Suchergebnisse

Between 1997 and 2011, parents and other language activists in Edinburgh engaged in a long and difficult campaign to establish a dedicated Gaelic-immersion primary school in the city. The parents and other activists organized their campaigns in the face of a powerful and pervasive ideology in Edinburgh, rooted in the Scottish Enlightenment, that understands Scottish Gaelic as a vestigial Highland language that has no place in Scotland's modern and cosmopolitan capital city. As such, the debates around the development of Gaelic-medium education in Edinburgh were strikingly contentious, and it is perhaps not surprising that it took more than a decade to convince the City of Edinburgh Council to approve a dedicated Gaelic school. This social history of that campaign draws on a wide range of data that includes newspaper coverage, letters to the editor and blog/newsgroup posts, official reports, City of Edinburgh Council meeting minutes and consultation documents, consultation submissions and commissioned research, as well as data from extensive archives of documents collected and preserved by the activists themselves, including correspondences with officials and politicians, meeting minutes of activist groups, drafts of speeches, newsletters, campaign plans and lobbying documents. In addition, interviews were conducted with 13 key activists involved at different stages of the campaign. Together, this data provides us with a detailed picture of a grassroots language-revival initiative as one element of a broader social movement to promote the Gaelic language in Scotland, and over the course of this campaign, we will see how grassroots Gaelic activists challenged received notions of Gaelic's value and place in Edinburgh in support of more ambitious Gaelic development in the city.

What does bilingualism mean when we use it as a policy goal? If an organisationor politydeclares itself bilingual orsubscribes to apolicy of bilingualism, what sort of language use should we expectas a result of that policy?'Bilingual'and 'bilingualism'are terms that strain under the semantic burden of a wide range of meanings as they are usedto describe both individuals and groupsin a number of different contexts, from sociolinguistics to applied linguistics, anthropology, child development,education,language policy and planning, as well asinpopular and political discourses on language use and ability (see Dunbar in this volume).Andbilingualism isalsofrequentlynamed asan objectivein language policy and planning documents.Certainly, bilingualism in one form or another is a common policy goal at all levels in Ireland and Scotland, butwe could ask,given this uncertainty and multiplicity of meanings,is it always clear what specific norms of language use are being advancedwhen anorganisationor polityadopts a policy of bilingualism?

This article responds to the recent special issue of Scottish Affairs on 'Gàidhealtachd Futures' and in particular the article by Iain MacKinnon proposing that ancestry, ethnicity and indigeneity should become the principal elements in contemporary Gaelic identity. The editors of the special issue do not give an analytically meaningful presentation of the term Gàidhealtachd and MacKinnon fails to give a complete or balanced account of previous research on the question of Gaelic identity. There is considerable uncertainty about how the term Gael is understood today; many Gaelic speakers are reluctant to accept this label for themselves. MacKinnon's arguments concerning the role of ancestry in defining Gaelic identity are highly problematic in both analytical and political terms. His proposals concerning ethnicity and indigeneity are unsustainable, particularly in light of relevant legal standards, and amount to a strategic, ethical and legal dead end for the Gaelic revitalisation movement.

This article considers a range of weaknesses and deficiencies in the article 'Moving Beyond Asocial Minority-Language Policy' by Conchúr Ó Giollagáin and Iain Caimbeul and the underlying research study on which it was based. The authors' presentation of previous research was inadequate and the framing of their survey results was sensationalistic, risking the demoralisation of Gaelic speakers and the weakening of social or political support for the language. The authors fail to justify and properly define the key terms used in their analysis, including 'vernacular community' and 'Gaelic group', so that there is a pervasive lack of clarity to their discussion, with serious implications for their key policy proposal. We also identify shortcomings in the geographic framing of their study; which areas were included and which were not. We then challenge the social classification they use in their analysis, and their rigid distinction between Gaelic speakers in their study area and all those living elsewhere. We then demonstrate how the authors' presentation of current Gaelic policy is incomplete, misleading and biased, and we critique their proposals for fundamental changes to the current policy structure, including the creation of a new Gaelic community trust. We argue that strengthening existing policy structures and exploiting such structures much more energetically and effectively offers a better approach to strengthening the language, both in the areas studied and elsewhere in the country.