Growing Up With(out) Gaelic

My experience learning a language on my own

Photo by Aleksander Korobczuk on Unsplash

My journey with Scottish Gaelic began, ironically, where it is considered to have ended. On a family vacation to Scotland, we visited Culloden Moor where the final Jacobite Rebellion fought its last battle in April 1746. At the visitor’s center gift shop, I found a little blue book titled The Pocket Guide to Scottish Words, which contained phrases in Scots¹ and Scottish Gaelic. From there started what would be an ongoing passion with studying the history, stories, and language of Scotland and the world of Gaelic as a whole. It was one of the only languages I felt inexorably drawn to despite not having any family members who spoke it before I did.

Considering Gaelic’s status as a minority language, it is best learnt from native speakers who are becoming few and far between. Standardized curricula for Gaelic can be found in Scotland and Nova Scotia, but since I didn’t live in either place during my primary and secondary schooling it wasn’t an option for me to learn it in the classroom. For over a decade, I’ve scrounged and scraped to learn this language through trial and error until coming to a point when I found people and opportunities to speak it with.

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When I picked up The Pocket Guide to Scottish Words, I had little clue of how to pronounce many of the words or piece them together properly. I can remember sprinkling in words and phrases into my speech at the Live Action Roleplaying summer camp² I attended following the trip to Scotland. It was there, actually, my character Eachann MacLeod first appeared; I decided to alter the character I had been playing in order to incorporate my experience in a new country with a new culture and language. In the middle of that experience, I realized I needed more information on how to speak Gaelic since I was merely cobbling together the few words I could memorize from the book and badly-accented English words. I knew that if I wanted to get serious about the language, I’d need more structure than what a simple pocket guide could offer. In the back of it, I found a “Further Reading” list that I referred to later on as I sought out resources for my learning.

The next phase of my Gaelic-learning ran from the Christmas following my trip to Scotland all the way up to my senior year of college. This I would categorize as my “solo course era.” For that Christmas, I received a few books on Gaelic, including one on the alphabet, and a pre-packaged Scottish Gaelic course from EuroTalk. It had a very ‘90s computer game feel and a rather haphazard assortment of phrases and difficulty levels. One of the major shortcomings of this program was that it never explained any of the words or rules of Gaelic, presenting the language in a cold, stock standard format. In hindsight, there were many errors and misconceptions it could have drilled into me if I continued relying on it.

The next “course” I found was a full year following the trip to Scotland, this one being episodes of the BBC Alba (BBC Scotland) program “Speaking Our Language.”³ It was refreshing getting to watch and follow real people using the language (even if the acting was cheesy) rather than repeating single, pre-recorded words and phrases. It was here where I actually started taking notes on the language and recording my progress. Although it helped for memorization, pronunciation, and basic grammatical concepts, I noticed that I didn’t retain it very well since I couldn’t find ways to naturally incorporate it into conversations or daily life. At the time, I was working as a Counselor In Training at the LARP summer camp and shared a few tidbits of it with my friends but was usually met with quizzical expressions when I tried to explain it.

In college, my school had the option of a single credit, self-guided foreign language course. Students could pick any language they wanted to learn, conducting the course through a DuoLingo-like program called Mango Languages. I took this during my sophomore year, of course choosing Scottish Gaelic. Some progress was recorded on a Moodle forum for the course and in my icebreaker post, many fellow students commented saying they didn’t realize Gaelic even existed. This program, my advisor told me a year later, was very inaccurate in many respects and didn’t offer the same level of immersion as learning from a native speaker or course designed by native speakers. It did, however, have a leg up on both the EuroTalk course and DuoLingo since it actually took the time to explain grammatical concepts and cultural anecdotes about the languages it offered. It had the same bonuses as “Speaking Our Language” mentioned above, but I was in a similar situation where I had no one to speak the language with while I learnt it, thus leading to a decline in my retention.

That following summer, I found myself with bundles of free time after I failed to secure an internship or summer job. Not wanting to lapse into laziness or boredom, I made a strict regiment based on working out, writing, and language learning. I dedicated at least an hour a day to learning Gaelic, following the book Scottish Gaelic in Twelve Weeks. While this did challenge me and dispel some misconceptions I had picked up via EuroTalk and Mango Languages, I yet again found myself faced with the same problem of not having a single person to practice and use Gaelic with. At this point, the self-guided route had started to wear on me since I felt stuck, like I was missing out on immersing myself in the language outside of surrounding myself with books and the few pieces of Gaelic language media I could find.

