Phonology

A major contribution to the field of Scottish Gaelic language and linguistics is William Lamb, Scottish Gaelic: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge, 2024), which presents an authoritative account of modern Gaelic grammar. Notably, the book deals with both idealized usages and more colloquial forms; dialectal and register differences are also considered throughout. Each chapter provides basic information, expanded by detailed information for more advanced users. All levels of readers’ proficiency are accommodated, offering an important and refreshing grammar of Scottish Gaelic for beginners, advanced learners, and professional linguists. Claire Nance, ‘Scottish Gaelic’, in Language in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Susan Fox (Cambridge: cup, 2024), 288–313, provides a comprehensive overview of Gaelic in Scotland from its presumed origins in Roman-era northern Britain to twenty-first-century revitalization.

A. J. Hughes, ‘Scottish Gaelic “Bithidh”, Manx “Bee”, Irish “Bíonn”: A Synchronic and Diachronic Anatomy of the 3 Sg Consuetudinal Present/Future Tense in pan-Gaelic’, Studia Hibernica, 50 (2024), 143–160, seeks to analyse on a diachronic level the evidence provided for the verbal forms ‘Bithidh’, ‘Bee’, and ‘Bìonn’ by two of the most significantly detailed comparative monuments to Gaelic linguistic heritage: Heinrich Wagner’s Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects (1958–1969) and Cathair Ó Dochartaigh’s Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (1994–1997). Seosamh Watson, ‘Compound Prepositions in Irish and Scottish Gaelic’, Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, 32:1 (2024), 37–50, deals with a type of compound preposition found in Irish and Scottish Gaelic that consists of a simple preposition followed by the noun it governs (the noun in question often pertaining to human perception or activity). Watson discusses how this compound preposition adds a separate, often picturesque, dimension to syntax in each language.

Onomastics

Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘Saints, Druids and Sea-Gods: Imagining the Past in Iona’s Namescape’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 41 (2024), 83–105, analyses how Iona’s past was and has been (re)imagined through its place-names, and those place-names’ (re)interpretation into the twentieth century and the decline of Iona’s formerly majority Gaelic-speaking population. Jacob King, ‘Coilltean Caillte: Forgotten Woodlands Project’ (https://www.ainmean-aite.scot/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Coilltean-Caillte-Project-Report_Aug-2024.pdf), provides a companion to the Forgotten Woodlands Toponymic Dataset, listing Scottish place-names that in some way denote woodland coverage. Scottish Gaelic names are prioritized.

Education

Several important articles on Scottish Gaelic are included in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 45:1 (2024). Lisa MacDonald, ‘Going for a Song: Supporting Language Acquisition in Gaelic 0–3 Groups’ (34–46), considers the songs currently in use in Gaelic groups in Scotland for zero-three-year-olds, investigating how practitioners use these songs in group settings. MacDonald proposes that Gaelic Early Years practitioners insufficiently understand the potential of song in relation to Gaelic-language acquisition, with the integration of Gaelic translations of popular English children’s songs into Gaelic playgroups often distorting and misrepresenting the Gaelic language’s rhythms and grammar. The article argues for a highly skilled, knowledgeable, and responsive practitioner base and a clearly developed teaching strategy. In the same issue, Heather Sparling and Peter MacIntyre, ‘A Tartan Weave: Connecting the Experience of Flow in Traditional Music and Gaelic Language in Pursuit of Heritage Language Survival’ (47–58), examines the connection between intensely motivating ‘flow’ experiences in music and language using qualitative data. A sample of fifty-four participants with an interest in traditional music and Gaelic language were recruited via social media. Their results show the depth of connection to traditional music developed long term that appears to motivate language learning. Further, Susan C. Baker, Heather Sparling, and Peter D. MacIntyre, ‘A Good Return on Investment? Cultural Identification through Learning Traditional Music and Language in Gaelic Nova Scotia’ (59–71), argue that a commitment to learning music and dance may act as a channel to learning Scottish Gaelic. Their work draws on Norton’s construct of investment in language learning to consider the extent to which participants commit to learning the language and the music/dance for their identification with Gaelic culture.

