Language is both essential and fundamental for human culture. Language is unique to the human species, and, along with music and visual arts, is the primary way people communicate, build relationships, and create a sense of community. Language also helps people express their feelings and thoughts.

The Gaelic language has been spoken in Ireland for at least 2,500 years and Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland for over 1,500 years, making it an integral part of the both country’s heritage and cultural identity. It reflects the deep history of the Gaels and their connection to the lands. Even though the number of Gaelic speakers has declined over time, efforts are underway to revitalize the language because of it’s importance for fostering and preserving any sense of national identity.

Gaelic gives Scottish and Irish people a sense of who they are through their shared culture and heritage. Like any other language, their shared Gaelic Languages shape Irish and Scottish art, literature, song, and storytelling. Language provides a unique lens through which to experience and understand national cultures, both traditional and contemporary. It’s reflected in things like traditional music and literature, and in Ireland and Scotland, they are often in Gaelic. These languages are intertwined with the landscapes of Ireland and Scotland. Gaelic place names and traditional phrases carry meanings and connections to the land that can’t be fully captured in English.

For over 700 years, the Irish language was discouraged wherever the English ruled in Ireland. For many, the Irish language became a symbol of resistance against colonialism and a way to keep Irish culture alive. The revival of Irish Gaelic in the 19th century went hand-in-hand with the push for Irish independence.

Irish Gaelic is mainly called ‘Irish’ today and Scottish Gaelic is also known as Scots Gaelic, or Gàidhlig in Scottish Gaelic, which is pronounced ‘Gah-lick’. Before the 15th century, speakers of Scottish Gaelic referred to it as Scottis, which means ‘Scottish’. In the late 15th century, speakers began to refer to it as Erse, which means ‘Irish’. However, Scottish Gaelic is now recognized as a separate language from Irish, so the word Erse is no longer used.

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Adam Dahmer

Dè a th’ anns a’ Ghàidhlig?
What is Scottish Gaelic?

Scottish Gaelic, the language of the Scottish branch of the ethnocultural group known as the Gaels, is one of Scotland’s indigenous languages. Indeed, with a documented lineage of at least 1,700 years, Gaelic – out of all the Scottish indigenous languages – has by far the longest known history.

There are few places in what is now Scotland, apart from the islands of Orkney and Shetland, in which modern Scottish Gaelic or its antecedent forms were not spoken by either majorities or sizeable minorities of the local population. Indeed, from the founding of the Scottish nation in around 900 CE, to the time of the Wars of Scottish Independence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries CE, Scottish Gaelic was spoken by a majority of the people who resided in Scotland.

Dè a thachair ris a’ Ghàidhlig?

What happened to Scottish Gaelic?

Sadly, beginning as early as the reign of the Scottish King Malcolm III in the mid-eleventh century CE, Gaelic began to decline. This was largely due to the growing influence of Scotland’s more economically and politically powerful neighbor to the south – the Kingdom of England. As various iterations of the English language gained ground in Scotland, they gradually replaced Gaelic in most domains: first in the Lowlands, by around 1500 CE; and, since then, over more and more of the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

Of course, every cloud has a silver lining: during its conquest of Scotland, the Middle English language gave birth, in around 1350 CE, to the language now known as Scots, Scotland’s second oldest indigenous language. However, although the advent of the Scots language has surely proved a great gift to those moderns who – like myself – love Robert Burns, Hamish Henderson, and the bothy ballad tradition, it was cold comfort to the fourteenth-century Gaels.

From the 1500s, Gaelic’s fortunes continued to wane – a process accelerated by Gaelic becoming associated with Catholicism during the early days of the Protestant Reformation, and with Jacobitism throughout the Williamite and Hanoverian British royal dynasties.

By around the year 2000, Gaelic’s future looked bleak. In Scotland, it remained the majority language of only around two percent of the Scottish population. Of these some 60,000 speakers, most either lived in rural communities in the Scottish Hebrides, or having been born in such communities, had since been lured away to the big cities of Scotland’s central belt: Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

A few thousand miles west of Scotland, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia – a historical outpost of Scottish Gaelic – Gaelic’s prospects seemed little better at the dawn of the third millennium. Communities that had been fully Scottish Gaelic speaking only a century ago were down to their last few hundred native Gaelic speakers, with seemingly few if any young people interested in acquainting themselves with – yet alone acquiring – their dwindling ancestral tongue.

Solas san dorchadas!
A light in the darkness!

