3 - Scottish and Irish Gaelic: The giant's bed-fellows

Summary

When a language has been in retreat for a long time and its distribution has been shrinking at the same time that its functions have been dwindling, difficulties are very likely to arise in even such basic matters as determining just who should be considered a “speaker” or a “member” of the speaker community. The “native speaker” population itself may not agree on who falls within that category: some people may claim speaker status when others would not accept them as such; some may say that they are not speakers when others would include them as speakers. If the speaker population cannot agree on its own membership, then the problems for the researcher are bound to be even more acute. This chapter tries to deal with each of these matters in turn, community structure and speaker self-identification on the one hand, and encounters between communities and the investigator in search of speakers on the other.

The community

Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking areas

The modern native Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking populations, now largely confined to the extreme northern and western fringes of Ireland and Scotland and having the appearance of being self-contained entities are, nonetheless, in many ways a community within a community. Their members for the most part share the same racial inheritance as the general Irish and Scottish populations respectively and have religious affiliations in common with a greater or smaller section of the larger community. But above all, they must struggle for a place alongside English, that giant among the world's modern languages.