Gaelic

Bilingualism in Scottish history

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0:30Get more with BBC podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire and You're Dead to Me with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad free with an Amazon Music subscription. Hello. I'm going to begin the programme today in a slightly different way from usual.

1:02It's with a book that I loved when I was a boy of about 11 or 12, nearly 70 years ago. It's Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. But I'm not going to read it to you. I'm going to ask my guest today, who I'll introduce to you in a moment, to read a short passage from Kidnapped. We're in the year, 1751, and the narrator speaks of a moment very much to do with language. Over to you. We came down the Bray and were met at the Yardgate, for this place was like a well-doing farm, by a tall, handsome man of more than 50, who cried out to Alan in the Gaelic.

1:37James Stewart, said Alan, I will ask you to speak in Scotch, for here is a young gentleman with me that has nane of the other. The voice you heard there is my guest today, Roddy McLean. He's a writer, broadcaster and environmental educator, based in the Highlands and working in Gaelic. His weekly Lichter, that means Letter to Gaelic Learners, has been broadcast on BBC Radio, Nun Gale, for 27 years. So, Roddy, in that encounter from Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, we hear the narrator urging someone, James Stewart,

2:11to talk in Scotch and not in Gaelic, because the young gentleman doesn't speak Gaelic. Stevenson was in fact writing a historical novel set in 1751, a time a bit more than 130 years before the book came out. So, Roddy, the picture Stevenson gives us there is of a bilingual society. Is that familiar to you all this time later? Yes, it is indeed. Things have changed in terms of numbers of speakers and so on. But yes, I mean, Scotland's always been a bilingual, maybe a multilingual society,

2:45which makes it a normal country, because most countries have more than one language spoken within them. And in the days he was writing, the main two languages were Scots and Gaelic, Scots in the lowlands, Gaelic in the highlands. So, let's begin with you. Where were you brought up and did you hear Gaelic spoken all around you as a young child, as you were growing up? Well, I was brought up in the lowlands in a place called Brotty Ferry near Dundee on the east coast. There's no Gaelic there in the modern times, at least.

3:16So, I didn't hear it there, but my father was a native speaker of the Applecross dialect from the Western Highlands. And his mother, my grandmother, lived in Applecross, and we had many family connections to the place, and I would go there every summer. So, I heard Gaelic being spoken. It was very strong in that community at the time. It isn't today. Unfortunately, sometimes it would be used against me in the sense that people would use Gaelic so that I wouldn't understand them as a child. And that intensely annoyed me. And I remember saying as a young child, oh, I'm going to learn Gaelic if for nothing else I know what they're saying about me.

3:49In Scotland at that time, people had been subjected for a long time to a kind of propaganda that speaking Gaelic held you back, that the future was English. People didn't think about bilingualism or multilingualism. And so, there was a kind of almost a death wish for the language.

Roots and branches of Gaelic

4:05Now, before we go on, we ought to clear up what kind of language is Gaelic? Well, it's an Indo-European language, so it belongs to the great Indo-European family of languages spoken throughout most of Europe and through over into the Indian subcontinent. So, it has a relationship to English that goes way back, and you can occasionally trace that or trace it with relations to Latin and so on with certain words. But it's not obvious to the ear that it is related to English. It sounds very different from English, and its vocabulary is not obviously similar until you start to delve into things a bit.

4:41And to be clear, though it's what we say is a Celtic language, it's not in the same branch of Celtic languages as Welsh, say. No, it isn't. The Celtic language is sort of split into two groups, and we characterize them on the sound differences. There's one group that's called P-Celtic, the other's called Q-Celtic, and Gaelic's in the Q-Celtic group. And, for example, the Welsh word for head is pen, with a P. The Gaelic word is cawn, with a Q sound. So, the P-Q differentiation kind of divides the two groups.

5:13So that, as a Gaelic speaker, I'm halfway to speaking Manx Gaelic or Irish Gaelic. They're very similar, but Welsh is a bit different, and it's closer to Breton and Cornish. It's in that division of the Celtic languages. However, having said that, once you start to look at Welsh and Gaelic, I've got some Welsh-speaking friends in Gwynedd, a place I love very much, and we started to explore just the similarities of words in the landscape, for example. And for our word bialoch, they have pulch. For our word avin, for a river, they have avon.

