This thesis analyses two plays,

This thesis analyses two plays, Translations (1981) by Brian Friel and Dunsinane (2010) by David Greig. It focuses on their relationship with the linguistic and cultural elements believed to be essential in the construction of individual and group identities. In particular, it stresses the importance of language and linguistic strategies used to include or exclude one or more individuals from a group.

Moreover, the thesis views the connection between language and place as central in the development of ethnic and national identities. It describes the geographical, historical, and literary contexts in which the two plays were written and the role language plays in them. The present work explores similarities and differences in the way Translations and Dunsinane dramatize the language question in the colonial context. Its aim is to examine the various approaches chosen by the two authors, both in terms of the language in which the plays are written and the characters’ linguistic choices.

Therefore, the thesis seeks to analyse the ways in which the colonisers and the colonised express their affiliation to social, ethnic, and linguistic groups. It examines the relationship between identity and language, as well as the way in which the authors’ strategies allow the audience to grasp its importance.

La tesi propone l’analisi di due testi teatrali, Translations (1981) di Brian Friel e Dunsinane (2010) di David Greig, sulla base del rapporto che essi intrattengono con gli elementi linguistici e culturali ritenuti fondamentali nella costruzione dell’identità individuale e di gruppo. La tesi sostiene, infatti, l’importanza non solo della lingua, ma anche delle diverse strategie linguistiche utilizzate allo scopo di includere o escludere uno o più individui da un gruppo. Inoltre, tratta il legame fra lingua e territorio come centrale nello sviluppo di un’identità sia etnica che nazionale. Vengono osservati i contesti geografici, storici, e letterari in cui le due opere sono state scritte ed il ruolo giocato dalla lingua in queste. La tesi analizza le somiglianze e le differenze nel modo in cui Translations and Dunsinane drammatizzano la questione della lingua all’interno del contesto coloniale. Lo scopo è quello di mostrare i diversi approcci dei due autori, sia per quanto riguarda la lingua in cui sono state scritte le opere, sia per quanto riguarda, invece, le scelte linguistiche dei personaggi. La tesi cerca pertanto di analizzare i modi in cui sia i colonizzatori che i popoli colonizzati esprimono la loro appartenenza ai rispettivi gruppi sociali, etnici, e linguistici. Prendendo in esame queste strategie, vengono osservate le relazioni fra identità e lingua, nonché il modo in cui queste influiscono sul modo in cui il pubblico si pone in relazione alle opere.

Cette thèse analyse deux pièces, Translations (1981) de Brian Friel et Dunsinane (2010) de David Greig, Elles ont en commun des éléments linguistiques et culturels essentiels pour la construction d’une identité individuelle et de groupe. On peut mettre en avant l’importance de la langue ainsi que les différentes stratégies linguistiques employées pour inclure ou exclure un ou plusieurs individus d’un groupe. En outre, le texte examine le lien entre langue et territoire, vu comme central dans le développement d’une identité ethnique et nationale. On observe les contextes géographiques, historiques et littéraires dans lesquels les deux pièces ont été écrites et le rôle joué par la langue dans celles-ci. La thèse analyse les similitudes et les différences dans la manière dont Translations et Dunsinane dramatisent la question linguistique dans le contexte colonial. Le but est de montrer les différentes approches choisies par les deux auteurs en ce qui concerne la langue des deux pièces et les choix linguistiques des personnages. La thèse cherche donc à analyser les façons dont les colonisateurs et les colonisés expriment leur appartenance aux groupes sociaux, ethniques, et linguistiques. En étudiant ces stratégies, on observe les relations entre identité et langue, ainsi que leur importance pour le public.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1.

Identity and Language: The Cases of Irish and Scottish Gaelic 2 1.0 Introduction

1.1 Identity and Language

1.1.1 Individual Identity and Group Identity 2

1.1.2 Language, Culture, and Nation 5

1.2 Irish Gaelic

1.2.1 Origins and Decline 8

1.2.2 Gaelic Revival 12

1.3 Scottish Gaelic

1.3.1 Origins and Decline 17

1.3.2 Gaelic Revival 22

2. Irish and Scottish Theatre: Brian Friel and David Greig 24

2.0 Introduction

2.1 Irish Theatre

2.1.1 History and Themes 24

2.1.2 Brian Friel and Field Day 29

2.2 Scottish Theatre

2.2.1 History and Themes 31

2.2.2 David Greig and Suspect Culture 36

3. Translations 38

3.0 Introduction

3.1 Language of the Play

3.2 The Language Question in the Relationships between the Coloniser

and the Colonised: Baile Beag and the Royal Engineers

3.2.1 The Hedge School and its Pupils 42

3.2.2 Owen, Hugh, and the English Threat 47

3.3 The Language Question in Intimate Relationships: Lieutenant Yolland and Maire

4. Dunsinane 59

4.0 Introduction

4.1 Language of the Play

4.2 The Language Question in the Relationships between the Coloniser and the Colonised: The Scots and the English army

4.2.1 The English Soldiers and Scotland 63

4.2.2 Siward and Malcolm 65

4.3 The Language Question in Intimate Relationships: Siward and Gruach

Conclusions 76

Bibliography 80

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Introduction

This work is concerned with the analysis of the linguistic aspects of identity in two plays, Translations (1981) by Brian Friel and Dunsinane (2010) by David Greig. It seeks to explore the interplay of language and culture, their impact upon one’s individual or group identity and, vice versa, the impact identity has on them.

The first chapter looks into the theoretical premises of this work. First of all, it defines the concepts of language, identity, and culture as they are seen by contemporary scholars. In addition, it outlines some of the key points of debate around them as, for instance, whether the criteria of exclusion and inclusion are socially constructed or not. The notion of ethnicity is then discussed in relation to individual and group identities. Secondly, the chapter also discusses the role of languages in the establishment of a national identity and on the way the latter is shaped by the idioms spoken by a community. Finally, this chapter focuses on the history of Ireland and Scotland. In particular, it describes how Irish and Scottish Gaelic, two of the main languages spoken in these areas, struggled to survive after the English colonisation. It also describes the language policies adopted to preserve these languages and promote their use.

Chapter 2 is divided into two parallel sections. The first one is concerned with the history of Irish theatre, from the very first rural performances of the early eighth century to the end of the twentieth century. It then introduces the figure of Brian Friel and discusses his career, his works, and the creation of Field Day Theatre Company. Similarly, the second section outlines the history of Scottish theatre, its two literary renaissances and its struggles to establish an independent tradition separate from the all-encompassing English one. Finally, it presents David Greig, his career, the themes he usually addresses and his theatrical projects.

