Gaelic in Scotland, Scotland in Europe: Minority language revitalization in the age of neoliberalism

This dissertation is an ethnography of late twentieth-century efforts to revitalize the Scottish Gaelic language in Scotland. Scottish Gaelic is a minority language currently spoken by 1–2% of the population of Scotland. This dissertation focuses on the “project culture” through which Gaelic language planners must now channel their efforts. Project culture is the relatively new form of social and economic organization engendered in the United Kingdom through both U.K. and European Union-funded regional economic development programs, which take a neoliberal approach to social problems. The field research consisted of participant observation and interviewing in two sites in 1999–2000. The first site was a national Gaelic language planning organization in Inverness, the unofficial capital of the Highlands. The second site comprised the Gaelic-related regional development projects of the Uists, a chain of islands in the Outer Hebrides where over half the population is Gaelic-English bilingual. Through a study of daily social interaction in these sites, and a study of the Scottish media, I analyze the way people hierarchically classify varieties of Gaelic in relation to varieties of English according to ideologies of language standardization and relationships between language, ethnicity, and class. I also examine the way that the linguistic, political and economic requirements of the European Union, the U.K. as a European Union Member State, and the recently devolved Scottish Government have shaped Gaelic development programs. My analysis demonstrates how the enduring symbolic valences of Gaelic in Scotland and the strictures of the neoliberally-oriented development process condition social interaction in areas undergoing Gaelic language shift, in ways that make it difficult for Gaelic development programs to reverse language shift, even as they achieve the ultimate neoliberal goal of job creation. This project offers an ethnographically-based critique of the neoliberal approach to language planning and other social issues, an approach that is currently dominant in the U.K. and the rest of the E.U.