Sociolinguistics

Stuart Dunmore, New Gaelic Speakers in Nova Scotia and Scotland: Heritage, Motivation and Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), compares Gaelic language use and ideologies among new speakers in Scotland and the maritime province of Nova Scotia, Canada, analysing results from a three-year project. This important monograph identifies key principles that will aid the development of policies to support the Gaelic language in both countries. Stuart Dunmore, ‘Divergent Language Ideologies in a Transatlantic Minority: Gaelic in Scotland and Nova Scotia’, in New Approaches to Language and Identity in Contexts of Migration and Diaspora, ed. by Stuart Dunmore, Karolina Rosiak, and Charlotte Taylor, Studies in Language and Identity (London: Routledge, 2024), 44–58, examines outcomes of Gaelic-language revitalization in two interconnected but disparate settings. The chapter draws on a subset of four interviews from the research settings of Scotland and Nova Scotia to examine new-speaker-identity orientation among divergent cohorts of Gaelic-speaking adults. A crucial observation recognized by policymakers—that, once interrupted, the intergenerational transmission of languages in the home domain is extremely hard to reinstate—is also highlighted by Dunmore.

Conchúr Ó Giollagáin and Pàdruig Moireach, ‘Staing na Gàidhlig’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 71 (2024), 62–98, revisits the debate on the evidence of Conchúr Ó Giollagáin and others, The Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community (2020). The article examines the public debate that followed its publication and considers the way ahead in light of the intense discussions that have since taken place, focusing on appropriate strategies going forward.

Craig Willis, ‘How Do Nonspeakers View Minority Language Media? A Comparison of Basque, Catalan, Galician, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh Public Broadcasters’, International Journal of Communication, 18 (2024), 3752–3771, examines non-speakers within audiences of minority language media across five linguistic spheres in Spain and the United Kingdom. Using viewing and survey data alongside forty-four expert interviews to address the question of how non-speakers view minority language television in terms of content and genre, Willis’ findings differ across the minority languages: sport, for example, is a common genre across all cases, while children’s content is favoured in Basque, Catalan, and Galician, and documentary/factual content popular in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.

Bilingualism

Claire Nance and Sam Kirkham, ‘Producing a Smaller Sound System: Acoustics and Articulation of the Subset Scenario in Gaelic–English Bilinguals’, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 27:4 (2024), 572–584, begins with the question: when a bilingual speaker has a larger linguistic sub-system in their L1 language than their L2, how are L1 categories mapped to the smaller set of L2 categories? This ‘subset scenario’ is investigated through analysis of laterals in highly proficient bilinguals (Scottish Gaelic L1, English L2). Its results suggest that such speakers do not copy a relevant Gaelic lateral into English, instead maintaining language-specific strategies, with speakers also producing English laterals with positional allophony, all of which suggests that speakers develop a separate production strategy for their L2.

Oral Literature and Song

Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, ‘Domhnall Mac a’ Phì (c. 1784–1867), facal air an fhacal: Sàr-sgeulaiche agus a chuid sgeulachdan’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 71 (2024), 248–344, draws on newly recovered archival material to re-examine the extensive repertoire of South Uist storyteller Donald MacPhee, a prolific contributor to formative collections of Gaelic oral literature such as Campbell of Islay’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860s). Stiùbhart’s analysis considers the extent to which MacPhee’s stories may attest to their influence by older Gaelic manuscripts as well as contemporary printed stories including the Arabian Nights, questioning overall the under-explored interaction between other languages’ literatures and the supposedly pristine Scottish Gaelic oral tradition.

