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Holidays are important. They not only give us a well needed break from work and study but help us to experience new places and learn new things. When we are young, they can even help shape who we become.

When I was young, a lot of my friends went to Spain or Blackpool but not my family. We always went to Crail in the East Neuk of Fife.

As well as swimming and walking, we went to the shops in St Andrews a lot. There was a great bookshop that specialised in remaindered academic books at the time and a short lived but awesome second-hand record shop called Rock City Records. Between these shops I got such gems as “Language Death” by Nancy Dorian, “On the Level” by Status Quo and “Piece of Mind” by Iron Maiden. There was a branch of Woolworths too which sold budget cassettes of classic albums – I got Iron Maiden’s debut album and Thin Lizzy’s “Chinatown” there for £2 each.

Being a university town, the charity shops were full of amazing books and I bought vast number of vinyl rock LPs (which were cheap in those pre-hipster days) and books ranging from history and politics to rock biography and fortea.

On my holidays I was able to spend a lot of time just reading and listening to music. I remember reading Smash Hits under my bed covers with a torch when I was about 13, marvelling at the fact that such an awesome band could come from Rhyl and at the way their hair was both really long and able to stick up in the air!

I would also spend a lot of time mourning the loss of the Fife Coast railway and buy the St Andrews Citizen and the East Fife Mail every holiday to follow any progress with the campaigns to reopen the north and south ends of the railway to St Andrews and Leven. (No one was more delighted than me when the Leven line reopened earlier this year).

I even had my first train trip in the area. I had a largely train free youth as I grew up in the suburbs in Stepps just outside Glasgow and our station didn’t reopen until 1989 but my Papa took me to see a steam train on the Lochty Private Railway when I was 4 in 1978 and we went back to visit the railway every holiday until it closed down. There was also the miniature railway in Craigtoun Park, St Andrews too (which I didn’t consider to be a “proper” railway back in my more judgemental and purist days but now do!)

I even started learning Gaelic when I was in holiday in Crail at easter 1992.  (I started with the book “Gaelic is Fun” which I wouldn’t recommend but soon moved on to better and less sexist learning materials). I’m sure Crail had a part to play in my interest in maps and placenames too with cool placenames nearby like Kippo and Tongues of Clatto (a name for a Star Trek episode if there ever was one!) Many of the local placenames were clearly Gaelic but quite difficult to decode.

My holidays in the East Neuk really helped make me who I am. I think listening to vintage Status Quo while reading “Internal Colonialism” by Michael Hechter in Crail probably represents peak Alasdair.

So what does this have to do with anything?

I’m writing this from Crail on holiday with my family. It’s the first time I’ve been here for years and the happy thoughts of the past have got me really thinking.

As a language activist, I love all the Gaelic placenames in Fife and the fact you hear Scots around you all the time.

I think the first incidence of language activism I ever saw first- hand was in Anstruther, the language in question being Scots. On the sign going into the town from the Pittenweem direction, someone had crossed out Anstruther and written Anster (or maybe Enster – I can’t remember). This would have been the end of the 80s or very beginning of the 90s. I really wish I had my camera with me that day…

This week I was back at the shops in St Andrews, having a good rummage through the second hand book shops and charity shops. There are also a lot of high-end souvenir shops and a few tourist tat shops. I actually saw a tartan-clad plastic Nessie wearing a tammie and playing the bagpipes in one of the latter, believe it or not.

I made my excuses and left and headed for a fun shop called Bonkers which sells cards, maps, bags and games. The first thing you see when you go in are mock roadsigns pointing to St Andrews, Pittenweem and other nearby places – the kind of thing you’d put up on your kitchen wall.

This got me thinking about language.

We went on holiday to Ibiza a few years ago – the first ever foreign holiday we’d ever had as a family. Being a Catalan speaking area, I wanted to take home some souvenirs in Català but it took a whole week searching before I managed to find anything with Eivissa rather than Ibiza. After coming home, I had a conversation with a Gaelic activist pal who had had a similar experience in Greece where everything said Greece in English.

