The Ghosts of Gaelic

Summary

April 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Gaelic Language Act (Scotland) of 2005, passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament with the aim of ‘securing the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language’. It has provided the main policy framework for Gaelic since then. Scottish language policy is set to be reshaped by the Scottish Languages Bill, currently working its way through Holyrood, which will give official status to both Gaelic and Scots. This gives occasion to reflect on the place of Gaelic in Scotland, on the relationship of what is now a minority language to the identity of a nation which has had ambiguous and conflicting relationships with Gaelic. What was until the 14th century the primary language of Scotland was, in the 2022 census, spoken by 2.5 per cent of the population (up from 1.7 per cent in 2011). Ever-greater numbers of people are learning the language in school and university or through apps such as Duolingo and the Speak Gaelic initiative, but the shift to English is now at an advanced stage even in the remaining communities with high proportions of Gaelic speakers, including in the Western Isles, Skye, and parts of the Inner Hebrides. The language has now effectively vanished from much of the country: when the language goes from a place, it is not just irregular verbs, syntax, and morphology that are lost, but also the culture that lived within that language, shared among the people who spoke it. Macpherson and Ossian Attempts to preserve or transmit Gaelic culture through English have, however, risked obscuring it entirely. Perhaps the most notorious example occurred in the 1760s, when the Gaelic-speaking Highlander James Macpherson published a series of works in English, Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora (1763), known collectively as Ossian after the ancient Gaelic bard whose works Macpherson claimed to be translating. The prose-poems, invari...