Telling the Monolinguals from the Bilinguals: Unrealistic Code Choices in Direct Quotations within Scottish Gaelic Narratives

Abstract

Among the Gaelic-English bilinguals of East Sutherland, Scotland, code choice is made above all according to interlocutor. When the chosen code is Gaelic, the community norm for rendering direct quotations within a narrative is to produce them in Gaelic, regardless of which language was used originally and regardless of whether the quoted person was actually capable of speaking Gaelic. Examples are given to illustrate this quotational norm, but factors that can override it are identified and exemplified as well: a quoted monolingual's deeply ingrained identification with the landed gentry, the presence of profanity in the original English, or a particularly strong negative or positive resonance in the English original that a narrator wishes to reproduce. English remarks rendered as direct quotations in Gaelic narratives may show evidence of an unrealistic code choice in slight grammatical deviation or in the presence of more phrasal code switches than average, but in the more usual case local narrative practices make it impossible to distinguish monolinguals from bilinguals on the basis of their quoted remarks.

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