MSPs must use their influence and face reality over Gaelic crisis

The Scottish Languages Bill, if enacted as currently drafted, will outlive the remaining Gaelic-speaking communities. It is not legislation for a living language, and ignores day-to-day efforts to maintain Gaelic as a community language, opting instead for a perception of Gaelic as a second language that has passed from society. It represents an institutionalised vision, both unsympathetic towards community reality and nonchalant about the risks of terminal demise.

The amendments included in the legislation’s second stage drafting fail to address various well-considered critiques of the Bill. This poorly conceptualised and drafted legislation cannot be easily modified due to a lack of clarity on the problem the legislation attempts to address. Unfortunately, the amended second draft has compounded the original limitations of the proposed Bill. It continues to avoid the clear evidence that the remaining Gaelic-speaking communities, under current circumstances, will soon experience societal collapse. In failing to prioritise the challenges of sustaining Gaelic communities, the Bill lacks strategic relevance, evades real-world concerns, and is devoid of vision.

Gaelic is depicted, effectively, as a school language requiring public resources to support its practice in institutions and selected sectors which are symbolically useful to official assertions about Gaelic identity.

The confusion and disillusionment generated by the Bill are natural consequences of its weak relevance to Gaelic communities. A post-scientific disregard for the evidence of the Gaels’ social and cultural challenges is combined with more-of-the-same path dependency on what constitutes official language promotion in Scotland. In short, the Bill proposes a more anaemic and bureaucratic continuation of the status quo which engendered the current Gaelic societal crisis.

Most likely, this legislation will receive even less community traction than the 2005 Gaelic Act because the Bill neglects to establish any relevant, collective mechanism which empowers and resources the Gaels to deal with their societal challenges.

The clumsily controlled public debate about the implications of the Gaelic Crisis evidence has discouraged new community voices from engaging in deliberations about Gaelic promotion and protection. Complicated by extra levels of unnecessary box-ticking, as in the suggested language standards and the unclear departmental strategy proposals, the Bill signals a continuation of the existing official approach.

In the absence of practical resourced supports, it is difficult to see how the Areas of Linguistic Significance designation improves on the talking-shop tendency in Gaelic officialdom. Making this designation compulsory for some councils, as recently suggested, would merely make the symbolic bluster about Gaelic promotion compulsory. Given that out-group dominance of Gaelic affairs is set to continue, the public must ponder what the actual point of the legislation is.

Lacking clear strategic purpose, the Bill sets the Gaels further adrift from official bodies purported to be supporting them. The enactment of this Bill will further dissipate energy and resources on symbolic and bureaucratic aspirations rather than on practical community supports. From the perspective of the Gaelic communities in crisis, this legislation represents a non-policy.

As Gaelic promotion to date has failed to thrive, it is unlikely that a fragile and disadvantaged language minority is going to endure the added indignity of having to struggle with its own middle class to demand a coherent engagement with their community concerns.

The proposed Bill endorses the well-established language-in-institutions approach of the existing Gaelic affairs power class, creating further impediments to generating the required social dynamism for sustaining and reviving Gaelic as a lived community language. The positive recommendations about community-based or language-in-society approaches are precluded by the limitations of the Bill’s underlying philosophy.

The Bill’s weak sense of purpose could be partially explained by institutional paralysis in the face of daunting challenges of an under-resourced and low-capacity official sector. Nevertheless, the obvious question among the public remains: why do Gaelic promotion agencies not protect Gaelic communities?

The last four years have demonstrated that complacency and evasiveness about the issues driving language loss have become institutionalised. With centralised control over the distribution of public funds for Gaelic affairs, it is unsurprising that the funding mechanisms in themselves have become implicated in the evasive response to struggling Gaelic communities.

The legislation as it stands is unlikely to reverse the ingrained trajectory of social decline in Gaelic communities. The denialist public debate about Gaelic social reality benefits nobody, including the denialists. Despite notable contributions from tenacious individuals, we could be forgiven for concluding that the erasure of the remaining native-speaking Gaelic communities is a non-issue in academia, in the arts and in Gaelic promotion.

It is to be hoped that the Scottish Parliament uses its influence during the third stage of the Bill to encourage all well-meaning and interested parties to face reality and initiate a process leading to relevant and dynamic engagement with sustaining Gaelic as a lived language and culture.