Michael Fry: Attempt to rejuvenate Gaelic is a futile exercise

IT WAS Arthur Cormack, the chairman of Bòrd na Gàidhlig himself, that gave the game away to me.

On the publication this week of his quango's action plan for Gaelic, he said: "I am aware that many fluent Gaelic speakers feel as if they are not part of current Gaelic developments, and I want that to change. I want us to find ways to involve current Gaelic speakers with new Gaelic learners to ensure that those learners get exposure to the best possible Gaelic and to ensure that what they learn in classes can be reinforced in the community."

It would have been worth placing a bet that the basic issue raised by those remarks would not be mentioned at all in yesterday's solemn debate on the action plan in the Scottish Parliament. The fact remains that the current Gaelic revival, such as it is, has been largely the work of English-speaking Lowland intellectuals, of trendy mums and dads in Edinburgh and Glasgow who wish wee Coinneach or Catriona to acquire the mental equipment for a possible future career in BBC Alba.

Yet this fashion, and all the campaigning that trendy mums and dads can generate out of it, on the whole leaves the actual Gaels cold, the people dipping sheep or digging peats amid the howling gales and the driving rain of Harris or Morvern. Among them, the language has long been in decline. Most do not care: there are more pressing things to worry about. So they show little desire to get "involved", in Mr Cormack's sense.

On the contrary, these Gaels continue to retreat into their own circles, which are starting to look very confined indeed. Except for the raucous propaganda from Pacific Quay the Gaelic of the public sphere turns ever more muted. For example, the Presbyterian sects have for a century and more been one stronghold, but now there are no Gaels studying for the ministry. Within a generation, Gaelic will cease to be heard from the pulpit.

When "white settlers" move into the Highlands, even where they do not swamp or displace the natives, these seldom take the incomers under their wing and kindly teach them the local ways. No, the two groups lead separate lives while occupying the same neck of the woods or shore of the loch. Gaels babble among themselves at the bar or in the shop. But, being by nature courteous and friendly, they switch to English as soon as a stranger walks in. White settlers have, after all, transformed the Highlands in a positive sense too. They have halted the decline of population and made the region, in parts, quite prosperous. They cannot be dispensed with now.

Gaelic is, or soon will be, a language purely of the domestic sphere, and even there may have problems hanging on. The offspring of mixed marriages, of a Gael and an English-speaker, seldom grow up bilingual in Scotland.

When I was last in Lewis one of the babbling Gaels told me that his own children will not speak Gaelic to his own parents: if Gaelic bears the stigma of being the language of the old (which of course it largely is), then the young would rather forget it.

Modish myth sees in this decline a uniquely awful loss, yet it is far from unique. Right round the world the fate of languages is determined by the social situation in which they are used, or can be used. The decapitation of the local intelligentsia is how the French have rid themselves of their linguistic minorities from the Bretons to the Provenaux. Anyone who wanted to get on had to learn Parisian French, and those who did not were welcome to stay at home and hone the tines of their pitchforks against the day of the revolution that never came – or at least, last came over 200 years ago.

The stick-in-the-muds are then vulnerable to getting swamped. At this moment in Central Asia, Turkic peoples living there since the Middle Ages are being overrun by alien migrants from further east. But violent protests can hardly affect the outcome of the contest, when there are millions of Uighurs yet hundreds of millions of Han Chinese. And all over the world languages die out from one generation to another – native American languages, aboriginal Australian languages. The language is not even secure in the home if the social situation outside is unfavourable.

It is the unfavourable social situation that has sealed the doom of Gaelic too. Of course the causes are varied, but if asked to blame one single cause I would say the crofting system rather than the Clearances. The greatest decline did not occur in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It happened in the twentieth century when Gaelic was no longer suppressed but tolerated and, towards the end, even encouraged a bit.

By now the Clearances had ceased while the crofters were secure. That could not compensate for the fact that crofting is a lousy, uneconomic system. It gives a bare subsistence at best, and people on a bare subsistence seldom have time for culture. Speaking English was the first step on the way out to a better life. Crofters made sure their children knew it, and that might mean the parents avoiding Gaelic except to each other.

What is happening in this social situation that could make it more favourable to Gaelic? The short answer is nothing. The biggest single threat to Gaelic as a living language lies in the fact that its last stronghold in Lewis suffers chronic economic decline and continues to lose population faster than any other area of Scotland. Gaelic belongs to its way of life, and will vanish with its way of life: at the present rate, before the end of the twenty-first century. If that is true of Lewis, it is true of most of the remaining Gidhealtachd also.

What is there in the social situation in the rest of Scotland that will make people start speaking Gaelic? Again, the short answer is nothing. Of course, trendy mums and dads will go to Gaelic classes and send their kids to Gaelic-medium schools. But speaking Gaelic to other learners does not make for a fluent Gael, while the kids break into English as soon as they get into the playground.

The whole business is an exercise in futility, the product of the groundless belief in Scotland that government's wishful thinking and public subsidy to special pleading can make things happen. When will we ever learn?