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

to reflect on what the past has created: every time a Gaelic speaker, or someone from a Gaelic-speaking community or what was once a Gaelic community, defers to English—for instance, by insisting that his or her child be educated only in English because that is the language of “getting on,” or agrees with the assumption that English is for serious business and Gaelic only for the home—the past continues to live on in the present.

Research Questions

The objectives of this book include examining the arguments supporting the importance of maintaining a heritage language and how those arguments relate to Scottish Gaelic. (I am advisedly using the term arguments for heritage language maintenance and revival because the choice to maintain a heritage language or to let it die while adopting whole cloth the lingua franca of the day rests largely upon arguments for subjective values and worldviews that various people hold, rather than upon evidence for empirical truths akin to the relationship between matter and energy). Secondly, as a part of an overview of and background for the Scottish Gaelic educational movement, I describe some of the historical efforts at heritage language maintenance.

Before examining the specifics of the development of the inchoate Scottish Gaelic educational movement, we should look at the arguments supporting the maintenance of heritage languages. In part I, I detail the arguments that support heritage language maintenance by “crystallizing” (Richardson, 1994) the central issue from different disciplines and vantage points. The background implications touch on several issues that might seem arcane and unnecessarily theoretical to the reader, but which I believe answer the fundamental question that asks why a minority language should be supported. I then provide background and context to a question that concerns actual education measures to revive the Gaelic language and culture. In touching on the theoretical value of divergent languages, and by extension the cultures they contain, I summarize a theory of language—the Whorfian hypothesis—that says that each