Fortunately, it was at about that time – that is, the turn of the last century – that the seeds of language revival sown and nurtured by language activists in the 1970s and 80s finally began to bear fruit. For instance, throughout the late twentieth century, extensive grassroots efforts had been made to improve the parlous state of Gaelic education. This resulted in the creation of a still-expanding network of Scottish Gaelic-medium day-care and preschool facilities; primary and secondary institutions (both as stand-alone schools, and as ‘units’ attached to English-medium schools); and new universities and university departments – most notably Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the all-Gaelic college in the Isle of Skye, which has since become a component institution of the University of the Highlands and Islands. Although such initiatives had been slow to gain traction in their early days, they were going strong by the early 2000s. This didn’t escape the notice of the restored (or, as British legalese styles it, ‘devolved’) Scottish Parliament, which – in 2005, after years of urging by Gaelic activists – finally made Scottish Gaelic an official language of Scotland.

Furthermore, despite being often lampooned by its detractors as inherently ‘quaint’ and ‘rustic’, the Gaelic community also fortuitously embraced the burgeoning internet revolution of the 1990s, and has only expanded its digital footprint since then.

Nowadays, although Scottish Gaelic’s decline in its heartlands has not yet been fully arrested, let alone reversed, Gaelic’s future looks brighter than it has for many generations. More and more Scots and Nova Scotians are enrolling in formal in-person Gaelic education, and there are an estimated two million people from nations the world-over eagerly studying the language online. If you want to help keep this endangered language and its speech community hale and whole for another 1,700 years, then the very best thing you can do is to join those some two million people in learning the language yourself!

Ciamar a dh’ionnsaicheas mi a’ Ghàidhlig?
How do I learn Scottish Gaelic?

I was hoping you’d ask! One of the very best ways to get a handle on the language is to join one the many thriving North American Gaelic learning communities. These are organizations that share resources, host classes and events, and maintain online fora where their members can chat in and about Scottish Gaelic. They will connect you with other learners, and give you the tools and tips you need to acquire the Scottish Gaelic language.

Although there are too many such organizations to list in this brief article, some of the most prominent are:

• An Comunn Gàidhealach Aimeireaganach / The American Gaelic Society (ACGA)

This organization is essentially the umbrella group for all Gaelic learners and Gaelic promotion organizations in English-speaking North America.  They also host their own events, including the US national Mòd (a nationwide Gaelic song and poetry competition) and the annual Grandfather Mountain Gaelic Song and Language Week (a Gaelic retreat in the scenic Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina).

To learn more about them, check out the following website:
https://acgamerica.org/

• Sgoil Gàidhlig Bhaile an Taigh Mhòir / The Baltimore Gaelic School (SGBTM)

This organization promotes the Scottish Gaelic language and culture in the Tidewater South / Chesapeake Bay area, including all of Maryland and eastern Virginia. They host the Chesapeake regional Mòd, and teach online Gaelic classes to students worldwide. Starting this summer, they also plan to begin hosting annual Gaelic language and culture retreats.

You will find their website below:
https://sgoilgaidhlig.org

• Slighe nan Gàidheal / Path of the Gaels

Based in Seattle, Washington, this organization is aimed at promoting Scottish Gaelic along the US west coast. They host online classes, a local Gaelic choir, and famous in-person fèisean (festivals) that bring together hundreds of US, Scottish, and Canadian Gaelic speakers every two years.

Their website can be found below:
https://www.slighe.org/

• Comunn Gàidhlig Thoronto / The Gaelic Society of Toronto

As its name suggests, this society promotes Gaelic in the greater Toronto area. In addition to hosting online classes, it holds a monthly online cèilidh (an informal Gaelic song-sharing and storytelling session) that is open to Gaelic speakers, learners, and interested observers the world over.

Its website is as follows:
https://www.gaelicsocietytoronto.com/

• Colaisde na Gàidhlig / The Gaelic College (of Nova Scotia)

While not a Gaelic learning community per-se, this institution of higher learning functions in a similar way to the other organizations listed here, and has certainly become a locus for Gaelic community building. It promotes Gaelic virtually, through its online teaching service, but also in person, at its ever-growing network of brick-and-mortar campuses in Nova Scotia.

Its website can be found below:
https://gaeliccollege.edu/

• SPLANG!: Gàidhlig ann an Ceanndachaidh / SPLANG!: Gaelic in Kentucky

This organization is particularly dear to my heart – not least of all because I co-founded it! Its name comes from the Gaelic word splang, meaning ‘flash’ or ‘sparkle’, and its aim is to promote Gaelic in the parts of North America that other Gaelic organizations can’t reach, especially the Upland South, the Prairies, and the inland West. SPLANG! is instrumental in co-organizing Teanal Teagasg na Teanga (the annual Gaelic language and culture retreat at East Tennessee State University, in the Appalachian mountain town of Johnson City). It also hosts its own Gaelic retreat that pivots annually between Glasgow, Kentucky (where the retreat is known as Grigne Gàidhlig Ghlaschu) and Calgary, Aberta (where it is known as Cruinneachadh Cànain Chalgairidh).

