Tog Blog

The Island Voices project offers a model of community-based action in the maintenance of linguistic diversity and heritage in a world in which minoritised languages are under unprecedented threat. The archive stands out through its platforming of the voices of the people in the sharing of their unique cultural heritage.

So says the introduction to the imminently forthcoming Island Voices Multilingual Archive stored at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). On the cusp of Island Voices’ 21^st birthday, here’s a potted preview of some of the overall rationale that persuaded The National Lottery Heritage Fund to offer its support, focussing on heritage and risk in the context of global linguistic diversity.

Heritage

The remaining Gaelic communities of the Western Isles are the last inheritors of an unbroken culture and oral tradition that forms an intricate and integral part of Scottish history and identity. It stretches back well over a thousand years, and manages to live on still, despite its now severely minoritised position. Set against this historical backdrop these Hebridean communities also offer a casebook study of contemporary cultural dynamics in which bi- and multi-lingual contacts and contexts present often stark challenges and choices. This societal environment of steadily continuing encroachment upon traditional and conventional domains for the use of Gaelic, in everyday life as much as in more or less formal cultural pursuits such as the composition or performance of poetry and music, is replicated in similar form in many other minority linguistic cultures, whether indigenous or migrant diasporic, both elsewhere in Scotland and the UK, as well as globally.

Humanity has a widely diverse linguistic heritage, evolved to respond to the grounded particularities of different times and places across the world. The Gaelic language encodes a unique worldview as it is experienced by its speakers in their homes and community locales. The Scottish Languages Act gives official recognition to the importance of the language within Scotland, and puts some legal measures in place to support its continuing use, both on a nationwide basis and in relation to special “areas of linguistic significance”.

To some extent, this official response relates to corresponding situations with other languages in similar situations, for example Irish or Welsh. In search of solutions to the problems facing a particular language community, there is room for well-informed exploration of other similarly challenged cultural heritages through coming together in joint enterprises, while retaining a grounded sense of local realities. Over the last twenty years the Island Voices project, based in the Outer Hebrides, has been capturing and curating the natural speech of Gaelic speakers as they voice in their own words their memories, thoughts, and reflections.

The approach taken has been readily transferrable to enable comparison with, and adoption by, other similarly minoritised linguistic communities. This has resulted in a Gaelic-weighted yet profusely multilingual collection of 500+ video recordings featuring the authentic speech of community members as they relate unscripted stories, memories, descriptions and explanations, complemented by song performance and poetry recitation, and introduced by short plain language narrative documentaries. This is the heritage, highly valued by fluent community members, academic researchers, and language learners alike, that this archive seeks to safeguard.

Risk

In an era in which the loss of languages, particularly minoritised “heritage languages”, is proceeding across the globe at an alarmingly accelerated rate, the risk to Gaelic (and other languages within the UK polity) is now well documented, for example through the comprehensive “Gaelic Crisis in the Vernacular Community” book jointly authored by UHI Language Sciences Institute staff with other sociolinguistic researchers. Gaelic has been shown to face the imminent prospect of ceasing to operate as a language of daily use and conversational exchange in a community setting.

The last generation of fluent speakers with lived experience of growing up in a Gaelic-dominant environment, and hence acquiring the language through a normal process of inter-generational transmission at home and in the community, is of advancing age. They have important stories to tell from their own early life experiences, as well as their own reflections on witnessing the dramatic changes in community life as this transformative language shift has occurred before their eyes.

Island Voices has been a local presence for the past two decades in capturing and curating these narratives through the voices of ordinary community members. These are voices which may often struggle to be heard or noticed in national or institutional policy and decision-making fora, yet on which any language maintenance or planning initiative is crucially dependent, as they embody the linguistic competence which such bodies may seek to protect or promote.

Throughout this period, Island Voices has relied on technical and funding support from a wide range of disparate bodies in order to create and sustain its grassroots level approach, capitalising on powerful new digital affordances that help mitigate against documented linguistic risk. With the professional retirement of the project co-ordinator, there is now a requirement to gather the disparate outputs co-created with multiple stakeholders into a secure central storage point with guaranteed long-term longevity, to safeguard the digital artefacts themselves in a duplicated store, and ensure ongoing free public access to the first 21 years of the collection.

In working with the UHI Archive to capture and deposit the Island Voices project, the Language Sciences Institute has ensured this resource and its metadata are appropriately captured, catalogued, and safeguarded – digitally preserved to prevent decay, and promoted with stakeholder communities and the public in order to provide permanent access to the collection for future use and research.

So this must be among the longest of all Island Voices’ blogposts, as it marks an important inflection point! It’s been a blast, but we’re not quite done yet…

Next: College and Community.