Linguistic Pan-Gaelicism: A Dog that Wouldn't Hunt

Although 'pan-Gaelic' rhetoric has been a recurring theme in language movements in Ireland and Scotland since the late nineteenth century, there have been no significant efforts to bring Irish and Scottish Gaelic closer together in linguistic terms. Instead, contact between the two speech communities has been relatively limited and intranational forms of linguistic nationalism have been dominant. This article analyses some of the key debates and decisions in corpus planning for Irish and Scottish Gaelic since the late nineteenth century, showing how potential opportunities to promote convergence were overlooked and how linguistic modernization has tended to increase the divergence between the two forms. Against this historical backdrop, the article considers the extent to which the promotion of linguistic convergence would have been a realistic goal and whether such efforts would have harmed broader language revitalization initiatives in Ireland and Scotland.