Scottish Languages Bill is full of 'weakly relevant policy gimmicks' and won't save Gaelic

The Scottish Languages Bill as presented in the Scottish Parliament last November requires radical revision if it is to have a positive effect on Gaelic communities. The Bill, as it stands, now proceeding to its second stage in the Parliament, offers little substance beyond a performative gesture at honouring manifesto commitments.

The 2023 Bill is a weaker legislative instrument than the Gaelic (Scotland) Act 2005 it seeks to reform and will merely compound the ineffectual aspects of the original legislation, which failed to establish practical initiatives for supporting the use of Gaelic in communities. Instead of devising concrete steps to support Gaelic communities, now clearly mired in social crisis, the Bill has opted for weakly relevant policy gimmicks repurposed from other jurisdictions.

A sign in Gaelic and English on a road in the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides | Getty Images

The main policy changes centre on establishing “areas of linguistic significance” mimicking the deliberations of the Welsh Commission for higher density Welsh speaking areas. Another proposed procedural change aims to replace the current language plan approach with a language standards process, which has been lazily borrowed from fanciful official thinking in other Celtic contexts. Given the limited real-world traction that many current organisational language plans have attracted, this proposed “reform” will most likely replace one form of box-ticking with another.

The Bill also proposes vague new responsibilities for local authorities and other public bodies although its accompanying explanatory note explains that no additional state resources are anticipated in support of the proposed legislation, meaning that official bodies will most likely evade these aspirational responsibilities or allow for a rhetorical engagement with the issues. Beyond derivative thinking from other minority language contexts, little beyond a re-bureaucratisation of the status quo is offered when radical change is required to address a critical social and cultural situation.

The draft Bill effectively denies the crisis facing Scotland’s remaining native-speaking Gaelic communities. This possibly explains why the legislation fails to acknowledge the evidence base indicating that these communities are at the point of societal collapse. This denialism means that the Bill has become part of the problem, offering a “more of the same” approach rather than the much-needed new departure to help sustain Gaelic as a community language and reverse the social demise of the Gaelic communities.

The Bill’s second stage affords opportunities to address deficiencies including the mismatch between the largely symbolic or aspirational focus of the existing policy approach and the practical strategic supports necessary to arrest the decline. Parliament’s task is to jettison those legislative aspects which are irrelevant to the current social and cultural situation, replacing them with concrete proposals to support actual communities.

Since the Gaelic Crisis study’s 2020 publication, four years have been wasted via institutionalised evasiveness and faux consultations about policy reform, with public agencies failing to meaningfully engage with the study’s findings, implications and recommendations.

A complete reset of Gaelic affairs in Scotland is required. The Bill should specify parameters of root and branch reform before it is too late to effect meaningful change for communities. Given the urgency of the problem, engaging in legislative reform and retaining the policy apparatus in which the current community crisis intensified is a contradiction.

Politicians and public officials could demonstrate their commitment to reform the current situation by indicating in the legislation how they intend to address the two central challenges in Gaelic affairs: a) protecting Gaelic as a community language, and b) ensuring that Gaelic-medium education produces fluent and socially confident speakers.

This root and branch reform should entail:

• Dispensing with the bureaucratic practices that have had little positive effect on the real-world issues of communities;
• Providing resource and strategic backing for coordinating a community development approach for Gaelic promotion and protection;
• Reorienting Gaelic promotion bodies away from their largely aspirational and symbolic remit in favour of community initiatives and supports;
• Reorganising or enhancing Gaelic policy funding models to ensure that community bodies in Gaelic vernacular areas are focused on capacity-building measures among the communities they serve;
• Establishing family support schemes, youth socialisation projects, enhanced sectoral supports for preschool/childcare for Gaelic speakers and learners;
• Initiating a GME curriculum review to assess Gaelic acquisition levels among pupils, with a view to establishing an outcome-focused approach to GME and devising a curriculum and pedagogy rooted in Gaelic culture;
• Proposing initiatives to ensure pupil progression for primary to secondary GME;
• Reviewing third-level provision to determine how current provision engages with contemporary social and cultural realities;
• Instituting schemes to provide better possibilities for co-operation across varying sociolinguistic communities, speaker groups and learner networks and geographic (urban, rural, islands) contexts.

Legislation must provide the context for the regeneration of Gaelic communities if the Gaelic language is to be a meaningful aspect of Scottish identity for futures generations.

- Conchúr Ó Giollagáin is the Gaelic Research Professor in the University of the Highlands and Islands