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people speaking anything besides what many Anglo-Americans believe should be the mandated national language: English. While the jury may still be out on the effects of bilingual education itself in whatever forms it takes, there is nothing to indicate that knowing more than one language is harmful to anyone. Indeed, many well-to-do Americans spend a lot of money sending their children to weekend or summer language camps to help their children learn a second language. There is much evidence to indicate that bilingual education, in some forms at least, is beneficial for several reasons: Whorfian theorists posit that since different languages present different world views, different languages open up the speaker of multiple languages to wider perspectives on human experiences. Also, some educational writers, such as Hollins (1996), argue that children benefit from being educated in their home language.
In this book, I intend to argue for the revitalization of the Gaelic language in a way that has not been proposed or undertaken to date, for reasons that have not been heretofore considered, and having to do with the necessity of preserving the diversity of human cultural resources and bringing a measure of social justice to a group that has not only been underserved by a dominant culture but misserved. But the experience of the Scottish Gael is not unique. In some of these pages, I will refer to the experiences of the Welsh and the Irish as fellow Celts (the Irish historically speak a sister tongue to Scottish Gaelic, namely Irish Gaelic) since their language communities’ encounters with English, in terms of the actions, attitudes, and ideologies of the English speakers in all three countries, were nearly identical, both in terms of ideology and legal policy. Additionally, I will make reference to the experiences of other peoples in their contact with dominating groups.