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The grim Gaelic news shouldn’t really be a surprise, but the way it clashes with the prevailing mood-music kind of *makes it* confounding, and in a v suggestive way - 1/lots
For around 25 years the ‘cultural’ part of Scottish nationalism has become increasingly dispositional: a question of having and eliciting the right feelings/attitudes toward Scotland and its many signifiers (buzzwords: confident, positive, vibrant).
This operates mainly at the level of upbeat messaging, symbols and boosterism, and shades easily into the PR side of electoral politics. (Indeed, devolution was achieved partly by hegemonising this narrative, as I tried to show in my book: baking it into mainstream common-sense.)
Really importantly, it’s voluntaristic: it costs nobody much of anything and makes no real demands on the disposition-haver. You can ‘support’ Gaelic through clicktivism or voting a certain way, or learn it as a hobby, out of (as we say) ‘personal interest’.
Obviously, saving and reviving Gaelic - Gaelic as a living vernacular language and cultural tradition - can’t really be achieved at that level. Reversing its erosion and decline is incredibly difficult for a million reasons I’ll let the experts explain...
...but suffice to say it would require serious, long-term institutional commitment and probably some draconian state action (in addition to the community empowerment the UHI authors advocate).
Parts of the UHI book available online ( https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/research-enterprise/res-themes/humanities-and-arts/language-sciences-institute/publications/the-gaelic-crisis-in-the-vernacular-community/about-the-book/) draw a similar distinction, noting the difference between policies ‘which prioritise the institution position and symbolic status of Gaelic’ versus a language-in-society approach that empowers vernacular communities
I will swiftly back away from those debates around language planning and GME, but the wider cultural-political terrain in which they operate does seem fairly clear to me.
In Scotland there’s a growing chasm between the side of nationalism centred on confident ‘display identity’ - all the costless symbolic gestures, flag-waving etc - and the much thornier domain in which state power is used for the organised direction of cultural life/reproduction
The latter is much more divisive and expensive, obviously, and very quickly strains the broad-but-shallow political consensus with which cultural policy is usually aligned (not only in Scotland).
Can you possibly get from one to the other, e.g. leverage an upbeat discourse of confidence and renewal into serious public action and sustained commitment, sufficient to address an ‘advanced state of sociolinguistic collapse’? I suppose we’re finding out now...
Worth noting how language politics fit into broader political projects (and their limits): more radical movements such as Misneachd, which see ‘the struggle for Gaelic [as] one and the same as the struggle for economic, cultural and political justice’ chime with 2014 Yes idealism
...but a story of Gaelic ‘cultural genocide’ ( https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/10/23/a-radical-plan-for-gaelic-scotland/) is probably not going to be compatible with an uplifting electoral pitch aimed at securing a Holyrood majority: the 'vehicle' moves much slower and more timidly than the situation seems to demand. /ends