The third chapter is centred on Translations (1981) by Brian Friel. Not only does it focus on the issues raised in the play, but also on the linguistic strategies employed by the author. The first section examines the languages spoken in the play and investigates the approach chosen by Friel. The other sections of this chapter analyse the role of language and identity in the play. They discuss the language question in the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, between the English Royal Engineers and the people of Baile Beag. As concerns the intimate relationships, it looks into the love scene of Lieutenant Yolland and Maire and the way in which the two try to communicate despite the language barrier that separates them.

Finally, Chapter 4 has the same structure of the third chapter, but it is focused on Dunsinane (2010) by David Greig. The first section problematises the relationship between the play and its notorious prequel Macbeth (1606), highlights the differences between the two and looks into Greig’s

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language choices. The other sections discuss the role of language and identity in the play. As regards the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, the second section discussed the attitude that Siward and his soldiers have towards Scotland and its people, while the third section analyses the relationship between Gruach, Queen of Scotland, and Siward.

1. Identity and Language: The Cases of Irish and Scottish Gaelic

1.0 Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to give the theorical and historical premises of the work. The first section will seek to define the concepts of language, identity, ethnicity, and culture as they are seen by contemporary scholars. It will also discuss some of the major points of debate as, for instance, the level of arbitrariness of these notions, the relationship between individual and group identity, the criteria of exclusion and inclusion in ethnicities. Sections 1.2 and 1.3, instead, will focus on the history of two Gaelic tongues, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. It will briefly outline their history, how they struggled to survive Anglicisation and, finally, the language policies adopted to preserve them and promote their use.

1.1 Identity and Language

1.1.1 Individual Identity and Group Identity

The first part of this chapter is concerned with the concepts of identity and language. Its aim is to explore the interconnectedness of the two and how they impact upon each other. Giving precise definitions of these concepts, however, has often proved difficult. In the past, many scholars have tried to find the meaning of those concepts, resulting in hundreds of definitions which often clash with each other. This work will not try to offer a comprehensive overview of the history of how these notions have been conceptualised in the past few centuries; rather, it will briefly discuss the current visions of identity and how it is believed to relate to language.

The majority of scholars agree that identity is neither a given nor a product: it is a process that takes place in concrete and specific occasions, the result of countless negotiations (De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006). Furthermore, each individual has not just one, but multiple identities involved

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in a process of never-ending transformation. For instance, Kim (2003: 2) describes identity as “the individual’s concept of the self, as well as the individual’s interpretation of the social definition of the self, within his/her group and the larger society. Identity formation is not simply a conscious process but is influenced by unconscious psychological processes.”

The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed an explosion in the growth of publications on identity and ethnicity. While the word ethnic originally comes from the Greek ethnos, a term used to refer to a pagan or heathen, in the nineteenth century, it began to be used to refer to racial characteristics or to groups of people considered inferior. However, in the second half of the twentieth century ethnicity became a household word that has to do with group relationships and classifications of people. It refers to “aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive” (Eriksen 1993: 8). Nowadays, the term ethnic group is generally used to indicate groups of people that consider themselves as being culturally distinct because they share a number of characteristics different from those shared by other groups. Ethnic groups usually share a similar gene pool, a language, a history, and a culture, and for this reason, ethnicity has often come to be seen as a synonym of nation. The increasing contact between different communities brought about by decolonisation, globalisation, and migrations has problematised of the notion of identity and the study of the relationship between peoples, ethnicities, and nations. As a result, many scholars have tried to study the development of identities, namely how people build images of themselves and how they appropriate mainstream categories (De Fina 2006).

It is now universally accepted that identity construction is related to the definition of categories for inclusion and exclusion from a group. Every group identity, in fact, has membership rules, behaviours and characteristics its members are supposed to embrace in order to be able to call themselves part of a community. These typically consist of cultural attributes (religion, language, customs, myths, etc) that the majority of individuals in a specific community adhere to (Fearon and Laitin 2000). Part of an individual’s identity is thus determined by one’s sense of belonging to the social categories of the social group they claim to be part of.

In the 1970s, Henri Tajfel developed the Social Identity Theory which then became a model for analysing linguistic identity. According to him, social identity is “that part of an individual’s self- concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Joseph 2004: 76). He also postulated that every individual attaches different values to the group they belong to according to the knowledge they have of it. In other words, the way people relate to a group membership is not fixed, but unique, it changes from individual to individual.

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Not only are identities constructed, but also the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in the ethnic group are socially constructed. On the one hand, adhering to the membership rules can bind individuals together, create a sense of security and affiliation. On the other, it can reinforce stereotypes and prejudices, since those who do not embrace some elements of the identity (language, religion, etc) are sometimes seen as traitors of their ethnicity. Ethnicity, in fact, is often used as an instrument to differentiate a group from other groups in terms of culture, religion, language, race, and so on (Jaspal and Cinnirella 2012). Individuals in fact can use certain markers to contest one’s membership to the group. The failure to possess certain aspects provides grounds for the exclusion and otherisation of non-conforming individuals (Hozhabrossadat 2015).

Even though most scholars agree that identities are constructed and continuously shaped and reshaped by individuals, the degree to which human agency influences one’s identity is still up to debate. In fact, while some believe that identity is largely fictive, others deem it to be subject to social constraints which cannot be modified. A series of factors are involved in the process of identity construction, some of which are imposed by society and its structures, others which are deliberate and intentional choices of the individual. Even though it is generally assumed that individuals can present themselves choosing from a range of identities (or aspects of one identity) according to the circumstances and the interlocutors, the range people can choose from is restricted. It depends on ideologies, social implications, and beliefs regarding a group or a category (De Fina 2006).

Hence, although identity is constructed, it is not completely arbitrary. Furthermore, some perceived genealogical facts must legitimise the claims of ethnic identity. Jaspal and Cinnirella (2012:

507) hypothesise that “the provision of genealogical ‘facts’ grounded in social representations… lead to the ‘validation’ of one’s ethnic identity, which is an essential process associated with ethnic identity construction.” These facts can include physical similarities, cultural characteristics, common language, religion, etc. Usually, they are emphasised by the members of a group in order to downplay the other many facts that could suggest the contrary. An ethnic identity thus appears justified “by, firstly, presenting criteria for acceptance as an ethnic ingroup member… and, secondly, by convincing significant others… that the ethnic identity is based upon genealogical ‘facts’. If the two processes are successful, the identity is likely to be validated and, this, to become a socio- psychological ‘reality’” (Jaspal and Cinnirella 2012: 508). In other words, collective identities have to do with what members think characterises them as a group that is different from others.

