Gaelic heritage, language revitalisation and identity in present-day Nova Scotia

One notable legacy of the Clearances, and the resulting large-scale emigration from the Highlands and Islands to Maritime Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries is the continued presence of a Gaelic-speaking minority in 21st century Nova Scotia. In addition to Scotland’s 57,602 Gaelic speakers, the 2011 census recorded 1,275 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, amounting to just over 0.1% of the total population of the province. Of that number, only 300 individuals reported Gaelic as their mother tongue, with the remainder likely to have acquired Gaelic through educational programmes in adoleccence or adulthood. The concept of the ‘new speaker’ has gained currency in the sociolinguistics of minority languages in the past decade, referring to individuals who have acquired an additional language outside of the home – often as part of formal education – and who make frequent use of it in the course of their daily lives. Policymakers and language advocates in both Scotland and Canada make frequent reference to the role that new speakers may play in the future of the Gaelic language on both sides of the Atlantic.
The present-day Nova Scotia Gaelic community is thus substantially smaller than that of Scotland, having experienced a severe and rapid decline of over 99% in the last hundred years, from over 80,000 in the early 20th century. As a response to rapid language shift in both Scotland and Nova Scotia, Gaelic language teaching of various kinds has been prioritised by policymakers as a mechanism for revitalising the language. This chapter examines reflexes of this policy in the two countries, relating the ongoing fragility of Gaelic communities to new speaker discourses around heritage, identity, and language learning motivations. In particular, I consider Nova Scotian new speakers’ sense of identity as ‘Gaels’, an ethnonym largely avoided or problematised by new speakers in Scotland.