Gaelic will not die naturally.

It will be killed by those

who speak other tongues

Donald Murray

I was the boy who brought English to the village, or so an old man once accused me of doing, referring to the fact that soon after my family's arrival in the northern end of the Isle of Lewis from the urban hotspot of East Kilbride, the village lads began to speak that tongue instead of Gaelic, the first generation living within the township's boundaries ever to do so.
     Such was the power of my personality, it appeared I was the source of that transformation in the life of South Dell, possessing the magical ability to alter the language of my classmates – an awesome gift for any eight year old to have.
     Unsurprisingly, it is not an accusation I am inclined, as an adult, to accept. In my defence, I would like to point out that something far more potent and powerful than me arrived in the village around the same time as I moved to our family crofthouse. It came in the shape of a small, mahogany box that contained such unlikely and unGaelic heroes as 'Champion The Wonder Horse', 'The Virginian' and 'Rin Tin Tin'. Together, they did far more to alter the language of the village boys and girls than my puny efforts could ever succeed in doing. Even among the old, its presence had an effect. Their ceilidhs now clustered around such events as Celtic's victory over Inter Milan in the European Cup Final or an episode of 'Come Dancing', its frocks and sequins far removed from everyday events and attire on their crofts.
     In short, the old man's view of the effects of my presence in the village was somewhat exaggerated – just like the comments of a number of the monoglots whose voices have boomed in the Scottish media in recent years. This, in particular, has been the case in the articles that have appeared about, what they claim, are the vast sums of money 'wasted' in both Scottish education and public life generally on – a 'dying language'.
     Yet one can only wonder if or when a language ever becomes a corpse. Latin, for instance, finds daily resurrection in many tongues found around the globe – from Italian to Spanish and Portugese, the words of the New World and the Old. Its use has even contrived to make those who speak the tongue I am currently writing in sound 'educated', providing them with a vocabulary that enables them to discuss a few higher concerns when they are foraging around their local delicatessen.
      And even in Scotland, ghosts are always with us, their spirits surviving in the landscape of our own nation. The phantoms of lost Picts still speak to us in many of our place-names, especially in Aberdeenshire and Fife. Much though those who do not share my tongue might wish to exorcise it, there are also reminders of the fact that much of the Highlands and islands (and even the tenements and suburbs of the Central Belt) were part of a Gaelic-speaking landscape. Knowledge of that language adds much to an understanding of our nation. It enables a walker to tip-toe their way around its history and geography, examine the geology and terrain of these parts.
     It is a tragedy that there are those who live even in Gaelic's main heartland who fail to do this, campaigning, for instance, against the use of bilingual road-signs – Gaelic and English – within the Highlands. There are those within that community who argue that their presence confuses motorists, causes accidents, sends the four horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping down empty country roads. One can only wonder what they would have made of the trilingual road-signs – in Italian, German and the minority language of Latin – that greeted me travelling around the Dolomites to research my latest book, 'And On This Rock', the story of the Italian Chapel in Orkney. No doubt, if they had seen a wrecked car anywhere among these twisting, precipitous roads, they would have shaken their heads and blamed the nearest road-sign for the accident.
     And then there are the 'racial purists'. Among them are some of the good councillors of Caithness. In the last year, one even welcomed people to the Royal National Mod, that brought visitors and their hard-earned cash to their area, by pointing out that their corner of the country had an exclusively Norse heritage and should not have Gaelic words printed on any of the road-signs in the region. In arguing this, he ignored those like my own Gaelic-speaking aunt who 'followed the herring' from both Highland and Hebrides to Wick, settling down in that locality and raising their families there. They also overlooked the fact too that many, if not the majority, of the 58,000 or Gaelic speakers that remain had Norse forebears. The Macleods, the Macaulays are, after all, the sons of Leod and Olaf. As a native of Ness in the Isle of Lewis, considerably more than a tincture of Viking blood swirls around my veins.
     There is little doubt too that far from being a negative force, as councillor John Rosie and his kindred appear to believe, a mix of traditions is beneficial for people. In music, it provides them with two separate streams on which they can draw; the mainstream to which most people belong and also a distinct and different one, found within their family or community. The entire history and vitality of modern rock history in this country shows us this, with many of its major figures – such as Morrissey, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello – coming from backgrounds where the interaction of an Irish family background and English environment worked its own brand of magic. Canada, too, – a nation stitched together from a quilt of different shades and sounds – is also quite remarkable for the number of singer-songwriters it has produced over the years, from Joni Mitchell to Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.
     And so it is with Scotland’s own literary history. It is astonishing, for instance, that three of Scotland’s major poets writing in English, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown had one feature in common. They all had Gaelic-speaking mothers, drawing upon the linguistic richness this mixture produced in their work, the skald and bard coming together and casting their spell upon the printed page.

