 Economic Position and Occupation - with application of multiplier factor to 10% data, (see pp. 7-8) and under-enumeration factor (see pp. 10 -11) to return for Teaching professionals, 2c: 10% sample of 166 x 11.13 = 1,848 x 1.02 = 1,885.

4. Irish Press, Dublin, 18th March 1943.

5. MacIver, R.M. and Page, C. H. (1949) Society: an Introductory Analysis, London: Macmillan, pp. 8-10.

Revised version of MacIver, R.M. (1937) Society: a Textbook of Society.

Acknowledgements

As an academic user I gratefully acknowledge my use of Crown Copyright census data supplied by GROS, OPCS and ESRC Census Data Archive. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council for Research Project G00232326 is gratefully acknowledged, as is permission to use the data of the Euromosaic Gaelic Language Survey which I organised in 1994/95. The services of Research Centre Wales, University of Wales: Bangor, in computer analysis, and of Wayne Diamond, University of Hertfordshire in computer graphic illustration are both hereby acknowledged with much thanks.

Kenneth MacKinnon is an Honorary Research Fellow in Celtic at the University of Edinburgh, Visiting Professor and Emeritus Reader in the Sociology of Language at the University of Hertfordshire, and an Associate Lecturer of the Open University in Education and Social Sciences.

Contact: Ivy Cottage, Ferintosh, The Black Isle, by DINGWALL, Ross-shire IV7 8HX Scotland / U.K.
Tel/Fax: 01349-863460. E-mail: kenmackinnon@enterprise.net.
Website: http://www.sgrud.org.uk