5:43And you can go through lots and lots of words like that, and you can see, actually, I can see why people have classified them as Celtic languages. They do have a lot in common, but they're not mutually intelligible in any way. So, if you go back, we can go back to a point, I'm just being a bit fanciful here, maybe, where the two kinds of Celtic you've described, P and Q,

6:13branch. So, if we go back, say, thousands of years ago, when people were spreading out from Europe, and the Celts, they say, moved out of parts of Europe into what are now British Isles, at some point, those different branches split off from each other. Yes, is that right? Yes, it's a geographical split. I mean, there were Celtic languages spoken right across Europe at one time, from the Iberian Peninsula, right across Switzerland, Austria, sort of central Europe, down the Danube to the Black Sea,

6:45and even a branch in what's today Turkey. There was Celtic-speaking people there. So, it was a widespread group, but they never formed an empire in the way that the Romans did. And once the Romans started to spread, and the influence of Latin, and then Germanic languages in the north of Europe, the Celtic languages were kind of pushed out, and ended up really surviving only in Britain and Ireland. The exception, of course, is Breton, which is spoken on the European continent in modern France, but that, to a degree, derives from emigration of British people

7:18to the continent, to the old province of Amorica, which became Brittany. And so, all of the Celtic languages spoken today are defined as insular Celtic. They belong to the islands. The old continental Celtic languages, which were recorded by Caesar and other people, they are no longer spoken.

Geography and distribution of Gaelic speakers

7:35Yes. So, right now, where is Scots-Gallic mostly spoken? Well, it's mostly spoken, obviously, in Scotland itself, but within Scotland, historically, although it has been spoken at various periods throughout most of the country, the main exceptions being Orkney and Shetland, it retreated into the highlands in post-medieval times, and we call the highlands the Gaeltach, the land of the Gael. The Gaeltach is lowlands, which is the land of the non-Gallic speakers. So, there was kind of a division,

8:06northeast to southwest across the country, with the Gaeltach language being dominant in the highlands and islands. So, today, to hear it being spoken, you would be best advised to go out to the Western Isles or to Skye, the islands of the West. But there are speakers in many parts of the country, and actually, the area of growth at the moment in Gaeltach is in the cities, particularly Edinburgh and Glasgow. Because people are learning it there. Yeah, indeed. I mean, I remember a few years ago, somebody who was involved in Gaeltach saying,

8:36I think we should get involved in Duolingo, which is a language learning app, you know, and I knew very little about it, and I didn't realize why it was so enthusiastic. But since Gaeltach Duolingo was introduced, there's been well over a million people who have signed up to it to learn Gaeltach, which is way more, several times the numbers of speakers. So, it shows there's an interest there. And given how near the islands are to Ireland, is there a sense that there was an original settlement in the islands and people migrated to and fro from Ireland?

9:07Is there that idea that there's a fluidity of language use between Ireland and the islands of Scotland? Maybe not so much the islands, but the southwestern part of the highland part of the country, including the mainland coastline. And the reason being it's so close to Ireland, I mean, the contacts between Ireland and Western Scotland by sea were dead easy and very quick, whereas getting from Western Scotland to Eastern Scotland in ancient times across the mountains, rivers without bridges, no roads or railways,

9:37that was a major undertaking. So, there was kind of a coastland area, and it's called in Gaelic Eregael, which means the coastland of the Gael, and that's become modern Argyle in English. And so, that was settled by Gael's very early. And people have argued about, you know, at what point did it come into Scotland? So, we could conjure up a picture of, say, about 2,000 years ago, so this is before the arrival of Germanic peoples in what are now the British Isles. Would most of Scotland be speaking Gaelic at that time?

10:10No. Gaelic would have only been spoken in one part of the country, and it wouldn't have been recognised as Scottish Gaelic at the time because that divergence hadn't taken place. It was a common language with the northeastern part of Ireland. So, it would have been probably hard to differentiate between people living in the coastal parts of Antrim from the coastal parts of Argyle, for example. So, the differentiation into Scottish Gaelic from Irish Gaelic took place much later on. Right. That gives us quite a nice geographical picture there.

10:43Now, we've been talking about Gaelic so far, but not talking in it. As you may guess, I can't speak it, so I'd love to hear the sound of it. Would you like to say something, and then you can translate it for us? Yes, OK. Ha mi tolischtu rirar, gewill e griean ajarse gundju, ech geoltach na halapa, far will mi suiichtu. And that meant? I don't know if you heard the word halapa in there. That's Scotland. That's the Gaelic for Scotland. Oh, right. And Gaeltach, I mentioned, which is the highlands.

11:14So, I was saying I'm pleased to say that the sun is shining today in the highlands of Scotland, where I'm based. Oh, that's great. Because we haven't had the hot weather that some other places have been having.