In the Isle of Man, I found plenty of Manx or bilingual tourist souvenirs with Ellan Vannin and in Wales, I found a fair amount of items with Cymru written on them. In Ireland though, I remember looking round the biggest tourist tat shop in Dublin and while there were such items as a set of plectrums, each featuring the face of a different signatory to the Easter Rising (I love the image of someone churning out death metal riffs with Pádraig Pearse!), it was nigh impossible to find anything with Èire and impossible to find anything with Baile Átha Cliath. It was the same in Belfast’s main tourist information centre where there wasn’t a single Beul Feirste item to be had for love or money.

The situation in Scotland is pretty dire in terms of souvenirs in Gaelic. I’ve seen postcards for the Western Isles with the placenames in Gaelic – Eilean Leòdhais or whatever which is always good to see, but even for Hebridean postcards, I’d say this is in the minority. And I’ve never seen anything for anywhere else in the Highlands, never mind in the rest of Scotland. The first time I visited Stornoway many years ago, I went into the tourist information shop and the only thing I saw in Gaelic was a leather keyring with Eilean Leòdhas (sic). As a veggie and someone who cares about Gaelic grammar, I didn’t buy it.

And when I visited Barra about 10 years ago, I didn’t see a single item with Barraigh – everything was just Barra.

This may have improved in the Western Isles since I was last there, but I’ve not seen any progress elsewhere at all.

So does this matter?

After all, if you are a gift shop in Ibiza, you might not be bothered whether or not foreign tourists seeking sun and clubbing see any merch in Catalan or not – particularly in tourist traps that no decent Spanish citizen would be seen dead in.

However, not all tourists are foreign and not all shops selling tourist souvenirs are tacky tat shops.

Tourism is a big issue for minority languages like Gaelic. There are a lot of really big and controversial issues – the impact of second homes and short term lets on housing, the ability of infrastructure in some areas (Skye especially) to cope with the high number of tourists and also the historical tendency to present the Highlands as a wilderness with little reference to its inhabitants. Does this kind of little thing matter?

I’d say that using Gaelic placenames on tourist souvenirs is a quick win, a high impact low hanging fruit and one which doesn’t prevent or delay addressing other issues.

For minority languages, symbolism is important and visibility is crucial. “An rud nach fhaic sùil, cha ghluais e cridhe” – “what you can’t see won’t move the heart.

I remember the late Fionnlagh Strì telling me a story about how he’d once met a young woman. She had picked up a leaflet from him about Gaelic education as a child and kept it until she grew up and had children and then sent her children to Gaelic education years later. Quite simply, in a similar way many people will be interested in Gaelic (or Scots) merch and it will raise awareness and encourage some people to form more favourable opinions about the language and some of these people will go on to learn the language just like the woman who took one of Fionnlagh’s leaflet as a girl.

Someone once called hill names “Gaelic’s secret weapon” – I think it may have been the very wise and heroic Peadar Morgan. Many walkers and climbers are fascinated by the Gaelic names of the mountains they climb. It’s time that the value of other placenames was promoted. I’ve found that many people are fascinated by the origins of their local placenames and it all helps chip away at the “they never spoke Gaelic here” trope.

I recently read Alasdair Whyte’s Glasgow’s Gaelic placenames book and it had an incredibly powerful effect on me, bringing medieval Gaelic Glasgow to life and giving me the Gaelic forms for a variety of places in my side of Glasgow (North East Glasgow/North Lanarkshire) which I’d never known before – it really touched me even though I’ve been a Gaelic speaker for 30 odd years. Just think about the effect that this kind of thing could have on potential future Gaelic speakers.

The meanings of the names could possibly used alongside the Gaelic names in any merch too. While on holiday in (Northern) Ireland about 10 years ago, I saw town signs in and around Ballycastle that the local authority had put up with the names in English and Irish with the literal meaning of the Irish printed underneath. I can’t remember any examples offhand, but in Scotland, it would look something like:

Balloch – Bealach –  “the mountain path”

Or

Lamlash – Eilean MoLaise  – “St Molaise’s Island”

This kind of explanation might help with those who argue that Gaelic names are artificial or made up – it’s hard to argue this when it’s clear that a name actually originated in Gaelic and has a clear meaning.

VisitScotland have found that Gaelic is a key factor in encouraging many people to visit Scotland and they have been doing a lot to promote the Gaelic elements in tourism via the Gaelic tourism strategy. Souvenirs don’t seem to have been really addressed so far but this would very much build on the efforts that have been made – the ability to take a little Gaelic home after a visit.

