When school is over and done with: Linguistic practices and socio-demographic profiles of gaelic-medium educated adults

This chapter presents data from doctoral research conducted by the author, which examined language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of 130 adults who started in Gaelic-medium education (henceforth ‘GME’) during the first years of its availability in Scotland (Dunmore 2015). As part of this research an online survey of language use and attitudes among this group elicited 112 responses between 2011 and 2013. Twenty-eight of these participants were also interviewed, as were eighteen further individuals. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrated that the majority of participants’ social use of Gaelic is limited today, although notable exceptions were found among some speakers who were substantially socialised in the language at home during childhood.1 Only a small minority of participants may be described as ‘new speakers’ of Gaelic, that is to say having been raised without Gaelic at home and acquiring the language in GME, but continuing to make frequent use of it in the present day (see McLeod et al. 2014; Dunmore 2018). This chapter focuses specifically
on the degree to which questionnaire participants reported using the Gaelic language in the work, home and community environments, before moving on to examine the sociological and educational correlates of these professed language practices statistically. As I hope to demonstrate, the question of former-GME students’ socialisation in Gaelic at home during childhood appears from the quantitative analysis to have an important bearing on rates of Gaelic language use with various interlocutors in adulthood. Similarly, continuation with GME after completion of primary school seems from the statistical analysis to play a crucial role, correlating consistently with higher rates of Gaelic use.