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New Gaelic Speakers, New Gaels? Ideologies and Ethnolinguistic Continuity in Contemporary Scotland

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New Speakers of Minority Languages

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of language ideologies and identities among four adult new speakers of Gaelic who acquired the language through Gaelic-medium education (GME). While GME occupies a prominent position in contemporary language policy, long-term outcomes of immersion education have rarely been examined. New speakers constitute a marked minority among the sample of former-GME students (N = 4/46) I interviewed, and their status as outliers from the overall sociolinguistic picture marks them out as deserving of greater analytic focus. Using an ‘ethnography of speaking’ methodology, I demonstrate that these new speakers’ functional fluency in Gaelic and constant use of the language at work seem not to be accompanied by a strong social identity in Gaelic, or regular use of the language at home, corroborating the view that essentialist conceptions of the language—identity nexus are inadequate.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Evidence from the international literature—and especially that concerning French immersion education in Canada—provides a mixed picture of target language use by past students after their completion of bilingual schooling. Johnstone’s (2001) comprehensive review of research on immersion education internationally found the extent of linguistic attrition after completion of immersion programmes to be widely variable. Harley’s (1994) meta-analysis of language practices among former French immersion students in Canada shortly after they had graduated from high school found greater use of listening skills than of reading, speaking, or writing, while MacFarlane and Wesche (1995) found low levels of French language use among former immersion students after high school.

  2. 2.

    In the interests of anonymity and data protection, pseudonyms are supplied for each of the interviewees in this chapter.

  3. 3.

    Indeed, it is far from clear that such a generalised conception of the relationship adequately describes the experiences of language users in any context.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Stuart Dunmore

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  1. Stuart Dunmore
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Cassie Smith-Christmas

  2. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Noel P. Ó Murchadha

  3. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Michael Hornsby

  4. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Máiréad Moriarty

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Dunmore, S. (2018). New Gaelic Speakers, New Gaels? Ideologies and Ethnolinguistic Continuity in Contemporary Scotland. In: Smith-Christmas, C., Ó Murchadha, N., Hornsby, M., Moriarty, M. (eds) New Speakers of Minority Languages. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57558-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57558-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57557-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57558-6

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