As hinted above, while a lot of effort is around tourists visiting from other countries, many people in Scotland visit other parts of Scotland for holidays, breaks or day trips. This makes me think of my childhood dentist and how he had a picture of Arran beside the bulb on the lamp that shone into your mouth – this kind of put me off the Island for a long time!

Would I buy a fridge magnet with Peterhead on it? Hell no but would I buy one with Peterheid on it? Totally. Would I buy a t-shirt with Nessie – Loch Ness? Of course not. But you’d have to hold me back from buying one with Niseag – Loch Nis and I’m sure I’m not the only one. And of course, they could be bilingual or trilingual.

There have been many t-shirt mills and people producing badges and brooches and the like in Gaelic. Some of these have since stopped producing merchandise – presumably due to the difficulty in scaling up and relatively low sales (e.g. NicBhàtair and Graphic Anna) and have gone on to concentrate on other things.

These are all amazing initiatives and aim at the Gaelic community itself which is an absolutely crucial market – the most important one (indeed, I’m writing this on a laptop covered with Gaelic stickers from Brochan no Bàs). However, I’d say something much larger scale that isn’t print-on-demand is needed to aim at non-Gaelic speakers and get Gaelic placenames out there.

OK – so what can we do?

I have to admit that I know absolutely nothing about the tourism or retail industries.

But I am a Gaelic translator. And I am passionate about promoting Gaelic throughout Scotland.

If you are a small scale artist or crafts person that produces high end goods for tourists or a gift shop that commissions souvenirs or even a large company that produces postcards or souvenirs and would like to use Gaelic placenames on them, I’d be happy to help as I’m sure would be other Gaelic translators I know.

If you just need a simple placename, I’d normally not charge anything for this. I’d rather see Gaelic becoming more visible than get rich. And if it was a slightly bigger or more difficult job with a very small wordcount, I and most other translators would charge their minimum rate (usually £15 – £20).

If it is a less common placename that requires some research, Ainmean-àite na h-Alba, the official national placenames expert group for Gaelic will be able to help for a modest fee.  

For the Scots language, I’m not an expert but I am a firm supporter and can put people in touch with my Scots leid contacts who I’m sure would be pleased to help.  

Let’s work together to get Gaelic names like Cill Rimhinn (St Andrews) and Peit na h-Uamha (Pittenweem) on souvenir signs, fridge magnets and more in the shops of East Fife and throughout Scotland– not to forget names Scots names like Saunt Aundraes (St Andrews) and indeed Ainster (Anstruther) –the first place I ever witnessed language activism!

Alasdair

p.s – Here are some more pieces of advice about using Gaelic placenames which might be useful but there’s no need to read this unless you are very interested.

Linguistic advice

Gaelic speakers love to see Gaelic being used but please do make sure that any Gaelic you use it is grammatically correct and spelt correctly.

Always use a professional translator – they’ll keep you right.  Make sure that you get the translator to proofread any proofs of artwork you get in case the gremlins get in at the design stage.

Don’t copy Gaelic placenames you see on signs or in documents unless you know what you’re going – Gaelic has different cases and there is a danger that you will use the wrong form if you aren’t a Gaelic speaker. (For example, a leaflet might say Fàilte do Mhalaig – Welcome to Mallaig – but the Gaelic for Mallaig is actually Malaig not Mhalaig – the latter is the dative case).

Never use Google translate to get placenames. I’ve known Google translate to make up (incorrect) Gaelic versions of less well known placenames or to make up (incorrect) English translations of lesser known Gaelic placenames.  

Also, don’t believe everything you read in placenames books – a lot of them were written by whacky Victorian amateurs many of whom wrote a lot of nonsense. The Ainmean-àite na h-Alba website will keep you right.

If you want to write what the meaning of a Gaelic placename is, make sure you take some advice from a translator or placename expert – there are lots of false friends out there (e.g. often in Kirkcaldy, Kirkintilloch there is no “kirk” as in church – it is Cair – “settlement” followed by a another word starting with C), lots of incorrect folk linguistics and many other dangers! For example, Glasgow does NOT mean “dear green place” as the romantic urban myth goes, but rather simply the less fancy “green hollow”.

Why do we need to research Gaelic placenames? Don’t people just know them?

