Trusaiche blogaichean
Le Gordon Wells
The second Digital Fèis for Aire air Sunnd is now scheduled for 11th and 12th August, taking the place of the May event which had to be postponed. Here’s the updated programme. Island Voices will be represented again, with new video playlists, and there will be additional Gaelic representation from the “Gaelic Crisis” writing team in the interdisciplinary forum on the Friday.
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
In the second Aire Air Sunnd July webinar a fresh panel discusses “Climate Change, Heritage, and Wellbeing”. This follows on from the previous week’s discussion of the not unrelated topic of Mapping Placenames & Stories of North Uist.
Followers of Island Voices will recall that earlier discussion in the CEUT Gaelic group addressed the theme of coastal erosion in a historical context, with mentions of stories of the last person to walk from Heisgeir to North Uist as well as the no longer evident Baile Siar to the west of today’s Baile Sear. The retention of CEUT chair Uisdean Robertson on the panel from last week provides continuity in this regard, while project officer Sharon Pisani reprises the role of webinar chair.
Here’s some of the CEUT description of the webinar from their Facebook page:
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
This week the St Andrews team of Alan Miller and Sharon Pisani completed the round-up and review of the Aire air Sunnd survey and activities, following on from Jess Wood and Gordon Wells. Their specific focus was on “Digital use and activities”, presented online again and available to view on YouTube.
These YouTube screenshots will give a quick impression of the range of topics covered: from digital accessibility in the North Uist community, through use of social media, special areas of interest such as Gaelic place names and climate change issues, and on to forthcoming events and ongoing needs – including further guidance on digital opportunities and potential.
The screenshots give a taste. The “full meal” is available here:
That’s the fourth video in the series of reports – all gathered together on this CEUT YouTube playlist:
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
Island Voices is still on Twitter. You can follow us here.
But in the tech world relationships are moving on, such that Twitter and WordPress evidently no longer retain the same mutually supportive understanding they previously enjoyed.
So, rather than keep this strange new message in the Island Voices sidebar, we’ve decided to remove the link that would take you straight to our Twitter account, for the time being at least. Perhaps a new understanding will be reached in due course.
We’ll keep tweeting – and re-tweeting – in the meantime. If you don’t yet follow us on Twitter, you might like to take a look. The interests we share there are broader than just our own productions, while retaining a language and Hebridean focus – and a serenely cordial tone!
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
Following on from the North Uist “Wellbeing” survey, Gordon Wells this week reviewed the Island Voices contribution to the Aire air Sunnd project led by Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath.
Adopting a slightly different format to Jess Wood’s presentations last week, Gordon speaks to camera on Zoom while screen-sharing key points from the Island Voices Aire air Sunnd webpage. Speaking in Gaelic he reinforces the point that using this language does not exclude non-speakers or early learners, given the multilingual technical resources that are now available online.
His video recaps the various recordings that have been created for the project in the past year or so, including the “Gaelic Crisis” presentation, and the Progress Report, as well as the recording sessions with community members covering storytelling, artefact description, and environmental issues. In so doing, it also shows how the YouTube subtitling and auto-translation functions can be put to effective use, and includes a quick demonstration of the Clilstore platform too, while emphasising the alternative effectiveness of recorded speech in a world where written communication is often taken for granted as the default norm.
Summing up, Gordon stresses the untapped value of various recording collections (in addition to Island Voices’ own), noting in particular how open resources such as Tobar an Dualchais have the potential to bring present and past communities together in a new manner to support North Uist cultural wellbeing, offering innovative ways of forward-looking engagement with the island’s Gaelic heritage so positively valued by all. At the same time, it needs to be recognised that community-wide engagement in such activity is dependent on community-wide comfort with the new digital tools that enable it. This is probably an area of work that needs closer attention.
Here’s Gordon’s talk on YouTube:
You can get a wordlinked transcript, with the video embedded, in this Clilstore unit: https://clilstore.eu/cs/11436
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
The results of the Aire Air Sunnd community survey in North Uist are going online. Jess Wood from the University of Aberdeen kicked off on Monday 19th June with an overview, split between two videos on a dedicated CEUT YouTube playlist, both of which are well worth watching to get a sense of the breadth and depth of the project. It’s been an ambitious collaborative exercise, turning out interesting and challenging findings for anyone interested in taking a rooted and holistic approach to community wellbeing across the board.
For those with a particular interest in Gaelic, Jess has devoted quite a bit of time in the first video to analysis of responses on this topic. We’ve picked out some headlines below.
The overall sample of 79 respondents divided themselves up roughly equally between Fluent Speakers, Learners, and Non-speakers of Gaelic.
The slide below shows a really strong level of agreement in the group overall with the notion that “Gaelic has an important symbolic value in the community as a vehicle for transmitting our island culture and heritage”.
Another immediately striking statistic is the 90% figure for those expressing concern over the declining trend in use of Gaelic, as shown in this slide:
And what may be particularly interesting about this figure is the way that similar sentiment is shared across all three groups – Fluent Speakers, Learners, and Non-speakers – with even 58% of those who have no Gaelic expressing concern about the decline in its use.
While Jess is duly cautious in her presentation, a topic eliciting a 90% level of concern might well be considered a community wellbeing issue worthy of further investigation…
If these figures pique your interest do take a look at the online presentation to find out more. The project also plans to run another face-to-face event in August at which Gaelic and other questions arising from the survey will be further discussed and developed. You can find full details and keep abreast of other events leading up to it on the CEUT Facebook page.
