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Abstract
Heritage learners of minority languages can play a lynchpin role in reversing language shift (RLS) in their families; however, in order to enact this role, they must first overcome certain barriers to re-integrate the minority language into the home domain. Using a combination of conversation and narrative analysis methods, we demonstrate how both enacting this lynchpin role, as well as the specific barriers to its enactment, unfolds at the micro-level for heritage learners of Scottish Gaelic. We then turn to Gaelic language planning at the macro- and meso-levels, and argue that Gaelic language education policy does not explicitly recognise this potential lynchpin role, nor does policy or pedagogy specifically address the particular interactional challenges that heritage learners face. We argue that in order to best maximise Gaelic education as means to RLS, the education of adult heritage learners needs to be seen as a complementary strategy to childhood education, not as a secondary (and often lower priority) tactic to ensuring the vitality of the language.
Acknowledgements
We thank Wilson McLeod, Rob Dunbar, Angela Weir, Iain Tormod MacLeòid and Mark McConville for reading and commenting on a draft of this paper. A version of this paper was presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland on 6 September 2013, and we thank conference attendees for their comments and suggestions.
Transcription conventions
| : | = | Elongated sound |
| ° | = | Decreased amplitude |
| - | = | Cut-off |
| = | = | Latching speech |
| [[ ] | = | Overlapping speech |
| (.) | = | Micropause (less than two-tenths of a second) |
| / | = | Rising pitch |
| (?) | = | Uncertainty in transcript |
| • | = | Turns omitted |
Notes on contributors
Cassie Smith-Christmas is a research fellow for Soillse, the inter-university Gaelic language research network, for the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her doctoral research at the University of Glasgow examined code choice over three generations of a bilingual family and her current research explores migration to Gaelic-speaking areas.
Timothy Currie Armstrong is the Soillse research fellow at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. His research interest is in language planning at the micro-level and he is particularly interested in investigating how language ideology impacts the success of language revival as a bottom-up social movement.
Notes
1. Also following Van Deusen-Scholl (Citation2003), the distinction is made between ‘heritage learners’, as defined above, and ‘learners with heritage motivations’, the latter of which, in the case of Scottish Gaelic, often includes a number of learners seeking to re-connect with their ancestral heritage (see MacCaluim, Citation2007, and Newton, Citation2005, for more on learners in the Gaelic diaspora).
2. However, it is important to note that the Ùlpan course has a programme of training for its tutors. To date, there has been no independent evaluation of the effectiveness of Ùlpan or of its tutor-training programme.
3. The recordings were made using an ethnographic, participant observation-based approach. The researcher had been working with the family since 2007, which played a large part in mitigating the effects of the Observer's Paradox. For more detail, see Smith-Christmas (Citation2012).
4. All names are pseudonyms.
5. The interim plan, Ginealach Ùr na Gàidhlig (Bòrd na Gàidhlig, Citation2010), did designate parents as adult learners as a priority; however, as there has been no independent assessment of the implementation of this plan it is unclear if some of the more ambitious recommendations of the plan were actually delivered, and this interim plan is now superseded by the most recent national plan.
6. In the first national plan covering 2007–2012 (Bòrd na Gàidhlig, Citation2007), adult heritage learners were generally designated as a priority; however, it is not clear how heritage learners were to be prioritised in the implementation of the first plan, and in any event the first plan is now superseded by the most recent national plan.