Iain G. Howieson, ‘Bàrdachd Baile: Ath-Mheasadh’, Scottish Studies, 40 (2024), 41–64, reassesses the rather harsh opinions of prominent twentieth-century Gaelic scholars regarding nineteenth-century bàrdachd baile (‘township poetry’). Through close analysis, Howieson demonstrates that these local poets used a wide range of literary techniques to convey meaning and sentiment and shows how expressions that some have considered clichés are in fact vital to the poetry’s effect. He argues that proper evaluation of this poetry, much of it orally composed and transmitted, requires different aesthetic criteria from those applied to poetry that depends upon the written word. Donald E. Meek, ‘ “Factor Fiction”: The Portrayal of Factors and Other Estate Officers in Gaelic Tradition’, Aiste, 7 (2024), 156–229, builds on the preliminary discussion of ‘Factor Fiction’ by Alan Bruford in 1986. Assessing fact, fiction, and the creative reimagining of factors as well as aspects of historical commentary, Meek offers an overview of the complex body of Gaelic oral and literary material pertaining to factors and other estate agents in the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides, examining a selection of tales and songs that portray factors as villains as well as figures of praise. He concludes that these songs and tales helped provide a mental ‘survival mechanism’ for the affected communities. Frances Wilkins, ‘Singing and the Dùsgaidhean: The Impact of Religious Awakenings on Musical Creativity in the Outer Hebrides’, Scottish Studies, 40 (2024), 111–124, assesses the impact of na dùsgaidhean, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelical revivals in Presbyterian communities in the Western Isles, specifically their stimulation of an environment that encouraged converts to replace secular repertoires of Gaelic songs with spiritual songs and hymns that expressed their newly experienced Christian faith.

William Lamb, Natasha Sumner, and Gordon Wells, ‘Digital Developments in Scottish Studies’, Scottish Studies, 40 (2024), 65–81, considers the growing impact of digital technologies on the field. Julie-Anne Meaney, Bea Alex, and William Lamb, ‘Evaluating and Adapting Large Language Models to Represent Folktales in Low-Resource Languages’, in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities, ed. by Mika Hämäläinen and others (Miami: ACL Anthology, 2024), 319–324, examines digital folklore research that aims to use automated techniques to better understand folktales.

Gaelic Religious Poetry

Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present, ed. by Linden Bicket, Emma Dymock, and Alison Jack (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2024), includes entries from twenty-eight Gaelic poets as well as notes and an introduction that places Gaelic religious poetry within a wider Scottish context, highlighting its important contribution throughout the centuries.

Early Gaelic Literature

Duncan Sneddon and M. Pía Coira, ‘Literature in Gaelic I’, in A Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. by G. Carruthers (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), 77–90, is a two-part chapter that surveys Gaelic literature before and after 1200 (the date of the conventional beginning of Early Modern Gaelic). The chapter considers both written and oral streams of Gaelic literature.

Sixteenth-Century Literature

Aonghas MacCoinnich, ‘All-Utterly Barbarous? Gille-Chaluim Garbh, Laird of Raasay, and a 16th-Century Gaelic Poem from the Fernaig Manuscript’, Northern Studies, 55 (2024), 52–78, provides valuable discussion of a previously unanalysed poem preserved c. 1688 that explores generosity as a praiseworthy attribute of contemporary chiefs. Re-examining the manuscript’s problematic Scots-based orthography, MacCoinnich proposes a new interpretation of a controversial line understood by earlier scholars as the simile ‘like lobsters in burrows’, proposed instead as a comment on thigging that sits firmly alongside the poem’s preoccupation with chiefly open-handedness. An edition and translation of the poem is included, and its presence in the Fernaig manuscript contextualized by the poet’s great-granddaughter Seonaid’s marriage to its compiler, Donnchadh MacRath of Inverinate. Kate Louise Mathis and Roslyn Potter, ‘Early Modern Women Writers in Scotland’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_69-1, sets Gaelic women poets alongside Scots and French counterparts. It contrasts in particular the strong likelihood that anglophone women’s writing in Scotland was preserved contemporaneously, including with authors’ personal involvement, while Gaelic women’s work was captured much later from initially near-exclusive oral circulation at often multigenerational remove from its composers’ lifetimes.

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature

M. Pía Coira, ‘The Poet and the Teacher: The Religious Poems of Sìleas na Ceapaich’, Aiste, 7 (2024), 1–42, studies MacDonald poetess Sìleas Nì Mheic Raghnaill’s (Sìleas na Ceapaich) early eighteenth-century religious poetry, identifying elements in her verse that support the possibility of Jesuit influence. Coira focuses on the didactic nature of MacDonald’s work and argues its connection to the poet’s choice of methodology and literary devices that supported the learning process. Leith Davis, ‘Memorialising through Memoirs: Robert Forbes’s “The Lyon in Mourning” Manuscript’, The Bottle-Imp, 34 (2024) (https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2024/06/memorialising-through-memoirs-robert-forbess-the-lyon-in-mourning-manuscript/), observes the mediated presence of multiple Gaelic speakers’ eyewitness testimony in Forbes’ monumental engagement with the campaign to restore Charles Edward Stuart to the throne in 1745–1746.