Scholars have often investigated the relationship between individual and collective identities and how people seek to establish a common ground between these two. De Fina (2006) claims that both personal agency and social positioning play a fundamental role in the construction of identity and that group identities revolve around the acceptance or rejection of shared social representation.

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Shared social representation is the schemata that “allows members of a group to present themselves as belonging to categories whose members have typical characteristics and defining ways of acting”

(De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006: 346). It consists of shared meanings, that is metaphors, themes, symbols, and stories that people use to make sense of their own identity and communicate it to others. They are a consequence of growing up in a specific group and culture, in a specific time in history, speaking a specific language. These shared meanings, however, affect members of one’s community in different manners. Individuals can make the social personal by using or ignoring the shared meanings as they see fit for specific reasons (Shiff and Noy 2006).

Social construction of a group necessarily involves the differentiation of one group from the others and, consequently, entails a potentially antagonistic relationship with the other. Scholars who believe identities are primordial, unchanging and unchangeable, are also known as Primordialists.

They claim that conflict between two ethnic groups is inevitable, the result of the natural clash between peoples doomed to fight because they are inherently different, predisposed to see the other as a threat. On the other hand, scholars who believe that identities are fixed by social conventions rather than human nature, claim that hostility between two ethnic communities is not an eternal condition because boundaries between communities are never permanent (Fearon and Laitin 2000).

1.1.2 Language, culture, and nation

The nineteenth and twentieth century saw a revival of nationalism fuelled by the belief that people with a common history, religion, and language had to coalesce and fight the other. The doctrine of nationalism is based on the idea that humanity is naturally divided into nations and each nation has its own peculiar characteristics. The very same idea of nation, however, is ambiguous.

Etymologically, it could refer to people linked by nativity, but in its extended sense it also refers to the territory, its inhabitants, and the government, to an imaged political community. Sometimes these two senses coalesce, but the definition of nation remains difficult to establish.

Research in many fields, among which anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology, has firmly established that language is central in the formation and negotiation of national identity.

Joseph (2004: 94) states that “the existence of a national language is the primary foundation upon which national ideology is constructed.” National languages play a role in assigning memberships and in the process of identity construction. Moreover, they also define the difference between communities, especially when they distinguish neighbouring cultures where even the smallest variation assumes a huge cultural significance. In 1806, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb

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Fichte argued that a nation in defined by its language. His theory, which was then exploited by the Nazis during World War II, affirmed that (Fichte in Joseph 2004: 110):

those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.

Fichte, like many other philosophers, thought that the Volksgeist, the spirit of a people, was reflected in their language. Racially and nationally distinct feelings shape the language of the group because members of different nationalities and ethnicities differ in their perception of the world around them (Joseph 2004).

Language is also inextricably linked to culture. Culture is described by Kim (2003: 1-2) as “a set of beliefs, values, norms, customs, traditions, rituals, and a way of life that differentiates one group from another”. Just like identity, culture is not a static entity because a society’s values and norms are continuously recreated, restructured, and redefined. Language and culture, however, are interdependent because without language, culture cannot be acquired, expressed, and transmitted. In turn, without culture, language does not exist. Language, in fact, is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. In that regard, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonsing the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986: 14-15) claims that

[i]n doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves. […] Over a time this becomes a way of life distinguishable from other ways of life.

They develop a distinctive culture and history. Culture embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which they come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people’s identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race. All this is carried by language. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.

Ngũgĩ also affirms that culture reflects a people’s history and it does so by forming images of the world as seen by said culture. He postulates that an individual’s conception of themselves is based on those pictures and images and, thus, “language as culture is… mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating my very

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being” (Ngũgĩ 1986: 15). Language, therefore, is not just “a system of communication comprising codes and symbols which is used by humans to store, retrieve, organize, structure and communicate knowledge and experience” (Kim 2003: 1), but also something that shapes identities. Hozhabrossadat (2015: 195), for example, believes that “our relations and positions in the communities we live are defined, to a great extent, through the language we use.”

For these reasons, language is almost never seen as a culturally neutral instrument. It is part of a broader capacity of people to understand, organise, read, and interpret the environment. An idiom is always loaded, embedded in a cultural dimension. It plays a fundamental role in the way one person is seen both inside and outside of a community. This theory is based on the assumption that individuals use language explicitly with the intent to convey and build identities. It is language, in fact, that gives rise to identity, abstracts experience into words and allows people to form a sense of self (Joseph 2004). A language shared by a group of people is a constitutive element in the formation of a community and/or a nation.

One of the main obstacles to the establishment of national identity is the absence of a national language. Idioms are believed to be a primordial reality. For this reason, when a nation lacks a distinctive language, nationalists often try to construct a romanticised ethnic history and create national myths and stories that endow a group with a strong sense of pride in their identity. These narratives often extend back into prehistory in order to make the nation be seen as natural and legitimate (Joseph 2004). Founding myths are also necessary to motivate people to fight on behalf of their nation and their identity. They allow communities to distance themselves from the negative aspects of their past and they provide a sense of connection to something immortal. Individuals

“utilize the socio-psychological resources… available to them to construe ethnic identity in ways that ensure a positive sense of distinctiveness” (Jaspal and Cinnirella 2012: 511).

In conclusion, language is a fundamental element in the construction of identities. It shapes the way individuals see the world and relate to it. Furthermore, it is believed that national identities are legitimised by the existence of a national language, shared by a community that has a particular vision of the world, distinctive from that of other peoples. Therefore, having a national language has come to be considered as one of the constituent elements of nationhood. For this reason, nations, especially those who have a colonial past, often go to great lengths to recover their ‘original’ language and officialise it.

In particular, this work mainly focuses on the history of Ireland and Scotland and how they managed to prevent both Irish and Scottish Gaelic from disappearing off the map. The next sections are concerned with the way these two languages struggled against the dominance of English in different historical periods and with the language policies adopted to preserve and promote them.

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1.2 Irish Gaelic

1.2.1 Origins and Decline

Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are both part of the so-called Celtic Languages, a family of Indo-European languages once spoken by many communities across Europe and in Asia minor. While the original homeland of the Celts and their languages is still unknown, many scholars have associated them with two Iron Age cultures, the Hallstatt and La Tène, both based in Europe between the fifth and seventh century BC.

The word Celt, however, is primarily a linguistic term. The first mentions of the Celts can be found in Greek and Roman manuscripts where the word Celt was used by classic writers to identify a group of people speaking a different language.

