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Preface
The borders of the Scottish Gaelic world have shrunk before the continually erosive power of the “killer language” English. The Gaelic language now faces the possibility of language death. With a movement that has gathered force since the recent opening of the Scottish parliament for the first time in nearly 300 years, Scottish Gaels have begun to build an educational system to revive and maintain Scottish Gaelic. Several organizations contribute to the governance of Gaelic education, with the Bòrd na Gàidhlig (The Gaelic Board) seeming to take the lead as an advisory, if not a supervisory, body. As part of a worldwide trend in minority language education, the rationale for saving threatened languages from extinction stretches beyond the linguistic boundaries of Scottish Gaelic. Heritage language education is supported by five arguments: (1) the world is currently experiencing a great die-off of languages that would (2) result in a great loss to humankind because each language constitutes a storehouse of both objective knowledge and—coincident with the Whorfian hypothesis of language relativity—a unique worldview, the loss of which would be inestimable to world culture; (3) language