Nigel Leask and Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, ‘Traveling Gaels: Coloniality and Dislocation in the Gaelic Atlantic’, Studies in Romanticism, 63:2 (2024), 231–253, analyses three early-nineteenth-century autobiographical texts written by young Scottish Gaels—Dugald MacNicol, Charles Campbell, and William MacGillivray—which narrate their sense of dislocation in the ‘Gaelic’ Atlantic. The essay focuses on Romantic-era travel literature and reflects on the relationship between an increasingly strained Gaelic culture at home and the emergence of a ‘Gaelic’ Atlantic within the British imperial world.

Several notable articles on Gaelic manuscripts by Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh published this year include, firstly, ‘Lost MacNicol and Irvine Gaelic Manuscripts Discovered’, Aiste, 7 (2024), i (also West Highland Notes and Queries, 5:10 [2024], 18), which clarifies the rediscovery of a significant number of important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gaelic manuscripts originally from the collections of Rev. Dr Donald MacNicol, minister of Lismore (1735–1802), and Rev. Dr Alexander Irvine, minister of Little Dunkeld (1773–1824), thought to have been lost for over five decades. Secondly, ‘Palaeography and Identifying the Hand of the Rev. John Stuart of Luss in the Rev. James McLagan’s Manuscript Collection’, Aiste, 7 (2024), 93–155, in which Ó Maolalaigh provides an objective methodology for confirming hitherto unidentified hands in the McLagan collection and elsewhere. Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, ‘Paradise Lost and Found: The Story of an Irish Manuscript in Illinois’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 8 (2024), 103–113, discusses a nineteenth-century Irish-language manuscript previously thought to be lost.

Sìm Innes, ‘The banarach (Milkmaid) and Scottish Gaelic Pastoral’, Aiste, 7 (2024), 43–92, discusses the banarach in Scottish Gaelic poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that, in pastoral-style poetry, Gaelic poets used the banarach as a vehicle for discussing wider political and philosophical as well as erotic topics. Economic and societal change for the Scottish Highlands is also considered in this context. Sheila M. Kidd, ‘ “You Seem a Very Intelligent Man, and Can Speak English”: Gaels and Government Inquiries in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review, 104:1 (2024), 71–100, assesses the extent to which Gaelic speakers’ testimony was represented by the Napier Commission (1883) or ‘invisibilized’ by its official, published evidence. Kidd considers the role of interpreters vis-à-vis Gaelic speakers’ contributions, examining the Commission’s power dynamic between Gaelic and English speakers and how this language barrier was negotiated.

Pam Perkins, ‘Landscape in Translation: Anne Grant and the Highlands’, Studies in Romanticism, 63:2 (2024), 213–230, examines the ways in which the poet and essayist Anne Grant embraced the Gaelic language learned in adulthood and understood her role as a translator of Gaelic literature into English. Grant felt that knowledge of Gaelic was requisite to the fullest appreciation of its landscape; Perkins argues that Grant saw her work as an attempt to ‘translate’ that landscape for English readers. Petra Johana Poncarová, ‘ “Many More Remains of Ancient Genius”: Approaches to Authorship in the Ossian Controversy’, in From Shakespeare to Autofiction: Approaches to Authorship after Barthes and Foucault, ed. by Martin Procházka (London: UCL Press, 2024), 55–72, provides a valuable reassessment of literary responses to James Macpherson’s Ossian after 1760, recentring the voices of those Gaelic-speaking critics closest to the Scottish Gàidhealtachd from which Macpherson’s underlying primary sources derived. Poncarová urges caution in modern critical approaches to Macpherson’s poems that replicate and continue to entrench this bias. Thomas Archambaud, ‘Enlightenment, Education and India: Sir John Macpherson and King’s College, Aberdeen’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 11:2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.57132/jiss.361, assesses the career of James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson’s friend and kinsman, colonial administrator Sir John Macpherson (c. 1744–1821), who supported the foundation of Inverness Academy and established a scholarship for Gaelic-speaking students entering ‘Ossian’ Macpherson’s alma mater, King’s College Aberdeen.