Nowadays, most scholars distinguish between two varieties of Celtic: Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic. The former was once spoken in the European continent, from Iberia to the Balkans. It supposedly died out by 500 AD, but it has more or less strongly influenced many of the Romance languages spoken in the area today. The Insular Celtic, on the other hand, survives to this day in the British Isles. The six remaining Insular Celtic languages divide into two groups: the Goidelic (Irish, Scottish, and Manx Gaelic) and Brittonic languages (Breton, Cornish, and Welsh).

As concerns the history of Insular Celtic, by the fourth century BC most people in the British Isles spoke a Celtic language or dialect. However, the dominance of these idioms in the British area was seriously undermined by the Roman invasion during the first century BC. The army of Julius Caesar, in fact, not only invaded most of Britain, but also brought Roman traditions and customs with it. Latin supplanted the Celtic languages as the language of power until the fifth century, when the Roman armies finally began withdrawing, and the British leadership tried to regain control over the Island (Macaulay 1992). Both Ireland and Scotland among other areas managed to avoid Romanisation and kept their tongues intact for many centuries.

The earliest written form of Gaelic is found in the in the Ogham (or Ogam) inscriptions.

Believed to be dating back to the period between the first and the sixth century AD, these stones are found in Ireland, Wales, and Man. They are lithographic inscriptions carved in short simple lines which mainly consist of lists of personal names. They do contain neither verbs nor prepositions, thus proving that the language reflected by the Ogham inscriptions is primitive and in its early development (Ó Dochartaigh 1992; Ó Baoill 2010).

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The cryptographic system used in some of the inscriptions, however, is believed to be derived from the Latin alphabet. Christianity, in fact, played an important role in the development of both Gaelic culture and language. It was brough from Britain to Ireland by Palladius in 431 AD, but the process of evangelisation was only completed by Saint Patrick in the mid-fifth century. In Scotland, instead, Christianity was spread by Colum Cille, also known as Saint Columba during the sixth century. With Christianity came also the Latin language. Not only was the Latin alphabet adapted to fit the Gaelic language, shape it, and eventually begin its slow process of standardisation, but the contact between the two languages brought with it several loan words, especially in the ecclesiastical and high-literate contexts (Ó Baoill 2010).

In the sixth and seventh century monasteries became major centres for religion, learning, and craftmanship, drawing scholars from England and Europe as well. Much of the linguistic evidence we have left of the so-called Old Irish Period (7^th – 9^th century) has been preserved in monastic libraries, mainly in the form of glosses and marginalia written by the monks on the Scriptures or on other Latin texts (Ó Dochartaigh 1992).

Latin, however, is not the only language which strongly influenced the Gaelic languages. The eight century saw the first incursions of the Vikings in the British Isles. They assaulted and raided monasteries, and eventually brought the Old Irish Period to an end. The incursions continued on for centuries, they mostly settled in the coastal regions and kickstarted the urbanisation of the areas of Dublin and Limerick among others. The influence of Norse on Irish, however, was limited to lexical borrowings, especially seafaring terms and Norse place-names (Ó Dochartaigh 1992).

Despite frequent raids from the Vikings, Irish remained the predominant language in the Irish isle, only dimly influenced by other tongues. During the Early Modern Irish Period (1250-1650), Irish also imposed itself as a literary language with its own literary tradition. This new development had two major consequences. On the one hand the new literary tradition ensured the standardisation of a high-register Irish, rich in Latin loans, which prevailed throughout the medieval age. On the other, the standardisation also prevented the recording of the diachronic development of the Irish language over those centuries. For example, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the Irish isle (12^th century) gave rise to a series of borrowings and calques which deeply modified the language. To this day, Anglo- Norman is the language that has had the most profound effect on Irish. However, the contact between the two tongues went mostly unrecorded for a long time.

During the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the Anglo-Norman invaders, or rather their descendants, assimilated to Irish traditions. They picked up the Gaelic tongue and freely cohabitated with the Irish. The English were so concerned about the ongoing process of Gaelicisation of the Norman colonisers that they sought to return them to the Anglo-Norman customs. The Statutes

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of Kilkenny (1366) commanded that “if any English, or Irish living among the English, use the Irish language amongst themselves, contrary to this ordnance, and thereof be attained, his lands and tenements, if they have any, shall be seized into the hands of his immediate lord” (Cahill 2007: 115).

The Statues were then followed by an anti-miscegenation law.

In 1536, a missive from Henry VIII ordered that “every inhabitant within said town [Galway]

endeavour themselves to speak English” (Cahill 2007: 115) and an act issued the following year proclaimed that English was the only language His Highness’ subjects could speak. In 1537, another statute blamed the Irish people’s attachment to Gaelic as the cause of their backwardness. These were the first, but definitely not the last statues officially implying that people speaking Gaelic were savages and their language nothing short of an infection that needed to be stopped.

Statutes, acts, and laws were then followed by direct action by the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In particular, the Oliver Cromwell’s Irish campaign (1649-53) led to the transplantation of Gaelic clans and families from Ulster, Munster, and Leinster into Connacht, the least fertile province, unless they proved their royalty to the Parliament. These areas were then occupied by planters from England and Scotland who were neither Catholic nor spoke Irish. The Cromwellian plantations utterly destroyed the Irish Catholic land-owning class and dealt another blow to Gaelic identity. Cromwell, in fact, presented himself as a liberator from Irish barbarism and hypocrisy. He claimed that, in order to properly control the Island, he first had to undermine the native Irish culture (Frey 2015). The English attempt to disenfranchise and repress the Irish Catholic population was then carried on by the Penal Laws. These were a series of laws introduced in Ireland in the 1690s and designed to disarms Catholics, keep them poor and deprive them of public life.

Catholics were not allowed to hold any land or have weapons, they were excluded from public offices, and did not have access to education. The Act to Restrain Foreign Education (1695), for example, targeted Catholic schools as responsible for spreading disloyalty to the English Crown (Cahill 2007).

The English colonisers further penalised the Irish-speaking population with the 1737 Administration Justice Act, which forbid the use of any language but English in court proceedings, thus preventing the vast majority of Irish civilians from being able to properly defend themselves (Cahill 2007).

By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the Irish natives still spoke Gaelic. However, significant shifts in public consciousness were starting to take place and people began looking at their language with different eyes. Irish Gaelic, in fact, had long been kept far from the political, economic, and cultural centres. Irish was the language of the poor, the barbarians, and the uncivilised, associated with rural Ireland. English, on the other hand, was seen as the language of power (Laukaitis 2010).

