I have been saying for like a decade now that Gaelic is caught between, on the one hand, 1) the awareness that Gaels are a marginalized ethnolinguistic community — I am inclined to agree that Gaels are capital-I Indigenous, but even if you disagree the basic truth here remains — whose language and culture have been subject to systemic efforts to erase them over the past several hundred years, both by states and by landlords who had state backing to pursue what amounted to ethnic cleansing and, on the other hand, 2) the civic claim made for and on Gaelic by the post-devolution Scottish state, that Gaelic is a “Scottish” language belonging equally to everyone in Scotland.
the problem with the latter claim is that by making Gaelic a common property of the entire “Scottish nation” — whether we define Scottishness in reactionary, white supremacist terms or expansively to encompass immigrants and people of color, anyone who has chosen to make Scotland their home — it refuses to assign priority to any person’s or community’s relationship to Gaelic. Gaelic belongs to everyone, and so it does not belong to anyone in particular. under such a framework, a native speaker from Lewis and a second-language learner in Edinburgh have exactly the same basis for making rights claims against the state, and in such a framework there is an obvious basis for prioritizing Gaelic funding and development in urban spaces, since there are more (self-identified) Gaelic-speakers in Glasgow or Edinburgh than in any individual Gaelic-speaking community, even if they make up only a tiny fragment of those cities’ populations.
there is, it seems to me, at least partly an is-ought confusion here (and at this point it’s hard not to see it as a willful one): ought Gaelic to be a “Scottish” language, present throughout the country? sure, I guess. but it isn’t, and to act as if it were is, at best, to continue a policy of state neglect by ignoring the realities that continue to marginalize Gaelic communities. at worst, it is to actively encourage the continued dispossession of Gaels from their language, culture, and communities, to say that Gaels’ relationships to their language do not matter, to say that Gaels’ language doesn’t, in the end, belong to them at all but to “Scotland”. this absolves the state — and any non-Gaels who have learned the language — of any responsibility to support Gaels’ communities in particular, or to address the relationship between language and other areas of policy, which de facto means absolving the state of any responsibility to meaningfully support Gaelic at all. why fund community-based projects, land buybacks, housing in the Highlands and Islands when you could make sure the cops who are arresting anti-genocide protesters have “Poileas Alba” on their cars?
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