Before my senior year of college, I found an online course through The Gaelic College (at the time known as Atlantic Gaelic Academy) that catered to different levels of Gaelic-speakers. When I applied, I wasn't sure what level I was at since I didn't have any reasonable way to measure my ability. The course manager sent me a self-assessment test for me to complete without any assistance. Although I struggled with it, and admittedly glanced back through Twelve Weeks to help with some of my answers, I was surprised to find that they placed me as an intermediate learner. Each class met over Skype for an hour and a half every Wednesday, starting in September. Most of my classmates were fellow Americans and were a bit older than I was, while our instructor was a native to Benbecula in Scotland. During my introduction, I managed to get a laugh out of my instructor after I mentioned Twelve Weeks and how at that point I had been trying to learn the language for years. That really put into perspective how long I had been struggling to learn Gaelic. Although at the best of times it forced me to start and hold conversations in Gaelic, the online format did not jive very well with language immersion on my end. At the time, I was also suffering the burnout of four years of undergrad, pouring so much time into my capston, and holding several leadership positions in societies across campus which hampered my focus in these online classes. It did leave me with some great resources and connections that I'd use later on in my learning at the very least.

For a few weeks after that online course ended, I enrolled in another from the Gaelic College in writing in Gaelic. This one challenged me a lot since it required participants to both write and speak in Gaelic during our meeting times. I learnt a lot about writing Gaelic prose, which in some cases was more challenging than speaking it. I would write brief stories each week based on a single word theme, some of which I figured I could use to inspire longer pieces. One of the ways I really tested my abilities was by not writing an English translation for any of the stories, before or after the Gaelic. Although I used resources to help find the right words and grammatical structures, this really forced me to think in conveying information in Gaelic rather than simply have it as a one-for-one translation of English to Gaelic. Thankfully, none of these were graded and were purely for educational development of participants. Writing in Gaelic is still something I struggle with but is a skill I’d like to master in terms of furthering my writing career and immersing myself in the language.

The genuine joy of learning Gaelic was reignited when I finally got to attend my graduate program at St. Francis Xavier University after complications from the pandemic forced me defer for a year. Over the 24-month period, I audited a total of four courses in Gaelic that were introductory but offered me a wealth of immersion that learning on my own had failed to do. During each of them, I sometimes had to hold myself back from participating in order to let students taking the classes for credit have a chance to speak. It was a sincere pleasure getting to have conversations in and outside of class with my instructor, Màiri Britton (who holds in person and online courses with the Gaelic College), speaking in Gaelic and really pushing myself to think with it rather than simply translate it from English. Over the course of my studies, I almost unconsciously transitioned into using it somewhat fluently.

Outside of classes, I participated in society events held by Gaelic-speaking students, many of whom had families that exclusively communicated in their mother tongue. It was at these visits (called cèilidhean in Gaelic) where I got to enjoy a seamless mix of higher education partying and genuine cultural immersion with people who carried so much treasure, in the form of knowledge, from childhood. It was amazing to see them keeping tradition alive in ways that didn’t seem dry or upheld with absolute reverence, but nonetheless respect and enjoyment. They lent their own talents of singing, dancing, and storytelling in ways that transcended time itself.

Most of my thesis and other coursework involved long hours of researching and analyzing Gaelic texts or accounts about Gaelic culture. Almost naturally, the lessons I had learnt over the past decade came full circle and helped me understand concepts that I would have been completely oblivious to had I not kept up my learning and enjoyment of the language for so long. In the last months of being in Nova Scotia, I really hit a point where I could just think in it without pausing to translate or find the right word in English. I mentioned this to my instructor before my very last class with her, which I found very coincidental since the very first session I had in graduate school was in her introductory Gaelic course. It was a bittersweet way to end my time there, leaving me with a strong desire to return at some point in the future and to continue learning and using the language as much as I could.

Something a lot of people who have learned one or more languages besides their own is that the language learning process never ends. Even a year after being away from the place where I got the most out of Gaelic, I still find myself striving to learn more from it and find opportunities where I can use it even just for myself. This language is not one that was offered to me in school or taught to me by family members, but one I discovered and chose to learn on my own. I realized, however, that I could not truly learn it until I found ways to live with it rather than simply study it.

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1. Scots (or Scots Leid or Doric) is a Germanic language (although sometimes called a dialect of English) spoken in the Scottish Lowlands. It is one of the languages closest to Middle English still spoken today. My own experience with Scots is not as in-depth as with Scottish Gaelic, but through reading texts in Scots and songs written in the language, I’ve picked up more than a few words with it.

2. For a rundown of my experience and thoughts on LARPing, check out this post!

3. All the episodes of “Speaking Our Language” along with handy course materials can be found at https://learngaelic.scot/sol/ absolutely free!