Grammar and sentence structure

11:26And to get a bit technical for a moment, when linguists describe a language, they quite often group one language with another on account of its structure. So, let's say the sentence in English, the cat ate the rat. They say the cat is the subject in a statement because it comes before the word ate, which is the verb, and the verb comes before the rat, which is the object. So, that's what sometimes they call an SV language, subject, verb. Is Gaelic like that with statements? Does the subject, does the cat come before the ate

11:56when you're eating a rat?

12:00No, it doesn't. And that's a big difference from English. So, the verb is initial. So, it's a verb-initial word-order language, Gaelic. So, we would say jich, en kat, en ratan, which is literally ate the cat, the rat. So, the doing action comes first, in a simple sentence, at least. Yeah. Doing action is the first word. Right. So, that is very different, isn't it? Because, obviously, in English, we're very nominal, very nominative in the sense that we say,

12:31I am now going to talk about the cat, and then we bang it right up the front, the cat, right there. But you're being very verbal in the sense of saying, listen to this verb first. Yes. Fishing for a fish. You know, fishing to fish would be first, wouldn't it? Yeah, indeed. And eating is first. You know, there's an eating taking place here. Who ate who, whom, or what? So, yes, so, jich, en ratan, en kat, would be the opposite. The rat ate the cat. So, we actually don't have a subject and object differentiation,

13:05but there are other inflections in Gaelic. There are actually four cases. Ah, right. So, yes, that's interesting, isn't it? Because we've, apart from our pronouns in English, we've pretty well lost the cases. You know, the cat and the rat don't change. If the rat eats the cat, there's no changing of those words. That's right. People who know other languages, like Latin, say they do change. So, in Gaelic, they change. You've got those cases. Yes, well, we've got the nominative, the vocative, the dative and the genitive cases.

13:36So, when people complain about that, I say, well, you've got six in Latin, so we've only got four, so stop your complaining. Yes. But it does add complications for an English speaker who's not used to case inflection, for example. Yes. Oh, well, that's very interesting. Yeah. One other thing I should probably mention when we're talking about verbs is we don't have a word for yes or no. How dare you? How do you get by? I say to you, are you enjoying yourself, Roddy? And you say... I am or I'm not. And say that for us in Gaelic.

14:07Well, if you say... The question is the verb to be, you would reply in ha or chaniel, being the affirmative or negative forms of the verb to be. So, you answer with the verb. It's the form of the verb that counts. Apparently, Japanese and Thai and many other world languages have similar things. They say, you know, in these Asian languages that people are avoiding directness for politeness. I'm not sure whether we're classified in that same way, but we don't have one word for yes or no.

14:37So, if you say, did you see, the answer is saw or didn't see with the Gaelic verb. Yes, well, those words, yes and no, are very declarative, aren't they? And they're very abrupt. So, I can understand why there is that sense of politeness about repeating the verb. Because if, you know, are you enjoying yourself, Roddy? No.

14:58Whereas, I am not, if I get you right, is more, I don't know, it's more concessionary somehow, isn't it? It probably is. Well, you're listening to Word of Mouth, and as you may know, the programme is produced in partnership with The Open University. If you'd like to listen to my conversation with The Open University about the words we use, my own language journey, and what I've learnt from the stories behind how we speak, you can visit the BBC Radio 4.

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16:06You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts ad-free with an Amazon Music subscription. Word of Mouth programme page, and then just follow the links to The Open University.

Proverbs and the landscape

16:19And then how about ideas and feelings? Do you sometimes have a sense that if you say it in Scots English, it's somehow or other not saying what you want to say? Let's say words about being sad or happy or anxious, and then when you say them in Gaelic, it's, ah, it feels like you've captured it, you know? Yes, I mean, I think all languages have the ability to express emotion pretty well, just in slightly different ways, perhaps. So I wouldn't claim that Gaelic is anything unique in that regard, but there are certain sort of concepts, I think, that are important.