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Before the English colonisation, especially during the Christian era and the Middle Ages, Ireland boasted of a long heritage as a centre for higher learning and literature. Colonial domination, however, belittled Irish culture and language. In this regard, McDermott (2011: 26) writes that “many within the dominated society came to view the coloniser’s culture as a means of empowerment and opportunity, while their own heritage, including language, is viewed as backward, inferior or a barrier to societal and economic progress.” It is of little surprise that many Irish speakers were ashamed of their native language and tried to pick up English, a language symbol of social and economic betterment. For instance, Irish laborers who spoke at least a little English were paid more than monoglot Irish speakers. Furthermore, given the poverty in which most Irish lived, emigration to North America and England was becoming an increasingly attractive prospect (Cahill 2007).

However, the absence of schooling in Irish and the urging to learn and shift to English meant that

“any kind of stable bilingualism with a functional distribution according to public and private usage, i.e. diglossia, was never really a viable scenario for the native Irish” (Hickey 2011: 4).

As this chapter tries to demonstrate, the decline of the Irish traditions was exacerbated by the constant English propaganda, claiming that the Irish population was inherently inferior, inadequate, and, therefore, their language was “good for little beside the most primitive conversation” (Thompson 2003: 222). Many of the eighteenth-century directives aimed to make Ireland a Protestant, English- speaking nation. For example, in 1831 the advent of an Anglican-controlled national school system, which will be discussed later in more detail, reinforced the shift from Irish to English in schools, thus effectively making English the only language of instruction in Ireland. The national school system is believed to be one of the major factors that helped facilitate a great reduction in the number of Irish speakers.

In 1833 even ‘The Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell who, with the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) relieved the Catholics of the civil disabilities imposed on them, expressed this view:

I am sufficiently utilitarian not to regret its gradual abandonment. A diversity of tongues is of no benefit; it was first imposed as a curse, at the building of Babel. It would be of vast advantage to mankind if all the inhabitants of the earth spoke the same language. Therefore, although the language is associated with many recollections that twine round the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication is so great, that I can witness, without a sigh, the gradual disuse of Irish.¹

The most significant decline in the use of Irish Gaelic, however, was registered in the second half of the nineteenth century. The two major events that contributed to this decline are the Great Famine and the following mass emigration. The Great Famine of 1845-1849, also known in Irish as An Gorta

1 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/daniel-o-connell-s-irish-legacy-1.3995431

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Mór, caused about a million people to die of starvation, most of whom came from the west and south of Ireland, poor rural areas where the Irish language was still dominant (Cahill 2007). Originated in the USA, the spores from the potato blight arrived in Ireland from the Atlantic and decimated the potato crop. In addition, the Great Famine demoralised the remaining population and kickstarted a mass exodus to England, Scotland, and North America, thus removing, in the period between 1846 and 1901 nearly five million native speakers from Ireland and making learning English an economic imperative (Laukaitis 2010). David Fitzpatrick (1992: 175) estimates that “by 1870 more than half as many natives of Ireland were living overseas as at home… The unique decline of Ireland’s population for nearly a century after the Famine was mainly caused by structural emigration which removed up to half of each generation from the country.”

When the first census of Ireland including the question of language was held in 1851, the Irish language was already on the verge of extinction. Only one quarter of the population spoke Irish in their daily lives. Furthermore, Irish was found to be predominant only in the poorest and unprivileged areas, while towns and wealthy areas had largely shifted to English. Irish had become a symbol of Ireland’s backwardness, an obstacle to economic and social progress. In political and economic circles, English had already been spoken for a long time and the natives were encouraged to abandon their barbarous language “in favour of English as a major language of trade, commerce, politics and religion – in short, a language of “general civilisation’” (Ó Dochartaigh 1992: 23-24).

1.2.2 The Gaelic Revival

It is only thanks to the re-awakening of a national consciousness in the late nineteenth century that the Irish language did not completely disappear off the map. The political void of the 1890s which followed the failure of the attempt to implement Home Rule and Parnell’s death, was filled with a new cultural awareness which stressed the importance of Irish identity, race, and culture. At the turn of the century, Ireland saw the rise in movements such as the Gaelic Athletic Association and the National Literary Society, which attempted to revive Irishness. While insufficient to halt the demographic decline of Irish for good, the Gaelic Revival of the 1890s led to an increasing awareness of the existence of the Celtic language and its cultural value.

Crucial to the survival of the Irish tongue was the foundation of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaelige) on 31 July 1893 by Douglas Hyde. Its aim was to preserve the Gaelic tongue and promote it as the centre of Irish national identity as well as the strongest legitimate claim to nationhood.

Though demographically and culturally peripheral, Gaelic was established as a symbol of amor patriae, a crucial element in the debates over the future of Ireland. In this way, the Gaelic League

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“sought to revive Irish in order to establish Ireland, first and foremost, as a culturally distinct nation”

(Laukaitis 2010: 223).

The Gaelic League helped eliminate the shame felt by many Irish-speaking natives and did much to teach the rudiments of the language to schoolchildren and monoglot English speakers who desired to (re)discover their roots (Fitzpatrick 1992). In a speech he delivered in 1892 before the Irish National Literary Society, Douglas Hyde (2010: 149) insisted that

[t]he Irish language, which so many foreign scholars of the first calibre find so worthy of study, shall be placed on a par with—or even above—Greek, Latin, and modern languages, in all examinations held under the Irish Government. We can also insist, and we shall insist, that in those baronies where the children speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, and that Irish-speaking schoolmasters, petty sessions clerks, and even magistrates be appointed in Irish-speaking districts. If all this were done, it should not be very difficult, with the aid of the foremost foreign scholars, to bring about a tone of thought which would make it disgraceful for an educated Irishman—especially of the old Celtic race, MacDermotts, O’Conors, O’Sullivans, MacCarthys, O’Neills—to be ignorant of his own language—would make it at least as disgraceful as for an educated Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew.

The emphasis on the revival of Irish was rooted in the belief that Ireland had a distinct culture with their distinctive tongue. As a consequence, de-anglicising became a fundamental step in the process of making people aware that their national identity mainly consisted of their distinctively Irish national literature, music, customs, and idiom. In order to do so, the campaign promoted by the Gaelic League insisted on the idea that Irish was “an ancestral language linked with an ancient race”

(Laukaitis 2010: 224). The League, in fact, adhered to the belief that the Irish race was the heir to an ancient Celtic race, long repressed by the English, which needed to be reawakened. Thanks to this claim, nationalism gained a legitimising mythological foundation which, in turn, created a bond between the Irish old Celtic race and the Irish Gaelic tongue. To the supporters of the Gaelic League, the abstract concept of nationalism and ethnicity concretised in the fusion between language and the very idea of nation. Race and language went hand in hand, reinforcing the idea that a national identity depended on a language that was natural to that identity. In Our National Language, Thomas Davis (Laukaitis 2010: 226) wrote:

The language which grows up with a people, is conformed to their organs… fitted beyond any other language to express their prevalent thoughts in the most natural efficient way… To lose your tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest – it is a chain to the soul.

