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ABSTRACT
This paper examines how caregivers in a bilingual family discursively link Gaelic to a school context when interacting with Maggie, an eight year-old who is currently enrolled in Gaelic Medium Education on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The paper argues that the caregivers achieve this discursive framing primarily through treating Gaelic as a performance language and through orienting to discourses that de-normatise Maggie’s use of her minority language. The paper argues that although the caregivers believe they are encouraging Maggie’s use of Gaelic, by framing the language in a school context, they link Gaelic to authority. It is further argued that this association of Gaelic with authority may be one of the many contributing factors to Maggie’s low use of the language overall. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this argument in terms of language policy and planning.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the organisers of the Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium for the invitation to speak at such a stimulating conference and to the audience for their insightful comments. The author would also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and also to Dr Stuart Dunmore for transcribing this interaction and for his many helpful insights on GME and RLS. The writing of this article has benefitted from ongoing discussions on the themes of ‘new speakers’ as part of the COST EU Action IS1306 entitled, ‘New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges’. All mistakes are of course my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Transcription conventions used
| : | = | Elongated sound |
| - | = | Cut-off |
| word | = | Emphasis |
| WORD | = | Increased amplitude |
| ° | = | Decreased amplitude |
| HI< | = | Higher pitch |
| WH< | = | Whispered |
| CR< | = | Creaky voice |
| BR< | = | Breathy voice |
| > < | = | Accelerated speech |
| = | = | Latching speech |
| [[ ] | = | Overlapping speech |
| (.5) | = | Pause (seconds) |
| (.) | = | Micropause (less than two-tenths of a second) |
| @ | = | Laughter (pulse) |
| (( )) | = | Non-verbal action |
| { } | = | Word/sound said ingressively |
| / | = | Rising pitch |
| \ | = | Falling pitch |
| /\ | = | Rise/fall pitch |
| .hh | = | Egressive sound |
| (?) | = | Uncertainty in transcript |
| • | = | Turns omitted |
Notes
1 This quote is from Fishman (Citation1996, p. 79). Full reference given in References section.
2 This is a pseudonym, as are all names used in this study.
3 For both corpora, each speakers’ turns in the conversation were coded for language: monolingual Gaelic, monolingual English, mixed (i.e. code-switching) and undecided. For the first generation speakers, in many cases the insertion of single lexical items into otherwise Gaelic utterances were coded as ‘Mononlingual Gaelic’. due to the proliferation of English lexical items into everyday Gaelic discourse (see Smith-Christmas, Citation2012).
4 A further 5% were coded as ‘Mixed’. No turns were coded as ‘Undecided’.