16:51I mean, for example, the word kianalas, which is a word that people would use. It gets translated as homesickness, but, you know, for somebody distant from their land, but it's actually, it's deeper than that, it has a deeper sense than that. So, you know, each language has its own way of describing the world and describing emotions and Gaelic has its own particular ways of doing things. And I think when you're looking at people who are maybe elderly people who are first language Gaelic speakers, they do find it maybe as dementia might affect them

17:22later in life, they find it then difficult to express themselves in English and they really do revert to their original language. And so that means that we have an obligation, I think, in the care industry to make sure we're recognising that and giving people the opportunity to use their first language if they need to. Yes. How about proverbs and sayings? Do you carry those about? I often think proverbs and sayings are what we might call portable knowledge, you know, more haste, less speed, or whatever, too many cooks. These things kind of hold a meaning,

17:53but also they quite often have a cultural sense. You know, we say too many cooks spoil the broth in English, but it carries some culture with it, doesn't it? It does, yes. One is which means hunger is a good cook. So if you're hungry, you know, everything tastes good. Yes. It would be a similar one to that.

18:14A friend's eye is a good mirror, which I think says something about friendship, which I rather like. Do you see yourself in your friend's eye? Is that the idea? Well, if it's a good friend, they'll maybe give you their impressions of you so you are seeing them as they see you, you know, you're seeing yourself then. Yes. Oh, very good. Yeah. And then can I ask you, can you say a rhyme or a song or maybe a nursery rhyme in Gaelic for it? Well, I suppose I could say

18:45the very first nursery rhyme I learned, actually, which is, I'll sing it for you if you like. Please do. I think you know what it is. Yes. Well, just give us a little rough translation. I think you know what it is. Yes. Very good. Now, it's very interesting.

19:15When I was in Wales, I was saying to a Welsh speaker there. Now, English sheep say ba. What do Welsh sheep say? And he said me. And I said, that's the same in Gaelic. So there must be Celtic sheep or something. But, yeah, so we say me is the sound of the bleating of a sheep. Me, me, hiragoo, ba, ba, black sheep. Now, you've already mentioned some words and some feelings about the relationship between Gaelic and the landscape. I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about this because I know this really, really matters to you.

19:47So when you see the landscape of the highlands and the islands and the words, I'm guessing now, the Gaelic words come to you to describe this landscape, yes? Yes. I remember actually speaking to an Englishman a few years ago and he said, you know, I really envy you people, the Gael's and the Icelanders. And I said, well, why is that? And he said, it's because the language you speak in your home is the same language that's on the landscape outside your house. And I thought it was very perceptive because he lived in the part of England

20:17where you really needed to be a bit of a scholar to work out the meanings of the places. So we're lucky in that regard in most of the highlands that we have the Gaelic language in a very large part covering the landscape. And it is largely easily understood by the modern speaker. So that's a nice thing about living here. Have you got some examples of that? An example is the names of the mountains. When I'm teaching people about the environment, I usually show a list of, I think it's 111 generic terms for hill, mountain or elevated place.

20:49So these are different words that can be used to describe a particular type of hill or mountain. 111? Yeah, it's very, very tightly aligned to the landscape. I mean, Gaelic is not a great language for talking about dry, dusty desert environments. We don't have a big vocabulary with regard to that. But we do have a tremendous number of hill names and a tremendous number of bog names as well. And some of the hill names, yeah, they're parts of the body very often. So a fiechel is a tooth,

21:19a strån is a nose, which is like a hill shoulder, if you like. And shoulder, goulen is used as well. Saal is a heel. That's something very steep, like the back of a heel on somebody's foot. And so on. So, yeah, lots and lots of names of that nature. And, of course, it means that people living in the highlands or coming to the highlands, they met with this very Gaelic landscape, and they often don't have the tools or aren't provided with the tools to understand that. So one of the things I always wanted to do was to get more people,

21:50au fait, to use a French phrase, with that Gaelic landscape so that they can help others to understand what the names mean and what they tell us about the culture and heritage of the land. You're saying that tooth is one of the words for a particular kind of mountain. This reminds me that in the Pyrenees, there was a big rocky outcrop that they called there Le Dant, the tooth of the name of the place, Orlieu, Le Dant d'Orlieu. And I just wondered immediately there

22:20whether there was a Celtic origin to that, because obviously we know the Gauls lived in France, didn't they? It's interesting. I mean, we have the word Alp in Gaelic as well for a mountain. Oh, right. Which must go back a very long time, and its actual origins, I'm not sure, you know, whether it's actually related to Alapa, which means white, it's to do with albino and so on. That may be it. And trees as well? You knew those or you've learnt them? In terms of the trees, yes. We have actually a project taking place

22:51in Alpacross at the moment, and it's a community woodland that's being recreated, and we're going to have Gaelic there as part of the interpretation, and that's a really good way forward. Some other organisations have been doing that as well. They see that there's a narrative there in the language of the land that they can use to help inspire people to love the land and understand it better. So those sort of things are happening. So in some ways the language is worse because we've lost a lot of speakers, but in some ways it's more respected today

