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The Ghosts of Gaelic

nguage and culture in Scotland have a long history, often subsumed by English. Is there hope for their future? April 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Gaelic Language Act (Scotland) of 2005, passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament with the aim of ‘securing the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language’.

Much of the most influential ink on the matter was spilled by people such as Samuel Johnson in the 18th century, who absurdly claimed that there was no written Gaelic literature more than 100 years old, and Hugh Trevor-Roper in the 20th, whose ‘gross errors and excesses’ (per the Celticist Donald E. Meek) at least had the virtue of stimulating more informed commentary. Indeed, from an English-speaking point of view it is easy to see Ossian as a bolt from the blue, an eccentric production emblematic of the anxieties and contradictions of post-Union and post-Culloden Scotland trying to articulate or invent an identity amid rapid and bewildering political, cultural, and economic change. The Bill’s proposals for areas of linguistic significance (in which a certain percentage of the population are Gaelic speakers) are a step in the right direction, but it is not entirely clear how these will relate to community language planning or – crucially – to funding.

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