I AGREE with Alex Neil about the ineptness of the Bord na Gaidhlig management team (‘Total disaster’: Gaelic body failing speakers, January 17), but the biggest problem is that the organisation’s whole strategy falls catastrophically short of what needs to be done. Inevitably: it’s like asking a small group of Shakespeare enthusiasts to save the whole of English culture and society.
Crofting, fishing, weaving and old songs and poems, even today’s Gaelic media output, is a hopelessly inadequate basis in itself for the continuation of any language or culture. Gaelic-medium education was and continues to be an achievement, but we can’t ignore the fact that once they leave school, 90% of these pupils drop the language, because they find it’s no help to them in making a living in a world that, at the moment, has no use for Gaelic.
READ MORE: ‘Total disaster’: Bord na Gaidhlig comes under fire from MSPs
Meanwhile in its surviving heartlands Gaelic use is disintegrating, especially among the young, who mentally live in and increasingly identify with the world of English. Culloden and the Clearances are still going on inside their unsuspecting heads.
This is all because the old Highland world (and maybe Galloway) continued to invest its identity, character and interests in the cosy illusion of ancient but permanent paternalistic clanship, and an over-simplistic social rigidity no-one dared step outside of conformity with to bring about innovation or reform. That society couldn’t change, or therefore control its own destiny or fate in a world where no-one and nothing escapes change. It never evolved the range of trades and professions (albeit at the cost of class division), the technological and philosophical advance that spread democracy in the Lowlands and England. So when socially foreign change was forced on the Highlands from outside after 1746, it was devastating. Gaeldom couldn’t internalise such change, and suffered for it. It’s still suffering, for the same basic reason.
Other marginalised or “less advanced” cultures have saved or helped themselves by assimilating useful innovations coming from the outside to their native social ethos (even, in Saharan Africa, religious myths). Even Mao had to create a “communism with Chinese characteristics”. Clanship’s still-surviving community solidarity ethos could be applied to locally redesign, in its image, the Anglosphere economics Gaels, too, primarily live in.
So far, what might be the means only exist in the experimental writings of a few dedicated but isolated individuals, though at the Gaelic college in 2016, Professor O Gilligan insightfully called for something that resembles them – to, so far, no practical response whatsoever. A lot of real cultural, social and economic advance has had such beginnings. There needs to be a means to socialise them. Maybe Misneachd needs to become a developmental group, not just a pressure, group.
The basic answer, though, is to root, motivate and guide locally reproduced, dedicated Gaelic development projects specialising in specific aspects of (principally economic) regeneration that can draw a lot of money and therefore people into small communities, and from which the rest can come, in the urban sphere too.
The result MUST be able to offer everything the Anglosphere does, and more that’s its own, in mutually-aiding but autonomous partnership with it. Otherwise, on present indications, it’s tha sinn deas.
Ian McQueen
Dumfries
GIVEN the success of the new Duolingo Gaelic online language course, the Bord na Gaidhlig is more important than ever. It needs to incorporate the 100,000+ new Gaelic learners into the existing Gaelic culture and language.
Jonathan Musgrave
via thenational.scot
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here