23:24and it's being used by people and understood as providing a special narrative of the highlands of Scotland. And as you're saying that, I'm guessing you believe very strongly that marrying up the indigenous language with the landscape that is there, with all its specificities, that it leads people to have a more caring attitude to the environment. Is that what you believe? Well, I think it does. It adds something else to their appreciation of the environment and maybe makes it personalised

23:54in a way that it might not be if you feel a bit more distant from the land by not understanding the language of the land. I wouldn't say it's a dangerous thing to put on to indigenous peoples or peoples with strong connections to the land that they have the solutions to the world's problems. I mean, I have had people coming to me and saying, oh, well, what does Gaelic tell us about how we can combat global warming? And that's a fairly big ask, you know, to deal with that. So I would say, well, it's all about just developing a comprehensive love,

24:28an inclusive love for the land that also reminds us that people are part of that picture. And because sometimes we hear the people using the word wilderness about the highlands. It's a great wilderness because it doesn't have many people. But that kind of devalues, I think, people's place. It's also a language zone. It's also a place with a very important relationship with language and culture and heritage and history. So I like to ask people to think about it in a more inclusive, holistic way

24:58that they understand that people have a place in the environment and always did have.

Status and modern revitalization

25:03That makes me think about the status of Gaelic. I understand it doesn't have the same status as Welsh within the UK. Is that right? Well, the Welsh have done very well for themselves and we look on them with some degree of envy, I guess, because they've kept a number of speakers. They've had a very strong attitude towards protecting their language. We've lost a lot of population through the clearances and outward migration, which has made it more difficult in Scotland. So the numbers game has worked against us

25:34and so we often get people who are not sympathetic towards Gaelic saying, well, look at the numbers, they're so low. More people speak Polish than speak Gaelic and so on, which isn't really a fair sort of correspondence because Gaelic is an indigenous and native language. So we have some protection. There was a Gaelic Language Act in 2005 passed by the Scottish Parliament, which gives it official status and for commanding equal respect to English.

26:05So it's not equality under the law, it's equal respect, which is fairly nebulous, I guess, but at the same time it does say that the nation as a whole, for the first time in centuries, was deciding to do things positively towards the language. And this must mean books, I guess, yes? Books in Scots Gaelic, yeah? Yes, there are books, yeah. I mean, for up until the 1970s, it was a poor situation. There wasn't much being published. But since that time it's expanded and for a small language community,

26:38there's a tremendous number of books. There's a lot of productivity, a lot of creativity. So it's a small community, but it's doing active things. And just before we leave the books, Michael, I'd like you, if I may, to listen to a translation into Gaelic of a well-known English language children's story told and acted out by children in Glasgow. And I wonder, as you listen to it, whether you might be able to identify the book.

27:16Yes, well, the uh-oh, I think, gave it away. But because you told me the word for a river is avin, I hope I've said that right, I think I picked that up as, indeed, a book I've heard of called We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Well done. Yes. The Gaelic is hashine dole hilig mahan. And mahan is the Gaelic for a bear.

27:47But I thought you might enjoy hearing that. And it shows something about your own creativity and ability to cross languages, but also about the creativity of the community that played around with the story and the ideas and actually created a song, which you haven't heard, but it's available on YouTube as well. And, yeah, that's a very nice thing, I thought. Indeed. Indeed, and it reminds me of my folky days going to folk clubs and I'm pretty sure I heard some Gaelic singing in folk clubs in London.

28:18The folk singer and collector Ewan McCollard collected it in Scotland. So there we are. It had a nice little echo of that. Now, we often finish our programmes with a farewell that fits the theme of the show. So I wonder, Roddy, can you see us off with a Scottish Gaelic farewell? But before you do, let me thank you, of course. Thank you very much indeed, Roddy McLean, for coming on the programme. So over to you, Roddy, to wish us farewell. Well, thank you. It's been my pleasure. And I've just written a kheru, a quatrain,

28:48in honour of our meeting today. And it's inspired really by a Gaelic proverb, hik kriya ghirn tūl, ach madi gul us kjol, which means that the world may come to an end, but music and love will last forever. And I've also included in that ym brya hyr biol, which is the word of mouth. That should last for a long time as well. So it's just to say thank you. This is my farewell. Go cindioch madi gul us kjol, ach churin rysyn ym brya hyr biol.

29:19Caen tis canan, fachlan galeor, ir radio cair, leu michiol cair.

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