This chapter considers the history, political context, and linguistic characteristics of Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland since approximately 400 CE and was a majority language of Scotland around 1000 CE. Today, Gaelic is a minority, endangered language undergoing revitalisation. Currently, there are around 58,000 speakers in Scotland, and 1,500 in Canada. Around half of speakers in Scotland live in the north-west Highlands and islands, but many also live in Lowland cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh due to migration and revitalisation policies. Gaelic’s linguistic features are substantially different from English and, along with other Celtic languages, are quite different from many other Indo-European languages. For example, Gaelic is a VSO language and retains morphological complexity such as case and gender. Phonological features include contrastive palatalisation, pre-aspiration, and some dialects have lexical pitch accents. In some morphophonological contexts, consonants undergo mutation. Recent sociolinguistic developments including language revitalisation have led to new linguistic structures emerging. This chapter outlines some of these developments such as new varieties of Gaelic in urban settings, and dialect levelling in traditional areas among Gaelic-immersion school pupils.

This essay addresses three fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women writers who composed erotic and satiric verse: the Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, and the Scottish Gaelic poets, Iseabal Campbell, Countess of Argyll, and her daughter, Iseabal Ní Mheic Cailéan. Adopting an archipelagic feminist approach, Charnell-White locates these figures within the broader context of late medieval bardic culture in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, emphasising their high social status and family connections. While the poetry of Gwerful Mechain was highly regarded in her own time and a significant body of her work remains, far fewer poems by Iseabal Campbell and Iseabal Ni Mheic Cailéan survive; like Mechainߣs, however, they were written to be performed before specific audiences. The essay reads the poetry of all three as playfully reappropriating and subverting the formulaic misogynism typical of the male-authored verse in their bardic or coterie groups. In responding to the kind of anti-feminist motifs characteristic of the European tradition of the querelle des femmes, these poets challenge courtly ideals of women as chaste, silent, and obedient and present female sexuality in empowering terms.

In this chapter I use a text-based approach to grammatical description in order to explore the interpersonal grammar of Scottish Gaelic. I analyse extracts from two Scottish Gaelic novels from the perspectives of the semantic systems of NEGOTIATION and ENGAGEMENT and correlate distinctions in these systems with function structures at the lexicogrammatical stratum. By these means I build up a partial systems network for MOOD in Gaelic profile, with choices and distinctive features represented in the most economical way and labelled according to their distinctive usages in discourse. On the basis of this analysis, I will suggest that Scottish Gaelic does not have a [declarative] versus [interrogative] opposition in MOOD, redounding with the system of NEGOTIATION at the semantic stratum, but rather an [assertive] versus [non-assertive] opposition, redounding with the system of ENGAGEMENT at the semantic stratum.

The alertness to the languages and literatures of Scotland that marks Seamus Heaney’s work in all its stages is rooted in an awareness of the Scottish derivation of much of the distinctive lexis of his native region. Ignorance of and even antipathy towards Lowland dialect and culture occasionally surfaces in Irish writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance in Carleton and Yeats. Heaney’s enthusiasm for Scotland was in some respects anticipated by James Joyce, another etymologically obsessed Irish writer, though it is notable that, unlike the novelist’s, the poet’s interests included the Highland Gaelic as well as the Lowland English and Scots aspects of Scottish literary achievement. The chapter traces Heaney’s sustained engagement with Scotland in his separate capacities as editor, translator and poet and concludes by examining key intertexts between his poetry and that of Hugh MacDiarmid.