You can find its website, Facebook group, and Discord server below:

https://kentuckygaelic.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/294562261677767

https://discord.gg/7HyhCE3D

In addition to the learning communities listed above, there are a number of resources that you might find helpful for self-study:

• https://akerbeltz.com

While it might seem strange that a website named after a Basque nature deity would be useful for learning Gaelic, this is in fact one of the most comprehensive online resources for understanding Gaelic grammar.

• https://learngaelic.scot

This website is a veritable treasure trove of Gaelic resources, from an online dictionary, to a corpus of learner-friendly texts, to a bank of audio-files to help with pronunciation. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

• https://faclair.com

Although the official name of this website, Am Faclair Beag, means ‘The Little Dictionary’, believe me when I say that it is anything but ‘little’. This is the digitized and updated version of Dwelly’s Gaelic dictionary – the fullest and most detailed dictionary of the Scottish Gaelic language that has ever been compiled. If you can’t find the word you’re looking for in Am Faclair Beag, it doesn’t exist (or, alternatively, it might be a dialect word from the Isle of Lewis – for whatever reason, Dwelly didn’t spend as much time there as he did elsewhere in the Gaelic world). If you only ever use one Scottish Gaelic dictionary, this is the one you should use.

• https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk

Many contemporary Gaelic speakers complain that there is a growing gulf between ‘learner Gaelic’ and ‘native speaker Gaelic’; and between ‘Mid-Minch Gaelic’ (that is, standard Gaelic), and Gàidhlig Dhualchasach (the dialectal Gaelic of specific regions). If you want your Gaelic to sound as ‘authentic’ as possible, then Tobar an Dualchais (Well of Heritage) is the website for you. It has recordings from Gaelic speakers from dozens of different regions collected over the course of a hundred years. Just choose the dialect you want to model, find the relevant recordings, and start practicing!

Agus sin agaibh e!
And there you have it!

If you have any further questions about the Scottish Gaelic world or its learning resources, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me by email at either atdahm01@gmail.com (Adam’s personal email), or dahmer@etsu.edu (Adam’s professional email with ETSU).

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foclóir.ie New English-Irish Dictionary is a very useful website for learning to pronounce Irish words correctly. Of course, there are three slightly different dialects accross Ireland: Munster in the South, Connacht in the West, and Ulster in the North, but this website has audio clips for each! Just type the word in the search box, and then click the red ‘C’, ‘M’ or ‘U’ to hear it in any of the three dialects.

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A Rough Basic Guide to Irish Phonetics

from Gwen & Donna’s
Song Study Circle
at the Philo-Celtic Society

By Gwen Butler, January, 2024

Here are the basics of how to match up letters and sounds in Irish:

b,*d, f, h, l, m, n, p,*r,*t  are fairly similar to English, but next to i or e, d can sound a bit like ‘j’, t almost a bit like ‘ch’ (in chin), and r, when not at the beginning of a word, often like something in between d and rzh with a puff of air.

a – as in ‘hat’	;	á – as in ‘crawl’
e – as in ‘let’	;	é – as in ‘way’
i – as in ‘if’	;	í – as ‘ee‘ in ‘deer’
o – as in ‘hot’	;	ó – as in ‘moan’
u – as in ‘tuft’	;	ú – as in ‘crooning’

ao or aoi – like í (‘ee’ in ‘deer’)
eo – like ó (as in ‘comb’)
ua ~ oo-uh ; ia ~ ee-uh 
often but not always:  ei ~ e as in ‘bet’  ;  ea ~ a as in ‘cat‘  ;  ae ~ ay as in ‘hay’

c – like a ‘k’, never like an ‘s’ (ex: Celtic is pronounced like ‘keltik’)
g – as in ‘gunk’, never as in ‘gerbil’
s: if the closest vowel is a/o/u – like ‘s‘ in song ; if closest vowel is i/e – like ‘sh‘ in she
c/ch: if closest vowel is a/o/u – like ‘ch‘ in Loch Ness ; if by i/e – like ‘h‘ in ‘house’
b/bh and m/mh – like either a v or w (more likely w if in the middle of a word, in northern dialects, or next to broad vowels a/o/u)
d/dh and g/gh: if the closest vowel is a/o/u ~ gargly ugh ; if by i/e – like ‘y‘ in ‘yes’
f/fh – always silent!
p/ph – like ‘f’ or ‘ph’ in ‘phone’
t/th and s/sh – same as a ‘h‘ (as in hello)

If you see a pair of letters at the beginning of a word that look unpronouncable, it’s likely an urú – a mutation that can occur at the beginning of a word.
The last letter in these combinations is never pronounced – for pronunciation purposes, act like the last letter isn’t there: bp  gc  dt  bhf  mb  ng  nd

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Gàidhlig: Language of our Scottish Ancestors

The Benefits of being multi-lingual

May 5th, 2019 / 5 An Cèitean 2019 | By Stephanie Taylor, FSA Scot

Music and language are inextricably intertwined, and for Celts, music and language form the bedrock of our Celtic culture.