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Therefore, the Gaelic League was called to revive the Irish tongue and use all their means to prevent it from disappearing. In 1900 George Moore, a keen supporter of the language movement, urged his

“fellow countrymen” to “return to the language” (Kiberd and Matthews 2015: 118):

The language is slipping into the grave, and if a great national effort be not made at once to save the language it will be dead in another generation. We must return to the language. It came we know not whence or how; it is a mysterious inheritance, in which resides the soul of the Irish people. It is through language that a tradition of thought is preserved, and so it may be said that the language is the soul of race. It is through language that the spirit is communicated, and it is through language that a nation becomes aware of itself.

Others like Frederik Ryan, instead, were critical of the conservative elements within Gaelic revivalism. He believed that the leaders of the Gaelic League aspired to a return to medievalism. He saw no point in dwelling on Ireland’s past glories and, to him, adopting a new language was an enormous burden. In Is the Gaelic League a progressive force? (in Kiberd and Matthews 2015: 121) Ryan claimed that

[i]ndividuality in man or nation is not a thing to be directly sought; it is a by-product of the whole nature. When a man has to deliberately emphasise his individuality by artificially doing something out of the common, real individuality is at a minimum. What really gives a noble distinction to a man or nation is not the language they speak or the kind of dress they wear: it is their culture, their science, their art.

As a matter of fact, not everyone agreed with the Gaelic League’s objectives. Namely, the aim of reintroducing Irish in the educational system sparked a debate between the supporters of the Gaelic League and a group of professors at Trinity College in Dublin. They denounced the League’s leaders as nostalgists, responsible for Ireland’s backwardness (Kiberd and Matthews 2015). For instance, Robert Atkinson, professor of languages at Trinity College, claimed that the Gaelic League was a

“front of separatism” and that the Irish tongue was “so unsettled that it is impossible for the child to get real education training out of it” and “there is extremely little literature that he can get to read”

(1899 in Kiberd and Matthews 2015: 115). When Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League there were only six books in print in Irish, a language that had long ceased to be a medium of intellectual exchange (Kiberd and Matthews 2015). Nevertheless, the Gaelic league quickly became popular with the people, the press, and the Church. The revival of Irish was urged on the grounds that it was once the national language of Ireland and that its adoption would prove Ireland’s individuality, its difference from the other nations and many seemed to want to cooperate in its revival. Hyde and the League’s influence in one year alone promoted an unprecedented interest in Irish: the League sold over 50,000 textbooks and thousands registered in language classes (Kiberd 1995). In the following

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years, in fact, the efforts of the language movement successfully managed to reverse the dire situation of the Gaelic tongue. Not only did scholars rediscover the rich literary history of Ireland, but also more books started being written and printed in Irish, among which magazines, grammars, and dictionaries. The battle between the professors of Trinity College and the Gaelic League continued for many years, but by 1906 the League secured the use of Irish in Gaeltacht schools as a subject and by 1909 knowledge of Irish had become compulsory for matriculation at the National University (Kiberd 1995).

In short, the Gaelic League promoted language through the arts, language classes, cultural festivals, and the publications of materials in Irish. In order to appeal to any who considered themselves Irish regardless of their political and religious affiliations, it also proclaimed itself as a non-political organisation (McDermott 2011). However, over the years some of its members grew the more and more intolerant of English and Protestant influences. For this reason, in the nineteenth century the Irish language was often politicised. Many of the members of the Gaelic League became involved in Irish nationalism. They claimed that the Irish language was superior and elevating, a synonym of liberation and an indicator of national identity, while the English language was debasing, a reminder of Ireland’s colonial history.

In 1915, after Hyde’s resignation, the Gaelic League officially became a political organisation.

It represented a strong voice in the Republican Movement and, later, its vision became a political reality with Sinn Féin’s success in the 1918 General Election. Since language was integral to national identity, the Gaelic League promoted the compulsory study of the Gaelic tongue in the national school system. Schools, in fact, were seen as the most powerful agent towards the vision of an Irish Ireland, a means to bring Ireland back to its former glory.

In 1922, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, the Provisional Government declared that Irish would be taught in national schools. It enacted a series of reforms meant to instil a sense of pride in the Irish idiom, culture, and literature. The Gaelic League ignored the fact that English had long become the predominant language in Ireland, a language of economic necessity and thus supported by the majority of the population. They blamed the decline of the Irish Language on the national school system imposed in 1981 and on the physical punishments used by the English to indoctrinate. In a sense, the Gaelic League “advanced a strategy based on English design, for it sought to use the national school system as an instrument of control, an agent of making Irish an obligatory language of the people” (Laukaitis 2010: 230). In addition, the foundations necessary to the adoption of Irish as an extra subject were not present at the time. Neither Irish spelling nor grammar had been standardised, textbooks were few and teacher training was non-existent.

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Nevertheless, in 1922 Irish officially became a compulsory subject. It was to be taught for at least one hour a day in every school, even when the language was barely spoken by a quarter of the population and sometimes not even the teachers were fluent (Laukaitis 2010).

The creation of the Irish Free State also enabled the recognition of the Gaeltacht districts, special areas created in order to preserve the Irish-speaking communities and minimise the loss of Gaelic speakers. To this day, abstract ideas of myth and tradition are often projected onto the Gaeltacht which are, more often than not, seen are shrines, living museums of the Irish language (Thompson 2003). Owing to pressure from the language movement in 1922 English stopped being a language of instruction in the Gaeltacht, thus forbidding children from ever learning English (Laukaitis 2010).

Instead of helping the cause, in many cases compulsion led to a growing hostility towards the Gaelic tongue and the educational reform backed by the Gaelic League never managed to fully revive the Irish language. The compulsory inculcation of the language “failed to revive its vernacular use and virtually killed the Gaelic League and cultural revival” (Fitzpatrick 1992: 221).

Nevertheless, in the Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann, 1937) Irish is officially the first language. Article 8 of the Constitution (2018: 8) states that

1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language.

2. The English language is recognised as a second official language.

3. Provision may, however, be made by law for the exclusive use of either of the said languages for any one or more official purposes, either throughout the State or in any part thereof.

