Category: Comann Eachdraidh

Six months after our “Island Voices make sense” Hogmanay post we can now note a midsummer milestone and a couple of other updates!

Firstly, we passed the half-million mark of hits on the YouTube channel on June 26th:

Not bad for a “minority language” channel! Many thanks to all our contributors over the years!

And after extended “18th anniversary” celebrations, we’ll be taking a bit of a social media breather over the summer break, but not before also noting the June publication of an abridged version of the comprehensive account of the Island Voices project in Language Issues, the NATECLA journal: “Island voices ‐ Guthan nan Eilean ‐ Hebridean language capture and curation, 2005‐2023: an overview”

Abstract:

This is an abridged version of an article providing a comprehensive description of the Island Voices/Guthan nan Eilean language capture and curation project as it stood in Spring 2023, available in full on the project’s website. The introduction presents information on its main features and aims, the linguistic rationale focussing on the primacy of speech and the salience of bilingualism, and the Hebridean community context in which the project operates. A shortened account of the project contents and chronology follows, divided into four separate sections or phases: Staff-led Production, Participatory Production, Multilingual Diversification, and Research Alignment. In conclusion, connections to further research and development projects and opportunities are sketched out, and some final reflections question a polarising juxtaposition of local versus global interests while pointing towards responsibilities alongside the opportunities this kind of work entails. Describing a primarily oral project through written text presents a challenge. Copious footnotes point to online samples of the materials discussed, and readers are encouraged to engage through the screen as well as the page in order to extract full benefit. The original article is bookended by a preamble and postscript, which offer written exemplification from short, transcribed extracts. It can be accessed through the following link: https://guthan.wordpress.com/2023/06/01/eighteen-years-of-island-voices/

(NB. It may be worth noting that, while it is of course great that Language Issues readers now get a chance to learn about the project through their own journal, the original – and full – article is still freely available on our research/reports page.)

Lastly for now, we were also pleased in mid-June to add the ninth and final film in the Comann Eachdraidh Sgìre a’ Bhac playlist of excellent community-made and subtitled videos to our Clilstore collection, with CIALL support. This is foundational work which, quite apart from its Gaelic learning support function, provides standardised transcriptions of authentic speech which can be used in a number of other important applications as well. We’ve now gathered together all nine clips with their Clilstore transcripts on a single dedicated Sgìre a’ Bhac page. Thanks and congratulations to the Comann Eachdraidh!

We look forward to coming back after the summer with more exciting developments…