Why Kenny Can't Can: The Language Socialization Experiences of Gaelic-Medium Educated Children in Scotland.

Abstract

After decades of declining numbers of Scottish Gaelic speakers, Gaelic-medium education (GME) in primary schools has become a significant tool of Gaelic language revitalization efforts since the mid-1980s. Providing initially total and later partial immersion in the language, GME is intended to boost the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland, and to provide institutional legitimacy to a code whose decline has been blamed on institutionalized discrimination and the symbolic domination of its speakers. Overall, graduates of GME have proven to be academically accomplished and to display a high degree of formal competence in Gaelic, GME-socialized children thus appear well-poised to overcome the social and symbolic restrictions on speaking Gaelic of the past, and to reverse the long-lasting decline of the language. However, outside of school, GME-socialized children rarely use Gaelic with adult speakers of the language who habitually use English with them because they do not recognize the children’s speech as Gaelic, or claim that their Gaelic cannot be understood. This dissertation examines the language socialization experiences of children enrolled in GME in a rural primary school on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in order to identify the source of this communicative impasse. It argues that the introduction of GME has changed Scottish Gaelic language socialization from a domestic experience to a school-based educational enterprise with far-reaching consequences for the continued existence of the Gaelic language community. The language ideologies at the heart of GME as an educational model based on the example of institutionalized schooling using standard languages, as well as the prevalent pedagogical practices of its teachers, create forms of communicative competence in GME-socialized pupils that either have no currency in the surrounding community, or offend the political and aesthetic sensibilities of Gaelic-socialized speakers. GME’s focus on imparting literacy skills and developing academic competence in Gaelic further reduces the opportunities for children to develop competence in the linguistic practices and social-linguistic variation that are at the heart of older speakers’ usage of the language. This calls into question the effectiveness of school-based language immersion programs as tools of language revitalization efforts.

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