Gaelic is fading but we must not let it die out

# Gaelic is fading but we must not let it die out
## Language connects Scots with our past and landscape — even if only 1.1 per cent of us speak it
Alex Massie
October 8 2019, 12:01am, The Times

From time to time young people seeking a career in journalism write to me asking how they might better find a place in this old game. I am sometimes tempted to suggest the easiest way of doing so, in Scotland at any rate, would be to learn Gaelic. A lifetime sinecure at BBC Scotland's Gaelic radio and television services would await them.

This, though, is not quite what they wish to hear. And it would be, more significantly, a snide response anyway. As BBC Alba is released from the tyranny of seeking popularity, programme-makers are free to make the shows they wish; the result is a product often superior to that produced by their English-language colleagues at Pacific Quay.

Despite much labour, great intentions and government support, Gaelic's usage continues to fall. Although Gaelic-medium education is thriving in Edinburgh and Glasgow — in part because Gaelic primaries have traditionally acted as feeder schools for some of the better-regarded secondary schools — in the Highlands the number of secondary school pupils taking Gaelic as a modern language has fallen by more than 70 per cent since 2012. If the language isn't quite on life-support, it's no stranger to intensive care either. Just 1.1 per cent of Scots have the Gaelic now.

Even where the language still breathes, it is likely to be a household language, not a public one. The Gaelic of the street, of the pub, of the kirk, is fading. No wonder, then, that Niall O'Gallagher, Glasgow city's bard, warns that there is "a danger in seeing [Gaelic] as being like a fragile vase that you can't afford to drop and [so] treat very carefully and delicately". You might look at it and admire it but you daren't really use it.

Then again, Gaelic is one of those subjects that produces eruptions of opinion of remarkable virulence; so much so, in fact, that it often seems wholly disproportionate to the impact of Gaelic on any aspect of most people's lives. Road signs in English that are succeeded by bilingual replacements are a particular source of angst and, remarkably, anger.

And for sure, there is an element of pretence involved here. Such signs are not needed anywhere, not even on the Western Isles. For this is an English-speaking country and pretending otherwise is a way of conning ourselves about the reality of our own lives. A piece of humbug that gestures towards saving Gaelic while doing vanishingly little to actually assist the language. It allows policy-makers to feel as though they are doing something, however small, and that is the main thing.

Nevertheless, there is humbug on the anti-Gaelic side too. What a waste of money, the sceptics scoff. Worse still, Gaelic is irrelevant. It has no use in the modern world. If it dies, it will be because too few people thought it worth saving. It deserves no special place or privilege. Sometimes you detect a certain satisfaction with this state of affairs; a residual lowland anti-Highlandism, perhaps. A knee-jerk prejudice the reasons for which, whatever their perceived justification once, were lost long ago but which remains in place like some evolutionary anachronism.

For once, this is not an issue of political identity. That is to say, it is not a question of nationalists versus unionists. Kate Forbes, the Gaelic-speaking SNP MSP, once told me that plenty of her Gaelic-speaking constituents were ardent unionists. Similarly, there is a wing within the nationalist movement which views Gaelic-promotion as, at best, a colossal waste of time.

Eventually, a Scotland in which Gaelic is only a memory or nothing more than tough-to-pronounce place names on a map becomes a less distinctively Scottish Scotland and thus, in some significant sense, a lesser Scotland. The sums allocated to Gaelic promotion are trivial — not much more than £30 million a year — and perhaps that is part of the problem. It is not much more than a gesture but, if it is just a gesture, it is an expensive means of signalling the decency of the government's intentions without the burden of delivering successful outcomes. It is, then, both too much and too little.

In my younger days, when I was surer and more certain of many things, I suspect I'd have reckoned it too much; now it seems much too little. We could, with ease, double or treble the amount spent on Gaelic provision without losing anything vital anywhere else.

Gaelic may not strictly speaking be necessary, but not everything can or should be subjected to the bloodless accountancy of practicality. Some things are more important than that and some enterprises worthwhile even if they're in pursuit of a losing cause. The language is not all of Scotland's story or even a significant part of Scotland's story everywhere but it is a part of us nonetheless; a thread connecting us to the past and the language which ties us to much of our landscape, too. That seems something worth protecting; something worth promoting.

Niall O'Gallagher is right, however, that if the language is to be treated as though it's a pretty but unusable piece of porcelain it will cease to be a genuinely living language. That would, in the end, leave a smaller, sadder, Scotland; a place in which those of us without the Gaelic would be subtly diminished too.