Tog Blog

Independent Gaelic consultant Kirsty Macdonald, from Claddach Illeray in North Uist, talks to Gordon Wells.

Patronymics (and a DNA test) reveal a long Gaelic-speaking lineage on her father’s side, while her mother first moved to Uist to learn the language, then marrying and settling down. From a family of teachers, Kirsty had a difficult relationship with education in her school years, but found her passion for Gaelic ignited when she left Uist to study, first at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, and then Edinburgh University.

Talking to Gordon, she also fleshes out some of her memories and thoughts recently published in her very popular article on “Getting closer to home from a journey away” in the West Highland Free Press, highlighting the treasures of Tobar an Dualchais, and the importance in her eyes of discussing and addressing the concerns of Gaelic speakers in the vernacular community – a topic of current debate.

YouTube “closed caption” videos are enabled here, so viewers have the choice of reading the Gaelic subtitles while they watch and listen. You can also, if you wish, get automatic machine translations of these into English and many other languages through the Settings menu.

A wordlinked transcript with embedded video is available on Clilstore via this link: https://multidict.net/cs/9629. 

This is part of the Stòras Beò nan Gàidheal project in which the UHI Language Sciences Institute with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and Soillse, together with Irish partners, record the natural speech of Irish and Scottish Gaelic speakers in their own communities with user-friendly equipment and techniques. Alasdair MacDonald, Kirsty’s dad, is already on the Stòras Beò site, but Kirsty’s final words indicate there’s yet more to come from that quarter… Watch this space!