The Celtic languages have a long history as a major language of commerce two thousand years ago. Fluent Celtic speakers lived in most of Europe, and in northern modern-day Turkey. The language that we know as Scottish Gaelic, (Gàidhlig), is derived from Old Irish, brought to what we now know as Scotland in ~500 CE when the expanding Northern Irish kingdom of Dàl Riata crossed the short 12 miles between the two islands, and incorporated the western lands and islands. Until that time, the indigenous Picts and Britons peoples of North and southwestern Scotland had spoken their own distinct languages. There is no precise historical record of the fate of these peoples, but it is likely they blended into the kingdom of Dàl Riata by intermarriage or conquest. There was also a Norse presence in the northern western isles and traces remain of that influence in those Gaelic dialects.

Scottish Gaelic began to decline as a primary language of administration and commerce during the court of Malcolm Canmore (1059-1096), losing out to Norman French, English and Scots. Gaelic language and culture retreated to the west, and in the fifteenth century, many laws were passed requiring English language education. After the rising in 1745, Gaelic language and culture were severely restricted.

Currently, the number of native speakers is small making Gaelic a true minority language. The percent of fluent speakers in the 2001 census are as follows: Ireland 35%, Wales 22%, Brittany 5%, Isle of Man 2%, Scotland 1-2% and Cornwall 0.1%. There are echoes of the language in the Galician communities of Spain, Turkey and Poland.

So, why should we bother rescuing an endangered language? A wonderful linguist, Lera Boroditsky, was interviewed on the January 29, 2018 NPR’s Hidden Brain series entitled Lost in Translation: the power of language to shape how we view the world. Her work centers on the way in which language affects perception. In that podcast, she quoted a colleague as saying that the loss of just one language was equivalent to bombing the Louvre in terms of cultural assets lost. There are many more examples in her interview. Here is the link to the podcast:
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/29/581657754/lost-in-translation-the-power-of-language-to-shape-how-we-view-the-world

So, what are we missing by being monolingual English speakers? Well, there are the joys of learning a new language which are not just intellectual but have also shown great benefit in preventing age related cognitive decline. Multilingual persons also often excel in measures of achievement and adaptability. The ability to see a problem from many points of view is priceless in solving the complex problems facing the world today.

So, what are the special qualities of Gaelic that would make you want to invest years in learning a new language? Here are a few examples. As musicians your singing in Gaelic will have greater depth and feeling. As a speaker, you will be able to enjoy the pleasures of a new word order for sentences, as Gaelic begins a sentence with a verb rather than a subject. ‘I went home’ literally translated from Gaelic is ‘Went I home’. Gaelic usually emphases the first syllable of a word, for example, the English speaker says Po-LICE and in Gaelic it would be said PO-lice. You might hear a bit of an American southern accent here in the Gaelic translation as many native Gaelic speakers were transported to the south, where the echo of the language continues. And if you have a sweetheart, you could say in English, ‘I love you’, but in Gaelic, it would be ‘My love is upon you.’ Much more endearing.

With Gaelic language learning you will also enter a community of like-minded speakers as you carry on our cultural heritage. When I started learning Gaelic in formal education, I found that essentially all the other students, as well as myself, were learning to honor recent and distant ancestors. Some had a Gaelic speaking Grandmother and feel they missed an opportunity to learn more from her when she as alive.

Learning Gaelic is a long-term commitment. It will take about five years of part-time study to become fluent. As most learners are either adults with jobs or students in college/high school, the courses are designed to accommodate work schedules.

As the culture is an essential part of the language, the learning experience will introduce you to new friends and new adventures. Coming home to your own language is one of the deepest pleasures you can have in life. If you are looking for resources, I have complied a partial list.

The major Scottish Gaelic formal colleges are:

Colaisde na Gàidhlig (Gaelic College) in Nova Scotia https://gaeliccollege.edu/
Atlantic Gaelic Academy, in Nova Scotia http://www.gaelicacademy.ca/
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Skye, Scotland http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/en/
Courses in Celtic Studies and Gaelic languages are also offered at: Univ. Of California at Berkeley, Northern Kentucky, U. of North Carolina, Boston College, University of Arizona, Tucson and more.

A sampling of Scottish Gaelic language organizations:

AN COMUNN GÀIDHEALACH AMEIREAGANACH The American Scottish Gaelic Society

Slighe nan Gàidheal, in Seattle https://www.slighe.org/
GaelicUSA, webpage and FB group https://gaelicusa.org/

Beannachd leibh (Blessings on you)-a traditional Gaelic ‘Goodbye’

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