The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education By Michael McIn ...

The major language is English, or forms thereof, with a large portion of the population speaking various forms of Scots—itself a dialect of English with also, some scholars claim, an admixture of Scandinavian—while little more than 1% of the population “have the Gaelic” (Macafee, 2000; MacKinnon, 1988). The majority of these Gaelic speakers comprise residents in the western Highlands and the isles that lay on the fringes of the Atlantic. In these areas, the Gaelic-speaking populations approach 50%.

Historically multiethnic, Scotland is composed of disparate ethnic and language populations—Pict, Gaelic, Briton, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, and Norse—that came together (not always peacefully) to form the present population of the nation. Though some present-day Scots may dispute the claim that Gaelic is the ancestral language of all of Scotland, since for a long period of time in Scotland's history Gaelic was referred to as “Irish” or “Erse” by English speakers in both Scotland and England, there is no dispute that Scottish Gaelic is indigenous to Scotland and is a distinct and unique national cultural resource.

This incident of what Crystal (2000) and others referred to as “language death” breaks down into several subcategories of problems. Various factors have contributed to the erosion of the Gaelic population, including legal measures, English-language education mandates, cultural prejudice by the English-speaking majority against the Gaelic-speaking Northerners, lack of economic opportunities in the Gaelic-speaking regions known as the Gàidhealtachd,and the corrosive influence of modern media on the minority population. The end result has been that the language and the culture of the Gaelic-speaking peoples have been marginalized and are in danger of becoming extinct.

Although the numbers vary, MacKinnon, drawing from the Scottish census, estimated that Gaelic is spoken by about 80,000 people in Scotland, mostly in the Western Highlands. This number is little more than 1.5 % of the population of Scotland. In some areas of what remains of the traditional Gaelic-speaking regions (having considerably shrunk from just a century, or even 50 years ago), between 50% and 75% of the inhabitants speak Gaelic. Nearly all of those Gaelic speakers are bilingually fluent, speaking both Gaelic and English (SCROL, 2001).