Here’s Part 1 of Jess’s presentation, in which she provides an update on the findings of Section 1 of the survey (including the questions on Gaelic):
In Part 2, Jess talks about the key findings of Section 2 – Use of the School, and Section 3 – Personal Wellbeing:
And coming soon, keep an eye out for an Island Voices video follow-up from Gordon Wells on “Recording Community Conversations”, to be followed shortly after by more detail on Digital Use and Activities with Alan Miller and Sharon Pisani from St Andrews University.
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
The beginnings of the Island Voices/Guthan nan Eilean project can be traced back to 2005 and the original European POOLS project in which Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (SMO) played a key co-ordinating role, with Gordon Wells appointed as Project Officer. It’s been a fascinating journey ever since, from the bilingual English and Gaelic recording of the first Craigard documentary video onward, in an ever growing and diversifying collection of “slices of life and work in the 21st Century Hebrides” combined with thoughts and reflections from both community members and interested observers.
Now in its eighteenth year, and fully independent of SMO, the project may be said to be “coming of age”, so Gordon has compiled a detailed report on its history and content to give an account of progress so far: “Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean: Hebridean Language Capture and Curation, 2005-2023”.
From the summary:
“This article provides a comprehensive description of the Island Voices/Guthan nan Eilean language capture and curation project as it stood in Spring 2023. 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. This is followed by a detailed account of the project contents and chronology, 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 screen as well as page in order to extract full benefit. The article is bookended by a preamble and postscript which offer written exemplification from short, transcribed extracts.”
And from the conclusion:
“There may be a lesson here for applied and socio-linguistic professionals. In a meaningfully socially aware mission, the development and display of academic and linguistic prowess should surely show and serve a genuine community connection and purpose. Such, at least, are the principles which the Island Voices project aspires to uphold. The project trajectory, while linguistically guided, thus aims at inclusiveness in content organisation and presentation, remains open to new inputs, and has an undefined end-point still over the horizon.”
Watch this space, a chàirdean! Agus cumaibh cluas ri claisneachd…
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
The Aire air Sunnd project is hosting another Digital Fèis, including showings of some Island Voices videos created during the course of the project. Check the programme! The event also features the recording of placenames, presentations of the Virtual Trinity Temple Walk, the North Uist Sound Archive, and discussion of the local impact of climate change, plus the sharing of the project’s survey results, and a Friday evening cèilidh!
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
Here’s welcome news of an exciting event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at the University of the West Indies, with whom the University of the Highlands and Islands recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the back of joint work on Mediating Multilingualism with the Language Sciences Institute (LSI).
This symposium is livestreamed on the Braadkyaas Jamiekan YouTube channel – the JLU’s media platform which provides a community-facing link for speakers of Jamaican, in much the same way as Island Voices has aimed to bridge gaps between academic linguists and vernacular Gaelic speakers in the Hebrides.
Any successful language revitalisation or normalisation strategy or plan will not be developed in isolation from the real world around it. That is surely a truism, yet worth repeating in a context where the detailed and demanding practical work entailed requires careful, even microscopic, attention to the actual “facts on the ground”. For best results in a highly challenging task the critical linguistic gaze must surely still be both inward and outward. Insofar as Island Voices can contribute to a wider appreciation and re-valuing of the Gaelic language in hopeful anticipation of renewed community use, that is why this project, alongside its local Hebridean capture and curation work, has from the start been multilingual in orientation, and actively seized any opportunity to build links with other language communities who might find their own continuity or development under similar threat.
The applied linguistic collaboration between the JLU and the LSI has included the creation of Jamaican versions of various Island Voices films alongside other foundational media and corpus work, in the hope that this Hebridean-Caribbean language link can be further developed going forward. Creole linguistics and the languages of the Caribbean tell an illuminating story, which pioneering Jamaican linguist Beryl Bailey helped uncover. It contrasts interestingly with that of Scottish Gaelic. Nevertheless fruitful links, perhaps particularly in relation to oral and bilingual skills and resources, are there to be seen, explored, and developed. This event is open to all comers. Happy 20th Birthday, JLU!
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico
Le Gordon Wells
Under his pen name ‘Nachiketa’, poet and professor Udaya Narayana Singh presents his Maithili version of the Island Voices film about the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre:
एखन अहाँ लोकनि जे तथ्य-चित्र देखै जा रहल छी, ततय स्कॉटलैंड केर आउटर हेब्रिड्स मे स्थित उत्तरी उइस्ट के पूर्वी भाग मे लोचमैडी मे जे संग्रहालय आ’ कला केंद्र अछि – जकर नाम भेल ‘थइ ख्यैर्सवाग़ संग्रहालय एवं कला केंद्र’ – तकर एकटा वर्णन मैथिली मे प्रस्तुत करै जा रहल छी हम – उदय नारायण सिंह ‘नचिकेता’.
Close followers of Island Voices’ collaborative work with colleges and universities in Scotland and overseas will already be familiar with Udaya’s voice and aspects of his work, from his many contributions to Mediating Multilingualism and Talking Points (with Norman Maclean). But it’s a special pleasure now to hear him actually voicing the language of his father, about and for which he has written and spoken so extensively and authoritatively on various other platforms. As part of our “Sharing Gaelic Voices” theme, we’re delighted to here add Maithili to our Other Tongues collection!
Here is the Maithili version of the Island Voices documentary on Taigh Chearsabhagh, North Uist, translated and narrated by Professor Udaya Narayana Singh – ‘Nachiketa’. YouTube’s Closed Caption subtitles are also enabled, so you can read the Maithili text as you listen (if you wish), or you can choose instead to read automatically generated translations into many other languages.
A Clilstore unit has also been created here: http://multidict.net/cs/11337. On this platform the embedded video is shown alongside a scrollable text which allows you to click on any word you don’t know to access an online dictionary translation.
Tadhail air Island Voices – Guthan nan Eilean
Powered by WPeMatico