Twentieth-Century Literature

Duncan Sneddon, ‘ “The Celt’s Far Vision of Weird and Hidden Things”? H. P. Lovecraft, William Sharp and the Celts’, Horror Studies, 15 (2024), 171–192, studies the racialized construction of Celtic-speaking peoples in pseudo-scientific literature in the period prior to the early twentieth century and how this construction was deployed by Lovecraft as part of his literary project. Sneddon reflects on Celtic Revival-era stereotypes about ‘Celts’ and their presumed sensitivity to the spiritual and supernatural. Gabrielle Fath, ‘Beyond the Cailleach: The Re-writing of Women’s Ageing in Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s Gaelic Poetry’, Aiste, 7 (2024), 230–249, examines the figure of the cailleach (‘old woman’) and how, in the second half of the twentieth century, it is seen in the works of Scottish Gaelic writer Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn (Iain Crichton Smith). Fath observes that the old woman bears characteristics of the cailleach ‘old hag’, associated with death and decay but also religious dogmatism. Mac a’ Ghobhainn, however, presents a more nuanced view of older women in his writing, subverting the cailleach trope and redefining the representation of female ageing in his poetry.

A very welcome publication that greatly progresses the understanding of Derick Thomson’s place in the field of twentieth-century Gaelic Studies is Petra Johana Poncarová, Derick Thomson and the Gaelic Revival (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Chapters are dedicated to Thomson’s work and ideas within the context of Gaelic literature; his outstanding contribution as co-founding editor of the periodical Gairm; his scholarship, activism, and translations into Gaelic; his poetry and its politics; and a thoughtful critique of his legacy. This is the first comprehensive book-length exploration of Derick Thomson’s work.

Emma Dymock, ‘Situating the Gael in Scottish Landscapes: Self-Identity and Change in Twentieth-Century Gaelic Poetry’, in Writing Scottishness, Literature and the Shaping of Scottish National Identities, ed. by Ian Brown and Clarisse Godard Desmarest (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2023), 176–196, seeks to explore how Gaelic poets of the twentieth century and beyond have continued to define and redefine their identity as Gaels within Scotland at a time when the geographical position of Gaelic is rapidly changing. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, in order to best critique the ways in which different traditions of poetry in Gaelic existed simultaneously, the chapter discusses the Gaelic Literary Renaissance; the establishment of Gaelic as a minority language and culture within a European context; the advent of learners and ‘new speakers’ of the language; and the effect of migration into and out of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. Michelle Macleod, ‘As Others Don’t See Us: Re-telling History in Scottish Gaelic Theatre’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 41 (2024), 248–268, considers five plays spanning the early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries—Dòmhnall Mac na Ceàrdaich’s Fearann a Shinnsir (‘The Land of his Forebears’, 1913); Tormod Calum Dòmhnallach’s Aimhreit Aignis (‘The Aignish Riots’, 1988) and An Ceistear, Am Bàrd’s na Boirionnaich (‘The Catechist, the Bard and the Women’, 1974); Màiri Nic’IlleMhoire’s Bana-Ghaisgich (‘Heroines’, 2018); and Muireann Kelly with Frances Poet’s Scotties (2018)—examining how each play challenges the received portrayal of an historical event by reasserting a Gaelic perspective.

The International Companion to Scottish Children’s Literature, ed. by Maureen A. Farrell and Robert A. Davis (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literature, 2024), includes two important chapters that explore Gaelic children’s literature. Sìm Innes, ‘Gaelic Plays for Children 1900–1950’ (99–114), focuses on the ways in which Gaelic playwrights reworked and adapted folklore as source material, using the rich traditions of Highland folklore to promote various agendas, including subversive ones. Mairi Kidd, ‘From Fairy Cauldrons to An Gruffalo: The Development and Challenges of Scottish Gaelic Children’s Literature’ (166–175), provides a detailed examination of the changing landscape of children’s literature in Gaelic, with specific examples placed into social, religious, and cultural contexts.