 

     Yet it is fair to say that the United Kingdom, like most powerful European nations, has never fully exploited the variety of voices within its borders. In the course of its history, it has, like France did with its Bretons, placed bolts of wood around the necks of children determined to speak something other than the approved tongue. It has – like Spain did with its other, national tongues, like Catalan or Basque - from time to time either banned other languages or skelped the fingers of those who dared to stain their lips with its words.
     The Statutes of Iona in 1609 were the first of many measures taken by the Scottish government to attempt to eradicate Gaelic. It was followed by other laws such as the Act of Proscription in 1746, where the banning of 'Highland garb' was used as a justification to also destroy the tongue. From 1872 to 1918, it was forbidden in schools as speaking it was held to be 'a deterrent to economic and social advancement' for any child unfortunate enough to hear it in their family home. For decades later, even up until my own time in school, this was still the predominant attitude among both many who had been raised as Gaels and others. My father, for instance, received the belt for using the tongue in primary school; the English-speaking headmaster believing he was being insulted when he overheard his pupil speaking Gaelic.
     The legacy of the days when the speakers of Europe's major tongues swaggered and bullied others into speaking their language is still present throughout much of the continent and beyond. It can be seen in that long tradition of making fun of and belittling those from the periphery. It is responsible, for instance, for the reaction of Roman Abramovich, the millionaire owner of Chelsea, who when asked by a news reporter why he had brought a London club instead of a Moscow team, dismissed the possibility, declaring: 'They treat me as a Chukchi there'.
     In making this statement, he was referring to the fact that he came from near Vladivostok; the word 'Chukchi' referring to a tribe on the eastern edge of that vast nation. It is a word and sentiment that echoes too in Scotland, resembling closely the word 'teuchter' which I was called (way too often) in my time in the Central Belt. Like many from the edge, I employed my own comic routine to defend myself against those who considered me – like Roman Abramovich – as coming from a place which was backward and remote. I would tell them, for instance, that my TV at home was powered by portable gas cylinder. 'Light the blue touch-paper and watch.'
     In Scotland, we hear echoes of their attitude in the way commentators fulminate in various issues of the Express and Mail about such iniquities as the princely sum of £2.08 per child being spent on a Gaelic DVD or the voice, too, of a certain newspaper columnist who apparently resents the fact that Pope Benedict used a few words of Gaelic in his address in Bellahouston. In this, she resembles the men from the city of Jerusalem who took a look at a prophet from the sticks and declared:
     'Nazareth? Did anything good ever come out of Nazareth?'
     It seems to me that the legacy of an attitude long held in the lowlands lies behind much of the present criticism of Gaelic education. There is the view that it is somewhat unnatural for parents without that language to send their offspring to the Glasgow Gaelic School, as if the present mono-cultural, monolithic system that operates still in so many of our state primary schools is of benefit to all who live through its experience. Despite the fact that many of these children are descended from those exiled from crofts and glens, their acquisition of Gaelic is seen as being artificial and false.
     Yet these parents – whether of Highland descent or not – are making the choice of Gaelic schools for their youngsters for good, practical reasons. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the earlier a child learns a different language from their 'mother tongue', the easier it is for them to pick up other languages. There is educational research like the work of Anatoliy V Kharkhurin which suggests that being bilingual improves people's creativity. Why shouldn't – if parents wish it – Gaelic be the means to help their youngsters express their originality of thought?
     There is also the constant criticism, heard from the media again and again, that Gaelic education is more expensive than its English counterpart. There is little doubt that, in terms of individual cost, this is the case. Gaelic education lacks the economy of scale that its English equivalent does. There are no large publishing firms touting textbooks for use in schools; no companies proffering a wide range of different resources. This clearly adds to the expense involved in creating a vital and modern curriculum for those who choose to be schooled in that tongue.
     Yet one should consider the greatest classroom of all when coming to that conclusion, the environment that exists outwith the school. Most children obtain their language skills within their own household. It is their interaction with their friends and family that largely determines whether they are going to have an extended or restricted vocabulary. Included among these major influences is – to go back to the old man from the village again – the rectangular screen found nowadays in most rooms of the average home.      Today, it is programmes like 'The X Factor', 'The Simpsons', 'Skins' – whether we like it or not – that provide much of the vocabulary of our age. With every day that passes, they bring more and more of their rich experience of the English language to the communities on Scotland's periphery.
     Even with a dedicated TV channel, Gaelic cannot compete with this. The monoglots (and others) in our modern media need not fear the day when their inability to communicate in any language apart from their own will deprive them of the opportunity to read and write their weekly anti-Gaelic rant within the Daily Mail. Instead, they should lay down their pens and consider for a moment their current campaign against those who speak or wish either themselves or their children to speak the Gaelic tongue. It has its origins in a long and sometimes harsh history, not unlike that of the iKung language which one of the commentators mentioned in an earlier article. Its end is threatened not as she suggested, because its speakers failed to adjust from hunting and gathering to farming. Instead, it is occurring because of Bantu immigration into its home area in Botswana and Namibia.
     In short, languages rarely 'die' naturally, as a Scotsman columnist claimed they did recently. Instead, they come to an end because of the brutalities and wounds those who speak other tongues have inflicted on them. It is not only long overdue historical justice that demands this is set right, but also the fact that possession of other languages, whether Gaelic, Scots or Urdu, within this nation's borders adds much to the wealth and riches of the whole.

Donald S Murray is the author of 'The Guga Hunters', 'And On This Rock' (both Birlinn) and 'Small Expectations' (Two Ravens Press). His next book – a collaboration with the photographer, Carol Ann Peacock – is called 'Weaving Songs'. Published by Acair, it is a celebration of the centenary of the Orb, the trademark of Harris Tweed, and due out shortly

 

Photograph by Carol Ann Peacock