“Why Won't You Speak to Me in Gaelic?” Authenticity, Integration, and the Heritage Language Learning Project

Abstract

The last speakers of an endangered language often include many individuals who have acquired less than full productive proficiency in the language, language users Nancy Dorian (1977) called semi-speakers. When these individuals enter formal education and seek to learn or relearn their endangered heritage language, they are often frustrated by challenges to their authenticity as legitimate language users and by difficulties in effecting integration into local language networks. This study investigates the unique language-learning task faced by heritage learners of an endangered language, Scottish Gaelic, and shows how this task differs significantly from the task of learning and using a foreign language. I will argue that the results of this study have important implications for pedagogical practice and curriculum development for the teaching of endangered languages, particularly where language learning is understood, at least in part, as a strategy for language revitalization.

Keywords:

• ideology
• metaphor
• Scottish Gaelic
• authenticity
• identity
• community

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Murchadh MacLeòid, Iain Mac an Tàilleir, and Liz NicIlleathainn for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. Portions of this study were presented at the conferences Languages of the Wider World: Understanding Resilience and Shift in Regional and Minority Languages, April 7, 2011, Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, and New Speakers of Minority Languages: A Dialogue, March 30, 2012, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh. I would like to thank the session participants for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹I am a competent L2 speaker of Gaelic; however, I interviewed in English because some of the interviewees, while comfortable conversational speakers of Gaelic, might be intimidated by speaking Gaelic in a formal interview situation. I feared that the norms of the Gaelic Revival could lead some interviewees to consent to an interview in Gaelic even if they would be more comfortable in English, so I felt that it was safer to conduct all of the interviews in English.