New Gaelic Speakers, New Gaels? Ideologies and Ethnolinguistic Continuity in Contemporary Scotland

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of language ideologies and identities among four adult new speakers of Gaelic who acquired the language through Gaelic-medium education (GME). While GME occupies a prominent position in contemporary language policy, long-term outcomes of immersion education have rarely been examined. New speakers constitute a marked minority among the sample of former-GME students ( N = 4/46) I interviewed, and their status as outliers from the overall sociolinguistic picture marks them out as deserving of greater analytic focus. Using an ‘ethnography of speaking’ methodology, I demonstrate that these new speakers’ functional fluency in Gaelic and constant use of the language at work seem not to be accompanied by a strong social identity in Gaelic, or regular use of the language at home, corroborating the view that essentialist conceptions of the language—identity nexus are inadequate.

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