There isn’t a complete Gaelic gazateer of Scotland featuring all the names from Gaelic or which have a Gaelic form.

Gaelic speakers typically know the most commonly used placenames and placenames in the area they come from and/or live. So all Gaelic speakers will know the names of the main Islands and the cities and most major towns and a lot more names in their local area.

Names such as there are well known, well recorded and easily available.

But there are be a lot of places that are small and of which most people have never heard– Gaelic speaker and English monolingual alike. There are also lots of places in Scotland where there are names of Gaelic origin but where Gaelic has not been the community language for centuries such as Fife or Galloway. So while almost everybody will know big Fife placenames like Dùn Phàrlain/Dunfermline or big Galloway names like an t-Sròn Reamhar/Stranraer less obvious ones like, say Lathalmond or Dunino or Minnigaff can be difficult to decode without the help of an expert.

Placename research is a serious business!

The Ainmean-àite na h-Alba database contains a wide range of Gaelic names from all over Scotland. All the most common names are already there and the Highlands and Islands are particularly well represented in the database. In most cases you’ll find what you need there but if what you want isn’t there you can contact AÀA and they’ll help you.   

And finally:

Don’t @ me about the clickbatey name of this post – I’m just having a bit of fun. BSL, English, Scots and Gaelic are all indigenous native languages of Scotland.

The fear that Gaelic is dying is nothing new. Folk have been warning that Gaelic could be dead ‘in ten years time’ since at least the 1980s, and folk have been agonizing about the imminent death of the language for much longer than that, but while not new, I would argue that this death discourse is self-sabotaging, potentially doing at least as much harm to our language revival movement as any active resistance from our enemies on the outside.

Successful language revivals are, first and foremost, vibrant social movements, but there is good evidence that in some cases this sort of negative discourse, often called ‘emergency framing’, can actually be less effective than more positive framing in motivating people to take action. This effect has not been empirically studied in Gaelic context yet, but if you think about it for a minute, it makes intuitive sense; for instance, it is reasonable to think that parents might be less likely to speak a language with their children, or enrol their children in a school that teaches in that language, if they think that that language is failing. Quite rightly, parents want to give their children the skills they will need to succeed in life, but the death discourse gives the opposite impression: that Gaelic is increasingly useless.

Or consider how politicians might interpret this discourse. As Gaelic activists, we are a very small group. Depending how you define ‘Gaelic activist’, there are a few dozen of us, or maybe a few hundred at most, so we don’t constitute a meaningful voting block by ourselves. To rally politicians to our cause, we have to convince them that our enthusiasm for Gaelic is shared by a significant percentage of the general public, but the death discourse, again, gives the opposite impression. From the perspective of politicians, it might appear politically naive, and possibly even undemocratic, to continue to dedicate public resources to a language that their own constituents appear to be abandoning.

Yes, Gaelic is a threatened language, and I am not arguing that we should lie to people, but I am arguing that we should tell a different story: a more hopeful and better balanced story, and thereby, a more accurate one. Any language revival is a mixture of good news and bad news, and while we have to be mindful of where we need to do more work, focussing almost exclusively on our fear that Gaelic will soon be dead actually misrepresents the situation. It may feel cool-headed, clear-eyed and realistic to some activists, but in reality, it is none of these things.

The problem with emergency framing in this respect is that it is both too optimistic and too pessimistic at the same time. It is too optimistic because it asserts that there is still a vernacular language left to ’save’, but as I have argued before, that horse bolted in the 1960s and 1970s, and there is no realistic prospect of reviving Gaelic as a universal vernacular language in the Islands or anywhere else in Scotland in either the short or medium term.

And emergency framing is too pessimistic because it asserts that Gaelic dying, when the truth is that by many measures, Gaelic has never been more popular in Scotland. There is exactly zero chance that Gaelic will die out as an everyday spoken language in the Islands, or in Scotland in general, in any of our lifetimes. Gaelic is changing—has changed—from a language spoken in territorial speech communities to one spoken in language networks, but it has not died. Engaged scholarship and effective advocacy alike should be about helping the Gaelic-speaking world to understand this change and to figure out how to make it work.

