Category: Gaelic

The Island Voices “Capture and Curation” approach is highly productive of new material in new languages to add to the original Hebridean focus on Gaelic and English, and it sometimes takes us to places where community language connections with our home territory may not always be immediately obvious. As we fill out new gaps which our CIALL-supported Extensions initiative has opened up, here are four new videos in Jamaican and Haitian Creole, adding to Caribbean-Hebridean links not often explored.

Audrey West, with Jamiekan ina Wielz, was our opening pioneer in taking our documentary plus interviews format beyond Scotland and into Wales, and also adding samples of poetic verse to the mix. Naturally, she followed that up later with her Jamaican voiceover of Ifor ap Glyn’s subsequent Welsh contribution. Here she completes the set with Jamaican versions of our documentaries on the three other writers so far featured – Donald S Murray, Christie Williamson, and Martin MacIntyre.

Donald:

Clilstore transcript: https://multidict.net/cs/12480

Christie:

Clilstore transcript: https://multidict.net/cs/12481

Martin:

Clilstore transcript: https://multidict.net/cs/12488

As Audrey’s own documentary illustrates, the Jamaican community presence in the UK is now of long standing. That includes the linguistic presence too, though widespread recognition of Jamaican speech as a fully functional communicative system perhaps remains elusive, with its rule-governed grammar blindly ignored by users of the “broken English” label. We congratulate Audrey on her determined promotion of her first language in a diasporic setting, and are thankful for the support of the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies in helping to kickstart this aspect of our work.

Within a Caribbean context, the neighbouring Haitian Creole provides an interesting comparator. Here, Mavreen Masere adds to her first voiceover of Audrey’s documentary, with a Haitian Creole version of our retrospective sampling of England’s urban multilingualism:

Mavreen:

Clilstore transcript: https://multidict.net/cs/12528

Haitian Creole, while not commonly encountered in the UK, appears to have achieved wider recognition of its independent linguistic status than Jamaican. It has long been listed among the languages available for treatment through Google Translate, for example. Subtitling under its own name is also an option on YouTube.

By contrast, “Jamaican Patois” has only recently been added to Google Translate, and has yet to be made available for subtitling on YouTube. This is why we still have to label as “English” the YouTube subtitles Audrey has created in Jamiekan using the Cassidy-JLU orthography, even while Google Translate will happily accept text using the same spelling system, identify it with the title “Jamaican Patois”, and make a decent fist of translating it into other languages.

From a home turf Hebridean viewpoint, both these languages may provide food for thought for those concerned about continuing the use of Scottish Gaelic. As a fellow minority language in the UK, Jamaican may be considered a near neighbour facing some similar issues around inter-generational sustainability in an overall polity where English monolingualism is the unmarked norm. Plus, as suggested previously, processes of linguistic creolisation, which are part of the historic experience of both Jamaican and Haitian Creole, may now be worthy of closer attention from would-be Gaelic revivalists. They may be particularly pertinent for those inclined to heavily invest their hopes in “naturalistic” Gaelic “immersion” for learners who have a different first language, perhaps in an attempt to boost raw numbers of self-reporting speakers, irrespective of the surrounding cultural and community context in which their acquired additional competence might be exercised.

Brian Ó Broin has a very interesting chapter in the recently published open access book from the Language Science Press “Foundational approaches to Celtic linguistics”. With the title “Comparing the syntactic complexity of Gaeltacht and urban Irish-Language broadcasters”, the chapter reports on contrasting characteristics of these two groups. Principally, he finds it noteworthy that “the syntactic complexity of urban and Gaeltacht broadcasters … is significantly different” (p365).

This fuller quote is from his summing up (p366):

As I noted in my previous work on phonetics and morphology, urban broadcasters tend to be discarding features of Irish that are not found in English. Velar and palatal fricatives are being dropped in favor of the nearest English sound, for example, while nouns are frequently no longer morphophonetically marked for case, with eclipsis and lenition becoming optional. In this paper we make a compelling case that urban broadcast Irish is also significantly different in syntax, substituting subordinators with conjunctions that require the listener to intuit the relationships between clauses and rarely forming sentences that involve the nesting of embedded phrases and clauses.

These findings are appropriately hedged with all the necessary caveats for a small-scale initial study, of course. Nevertheless, they do clearly point to an issue in the Irish context which will surely ring bells for those with a Scottish Gaelic interest, for whom a similar contrast appears evident, and they prompt an important question. In a contact situation, what are the implications for the minoritised language of changing its structures, and adopting more and more features of the omnipresent majority one? It’s an easier question to pose than to tackle, but there are increasing signs that people involved in Gaelic medium education are questioning the nature of the language that their learners are producing. For all its sociolinguistic naivety, the phrase “’S fheàrr Gàidhlig bhriste na Gàidhlig sa chiste” (“Better broken Gaelic than buried Gaelic”) does roll off the tongue relatively easily as a soundbite slogan, but its immediately resonant appeal appears to diminish markedly in the face of the actual language practice that results from many current efforts to instil Gaelic competence amongst those learning it as a second language.

In contrast to the uncritical approach to “Gàidhlig bhriste” displayed by some self-assertive Gaelic learning enthusiasts, Caribbean language proponents have clearly rejected the “broken English/French” title, instead staking claims for the creation of new independent languages. Is that a route Gaelic revitalisationists might wish to tread? If the answer is “yes”, a second question follows. If not “Gaelic Creole” (“Cridheol”?) what name should be given to this new language? Conversely, if “no” – say because continuing adherence to recommended retro-vernacular standards is indeed preferred – what needs to be done differently to current approaches, so that the title “Gaelic” retains its standard meaning?

(In passing, if the Gaelic Creole claim is to be advanced, then Scottish speakers may wish to get in there quickly, before the Irish stake prior ownership! See the final question and answer in this recorded talk, which formed the basis for the Ó Broin chapter…)

Whatever the answer to those questions, it seems clear that the continued use over protracted time of different languages alongside each other ultimately demands some form of stable accommodation between them. Island Voices started out as a bilingual project, and has since become manifestly multilingual. From that point of view, we’re just delighted to have added further to our Jamaican Selection, and created a new Haitian Creole Selection, to sit amicably alongside our still growing video archive of mostly retro-vernacular 21^st Century Gaelic – and many Other Tongues too!