The language policies introduced with the Constitution were then solidified by the use of Irish road and street signs, banknotes, postage stamps, and official documents written both in English and Irish.

This approach ensured that the language became visible, a normalised element of everyday life (McDermott 2011).

The Governments continued to emphasise the importance of the Irish language in the national education system until the 1960s. In those years, teachers were given permission to spend more time on oral Irish as a subject instead of teaching through the medium of Irish if they thought the strategy would be more beneficial for their students. The number of schools that taught Irish fell dramatically, to the point that at the beginning of the 1970s, only 11 primary schools used Irish as a medium. This showed that the prescriptive and regulative approach promoted by the Government met with resistance and was not as successful as hoped. Parents were worried over the academic achievements of students taught through Irish and still considered the English language to be a key for social advancement.

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However, in the 1970s, the same parents that had criticised the use of Gaelic as a medium in schools, changed their attitudes to the Irish language after the establishment of the Gaelscoileanna.

They are Irish-medium schools which adopt a softer approach to Irish. The new system was incredibly successful because even though Irish was still the dominant language in those schools, it was not taught at the expenses of English (Ó Ceallaigh and Ní Dhonnabháin 2015).

In 2003 the Official Languages Act finally “guarantees the right of all Irish citizens to communicate with the State in either Irish or English, and provides mechanisms to ensure that this right is respected by public officials. It also provides for the simultaneous publication of important official documents, such as annual reports or policy statement in both languages” (Ó Ceallaigh and Ní Dhonnabháin 2015: 184). In addition, in 2007 Irish officially became a working language of the European Union.

In conclusion, despite its many failures, it is thanks to the Gaelic Revival and namely to the efforts and the propaganda of the Gaelic League and its supporters that the Irish language survives to this day. Frequently deemed near its demise, thanks to the support and protection of the Government Irish has somehow thrived over the last century. Even if English remains the dominant language and Gaelic is not used in the daily lives of the majority of the population, most natives can grasp the basics of Irish Gaelic and view it as part of their heritage. For most citizens of the Republic, in fact, the language is an indicator of national identity and should therefore remain a compulsory subject in the national school system (Ó Dochartaigh 1992).

1.3 Scottish Gaelic

Often referred to as Gaidhligh or simply as Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic is a language native to the Highlands and the Hebrides. Once the dominant language of the area, in the last three centuries it has almost disappeared, resisting only in small bilingual communities (MacAulay 1992). Unlike Irish, however, Scottish Gaelic is only one of the many languages that were spoken in Scotland before the arrival of the English. It is in fact impossible to establish a period when Scotland was a monolingual country. Gaelic, Scots, and English, the three traditional tongues of Scotland, have all been the predominant languages of State in a given period.

While the origins of Scottish Gaelic are still largely unknown, most scholars agree that the Gaelic language was brought to Scotland by Irish raiders between the first and the fifth century AD.

Their most important settlement in Scotland was that of the Dál Ríata in Argyll. Presumably some

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sort of cross-channel kingdom, the colony progressively became a centre of power far more important than the motherland. This theory therefore suggests that Scottish Gaelic developed from Irish Gaelic.

However, recent researches backed by archaeological evidence seem to disprove this theory.

Scholars such as Ewan Campbell, for instance, argue against the widely accepted hypothesis interpreting it as a socio-political myth (Ó Baoill 2010). Regardless of the different theories as to how the Gaelic tongue arrived to Scotland, it is still commonly recognised that, by the seventh century, Gaelic was the predominant language throughout Argyllshire thanks to the Dál Ríata kingdom.

After 400 AD, Dál Ríata benefited from the waning of the Roman power and began expanding westwards and northwards, up to the point where their area covered a large part of what is today known as Argyllshire. Since the Gaels were known by the Romans as Scotti, their growing area of conquest led directly to the establishment of Scotland (Ó Baoill 2010). The expansion of Dál Ríata was at the expense of the neighbouring kingdoms, especially at the expense of the so-called Picts.

The military action of the Gaelic kingdom was helped by the intercession of the Church. The Gaelic Catholic Church based in Dál Ríata extended its influence in the areas beyond the Gaelic hegemony and ensured the survival of the language. With the support of the Church, Scottish Gaelic replaced the other tongues spoken in the area and affirmed itself as the dominant idiom (MacAulay 1992).

Similarly to what had happened in Ireland, the Vikings started raiding Scotland over the course of the eighth century. The first assault to be recorded was that of the monastery of Iona in 795 AD.

In Scotland, Norse control manifested itself mainly in the Hebrides. The archipelago came under Norse control towards the end of the eighth century and became independent only with the Treaty of Perth in 1266. As regards the language, numerous Norse borrowings entered into the Gaelic vocabulary, especially seafaring terms and place-names (Ó Baoill 2010).

Despite the Viking invasions, the Gaels enjoyed a long period of prosperity which lasted approximately until the eleventh century. The coming of the Norsemen did not seem to trouble the kingdom of Argyllshire. By the end of the ninth century, the Gaels had conquered the entirety of the former Pictish area and the Gaelicisation of northern Britain continued relatively unperturbed for centuries, to the point where the Gaels more or less managed to establish the modern southern border of Scotland.

The fate of Gaelic culture was sealed when, after the confrontation with Macbeth in 1045, Malcolm, the son of the king of Scotland Duncan I, was sent to England. When Malcolm won back his kingship and became King Malcolm III, he did so with England’s support. For this reason, after the Anglo-Norman defeat in the Battle of Hastings (1066), Edgar the Ætheling, the legitimate heir to the English throne, sought refuge with his sisters and his mother at the Scottish court. In 1070, Malcolm married Edgar’s sister Margaret and agreed to support the King’s attempts to reclaim the

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English throne from William the Conqueror. Probably thanks to his wife’s influence, Malcolm III moved the capital to the south-east of the Lowlands. Eventually, the capital of the Scottish kingdom was moved to Edinburgh in Lothian, a non-Gaelicised area in the Lowlands (Ó Baoill 2010).

After the death of Malcolm III, his brother Douglas became king and forced David, Malcolm’s son, into exile to the court of the King of England. David’s English education exposed him to a range of Norman and Anglo-French influences. As a consequence, when he claimed the Scottish throne in 1124 as David I of Scotland he established a series of English practices in the kingdom. For instance, he implemented feudalism, created royal burghs which brought increased trade and wealth to Scotland, granted lands to Norman barons and built abbeys run by Anglo-Norman clerics and administrators (Lawson 2014). The introduction of feudalism, a system entirely different from the Gaelic socio-political organisation, was then followed by a gradual but steady replacement of the Gaelic-speaking leadership with an Anglo-Norman one. David I and then his sons deposed Gaelic as the official language of court and contributed to the expansion northwards of the English language.