There is a persistent belief, though, shared by many Gaelic activists and even some scholars, that territorial speech communities are the sin qua non of living languages, but if we want to strengthen Gaelic as a vital, widely-spoken language into the 21^st century, we have to work with Gaelic as it is in the real world, not as we wish it was. We have to work with those who are actually interested in learning, using and passing on the language, not force our revivalist aspirations on individuals or communities because we believe they should save their language.

In 1998-99, as part of his PhD research, Alasdair MacCaluim conducted a detailed survey of 643 learners and new speakers of Scottish Gaelic, and one of the questions he asked was, to what degree they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “Gaelic can only be saved if Gaelic speaking communities continue to exist in the Islands”. MacCaluim found that a clear majority of respondents, 67.6%, either agreed or strongly agreed. (p. 264)

And this is, I think, the heart of the problem. Many Gaelic speakers, including many learners and new speakers, need Gaelic to exist in the Islands as a common vernacular to satisfy their own understanding of Gaelic as a real, living language, but folk on the Islands were not put on this planet to serve as a means to someone else’s ends. They will make their own decisions, and the reality is that, to date, a significant proportion of Islanders have decided that they are not particularly interested in the Gaelic revival, at least for now.

There are, of course, plenty of folk living in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland who are passionate about Gaelic, who want to learn, use and pass it on, and they should be unstintingly supported, but there is also huge interest in learning and using Gaelic throughout Scotland, and if all these interested folk, wherever they may be, could be could be helped to become active Gaelic speakers, Gaelic’s future in Scotland could be really bright.

There is no limit to what we can achieve; we just have to fight together for the structures (and money) required to turn interest into ability and then into use, but to do this, to build the kind of vibrant, optimistic social movement that could successfully pressure the government to genuinely support the Gaelic revival, we first need to figure out how to tell a different story.

Post script: five things that are making me optimistic just now.

Cnoc Soilleir, South Uist – Cnoc Soilleir grew organically out of the Ceòlas movement in Uist, and it is an inspiration. Local grassroots activists created a cultural centre that should serve as an exemplary model for community-based language and cultural development.

Cultarlann, Inverness – Another amazing grass-roots-built Gaelic cultural centre, this one in Inverness.

Gaelic in Sleat – Several generations of (home-grown and incomer) Gaelic activists have built a level of institutional support for the language in Sleat that actually appears to be delivering a revival. The recent census results are very encouraging.

Gaelic numbers in Scotland – Some may talk these numbers down, and it is true that we don’t yet know who these new speakers are or what sort of Gaelic they can speak, but the fact that 12 thousand more people rated their own Gaelic abilities or those of their children highly enough that they were willing to record themselves or their children as Gaelic speakers is unquestionably significant positive news.

Ionad Gàidhlig Dhùn Èideann – Edinburgh Gaels are nothing if not persistent. It took Gaelic activists in the capital 13 years to win a Gaelic primary school, and they are still fighting the council for a Gaelic high school. It is taking them even longer to win the battle for a Gaelic centre in the city, but I wouldn’t bet against them.

“Gaelic could ’die’ in ten years.” The Scotsman, 7 December, 1983, p 7.

MacCaluim, Alasdair. (2002) Periphery of the periphery? Adult learners of Scottish Gaelic and reversal of language shift. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.

For a good review of the many questions and uncertainties around ‘emergency frames’ see: James Patterson, Carina Wyborn, Linda Westman, Marie Claire Brisbois, Manjana Milkoreit and Dhanasree Jayaram (2021) ‘The political effects of emergency frames in sustainability.’ Nature Sustainability 4, 841–850.

For an interesting recent article empirically showing this effect, see: Marjolaine Martel-Morin and Erick Lachapelle (2022) ‘Code red for humanity or time for broad collective action? Exploring the role of positive and negative messaging in (de)motivating climate action.’ Frontiers in Communication 7.

For a scholarly critique of the death discourse in the Scottish Gaelic context, see: MacEwan-Fujita, Emily (2006) “Gaelic Doomed as Speakers Die Out?: The Public Discourse of Gaelic Language Death in Scotland.” In Wilson McLeod (ed), Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland: Policy, Planning and Public Discourse. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 279-293.

And for a scholarly critique from a North-American perspective, see: Davis, Jenny. (2017) “Resisting rhetorics of language endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous language survivance.”, Language Documentation and Description 14, 37-58. Thank you to Prof Martin Kohlberger for drawing my attention to this article.

Photo: Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA