"This Could Have Been Mine": Scottish Gaelic Learners in North America

Michael Newton, University of Richmond

Abstract

The Scottish Gaelic learners' movement is a recent development in North America that parallels the mainstream Scottish heritage movement in some ways, but is strongly oppositional to it in others. This essay describes characteristics of this phenomenon by analyzing the range of people involved, their motivations for learning, their goals, the creation of community among learners, the interaction between language learning and discourses of ethnicity, and the interface between Gaelic learners in North America and native Gaelic communities in Scotland and Cape Breton Island.

Keywords

Scottish Gaelic, Celtic, Scottish-Americans, ethnic revival, minority languages, heritage languages.