The Gaelic recession that started in those years has continued ever since.

The prestige of Gaelic remained strong and undisputed only in the west and in the islands.

Writers and historians alike began distinguishing between the educated Lowlands and the uncultured, uncivilised Highlands (Ó Baoill 2010). The emergence of the Scots language dates back to this century. A hybrid of old English, old Norse, and French, with borrowings from other languages, Scots was first called Inglis. It expanded across Scotland and gradually drove Gaelic to the north and west of the Country. It began being used in literary texts as well as in official documents, supplanting Gaelic and becoming Scotland’s national language (Lawson 2014). Gaelic, on the other hand, was at times called Irish or Erse, probably to highlight its foreignness.

Ironically, the first book ever written in Scottish Gaelic dates back to this period. It is the Book of Deer, a book of Gospels in Latin in which the blank paged had been filled by Gaelic texts written in the monastery of Deer (Aberdeenshire) presumably between 1138 and 1150 (Ó Baoill 2010).

In 1494-6 the Scottish Education Act decreed that wealthy families were expected to send their children to be educated in the Lowlands and spend their formative years in an alien environment. In general, “Gaelic seems to have had no official place at all in the late medieval Scots-speaking state”

(Ó Baoill 2010: 13).

James VI of Scotland, who then became James I of England after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, carried out the destruction of both Gaelic culture and language. With the promulgation of the Statutes of Iona in 1609, he formally dismissed the Gaelic tongue as unimportant, if not illegal. These statutes required Highland Scottish clan chiefs to send their eldest child to Lowland Scotland to learn to speak, read, and write English (MacAulay 1992).

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Nevertheless, up to the eighteenth century, Gaelic remained the predominant language in the Highlands and in the rural areas of the Country. Out of the 335,000 people living in the Highlands, over 300,000 were monoglot Gaelic speakers. This figure, unfortunately, has been steadily decreasing ever since for a number of reasons (Macleod 2010).

First of all, the so-called Highland Clearances (approximately 1750 – 1860) encouraged and/or forced emigration to the Lowlands or abroad. Entire communities where Scottish Gaelic still played an important role in the society were swept away by evictions and mass emigration, causing an enormous loss of native speakers in the area. Highland cultural practices became increasingly marginalised and Scots started to absorb English culture and customs and associate the English language with the idea of progress (Lawson 2014). The Clearances also had important political consequences. This process, in fact, weakened the structure and the organisation of Highland leadership. The Highland chiefs resembled landlords rather than leaders. They changed the organisation of their lands and forced their tenants into seeking other sources of income or moving away from the Highlands if they hoped for better living conditions. After a long period of mass migration which dramatically changed the outlook of the region, the Highlands finally began to view themselves as a cohesive unit in the 1880s, when the Highland Land Wars began. Different communities in northern Scotland refused to pay rent and began organising protests. As a result, the government ordered an enquiry into the conditions of the crofters. Eventually, the Crofting Acts in 1886 and 1892 put an end to the Highlands evictions and brought some peace and stability to the land (Macleod 2010).

The fall of the Highlands, however, was only one of the many reasons behind the decline of Scottish Gaelic. Education reforms enacted first by the parliament in Edinburgh and then, after its closure in 1707, by the English parliament contributed to the suppression of Gaelic. From the eighteenth century onwards, English was promoted as Scotland’s proper language, cementing its position as the language of education and prestige while both Scots and Gaelic were labelled as vulgar, bawdy, and uneducated (Lawson 2014). In 1709, the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was set up to bring education to the Highlands. Gaelic was excluded from their curriculum and children were punished when caught speaking anything but English (Murdoch 1996). Some scholars also claim that the greatest social factor that impacted on the Gaelic language was the continuous population shift. As a result of the mass migration that followed the Highland Clearances, several Gaelic communities established themselves in the Lowlands and especially in the urban areas of Scotland. In the twentieth century approximately half of the Gaelic speakers domiciled outside the Gàidhealtachd, the traditional Gaelic-speaking regions. Consequently,

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Gaelic-speakers could be found in the rural areas as well as in the urban areas and, for this reason, the Church stopped acting as a bastion for Gaelic culture and language (Macleod 2010).

Another event which had great impact on the destiny of Gaelic culture was the Disruption of 1843, in other words the schism within the Church of Scotland and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland. One of the many factors that contributed to the secession was the attitude the established Church had in regard to the Highlands issues. The established Church, in fact, often allowed landlords to veto the appointment of ministers to their parishes. The Free Church, on the other hand, supported crofters and quickly gained their support. The schism led to the coexistence of two churches: while the Free Church dominated in the Highlands and in the islands, Argyllshire was still a stronghold of the established Church of Scotland (Macleod 2010).

Nevertheless, even before the schism, the Church contributed significantly in the reinforcement of Gaelic as a legitimate church language and played an important role in the establishment of an educational system. In the Highlands, it helped developing education and increasing Gaelic literacy.

In 1766, the SSPCK finally admitted Gaelic as a medium of instruction in their Highlands schools, contributed to the writing of textbooks and, in 1766, helped translate the New Testament into Gaelic.

It is precisely this translation and, later, the translation of the Old Testament in 1801, that legitimised the Gaelic tongue as the bearer of God’s Word (Macaulay 1992). Other organisations like the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society (1811) were founded with the objective of teaching people to read the Bible in Gaelic.

In 1872, however, the Education Act resulted in the passing over of the Church and the societies mentioned above to local school boards which generally failed to consider Gaelic and discouraged its use (Macleod 2010).

Even though Gaelic remained largely ignored by the official school system, the language surprisingly retained “a richness of expressive resource and a (restricted) range of differentiated registers associated with language arts, especially poetry, folktale and historical narrative, with crafts and with the range of community activities which require special vocabularies” (Macaulay 1992:

145). In 1873 and 1878, the School Codes in Scotland allowed teachers to use Gaelic in classrooms.

Regardless of all the efforts of different societies, parents seemed to want their children to become literate in English as this was viewed as a key to success. Until the twentieth century, the attitude of the English with regards to the Gaelic tongue had alternated between complete rejection and pity for the savages that still spoke the language. The English as well as the Lowlanders had long associated Gaelic and the Highlanders with a kind of animal behaviour in both speech and behaviour.

Furthermore, the supposed lack of literature excluded the language from any sort of analysis. In A