Speaking Gaelic
Gaelic in Scottish Education and Life. By John Lorne Campbell. (Johnston (Edinburgh) for the Saltire Society. 3s. 6d.)
ABOUT a subject which easily arouses sentiment, Mr. J. L. Campbell of Canna has assembled a most businesslike collection of facts. The number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland, the churches and Gaelic, Gaelic scholarships and bursaries, Gaelic publications, methods of teaching Gaelic, the attitude of the Scottish Education Department— information on all these headings has been collected from histories, statistics and reports, and by personal enquiry, and presented clearly with the help of maps, tables, and a bibliography. In the sixteenth century Gaelic, one of the oldest literary languages of Europe, was spoken over half Scotland: in 1931 only by two per cent. Mr. Campbell outlines the centralising, anglicising policy of the State and the Presbyterian Church which brought this about: it is a bitter story, which shows that Gaelic did not decline through its own lack of vitality, but through deliberate and sometimes cruel repres- sion: but his main concern is with the present and future of the language. Today, Gaelic is so far officially tolerated as to be taught in certain parts of the Highlands, but mostly as a medium for learning English, and there is " an air of indifference to Gaelic " in the Highland classroom. The Gaelic-speaking child may never learn to read or write his own language; may get no idea, in school, of his native heritage of poetry and legend; and may even, in a country as rich in folk-song as any part of Britain, find himself singing out of The English Community Song-Book. Mr. Campbell's case—backed up by a section on " Bilingualism in the Empire and abroad," Wales, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Malta, Malaya and Iceland—is that Gaelic should be given at least as satisfactory treatment as that accorded to other minority languages in the Empire and Gaelic made the medium of instruction for Gaelic-speaking children for the first years of school life. There are passages in this book to surprise and shock any British. reader, but the study is all the more valuable for its factual unemotional approach; both Mr. Campbell, and the Saltire Society which has sponsored his enquiry, deserve praise and
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