A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh? Do you speak Gaelic? Would you like to learn? Are you interested in Gaelic language and culture?
If so, read on.
Four years ago, I started learning Gaelic on Duolingo after my son bullied me into it. Since then, I have completed the online introductory course at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Scotland’s Gaelic College and have just started on the next course. I spent a week at the college on Skye in the Summer being taught by a very funny German, Michael Klevenhaus, who has a real passion for finding traditional Gaelic melodies in Beethoven’s work. There’s even a BBC Alba documentary about it which, sadly, is no longer on the iPlayer.
The course was brilliant and very well paced. Michael would do a heavy grammar session and then get the Tesco website up and get you to say how much things cost, or ask you the date. He had us making up stories in Gaelic a line at a time.
We also had to sing two songs at the ceilidh on the last evening. One was a pretty rowdy drinking song but the second was quite emotional. Michael has written Gaelic words to Ode to Joy, the European anthem that is very close to our hearts as liberals.
I initially started learning to support my son. I did not expect to fall in love with the language. I mean, how on earth can you not when (one of) the words for bluebell translates to “cuckoo’s shoe”?
It’s connected me to my heritage in a way that I didn’t expect and made me understand so much more about my family. My Granny’s parents were born around about the time as the 1872 Education Act, a major part of which was to suppress the language. Children were belted in school for speaking it and all education was carried out in English. Gaelic Medium Education was only reintroduced in the 80s.
So my Granny grew up in a culture where there was a deep sense of shame about speaking Gaelic. We discovered from census records that her dad had Gaelic, and conflicting information about her mum but she didn’t. However, I now realise that she spoke English in a very Gaelic way.
Language suppression is never a good thing and the work that is being done now to keep the language alive is vital to preserve an important part of our Scottish identity. I think that there are some things we could do better in making the language a lot more audible as well as visible and getting it out there into communities. The new award winning Kilbeg development near Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye aims to be a community where Gaelic is regenerated and we need to see how that works out and if it can be extended.
I will confess to being relatively indifferent to Gaelic until my first visit to Wales in about 2012, seeing how Welsh was embedded everywhere, that changed my mind. In 2016, I went to Welsh Conference and was really amazed to see Welsh speakers and headphones with for translation between the two languages.
Gaelic was once spoken virtually everywhere in Scotland except Caithness and East Lothian. There are, according to a BBC Alba documentary about the Fife Coastal Path, more Gaelic place names in Fife than in the Isle of Lewis.
There’s a lot to think about how we ensure that Gaelic not only survives but grows in the future. This matters to so many of the communities to represent. Angus Macdonald recently asked a question about it at a House of Commons committee. The point he made about Gaelic being essential to the economic development of rural communities in the Highlands is a good one. Watch below.
With that in mind, I and a few others have set up an informal group which will give those of us who speak (and I use the term loosely when it comes to me) Gaelic the opportunity to chat and to think about how we could develop policy in this area.
It dawned on me that there may be some people reading this who would like to be part of Lib Dem Friends of Gaelic Language and Culture who don’t live in Scotland. Do let me know if you are interested by emailing me at my caronATlibdemvoiceDOTorg address.
You don’t have to speak Gaelic at all, but if you want to learn we can point you in the right direction.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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10 Comments
Thanks for this article – I did a Duolingo Gaelic lesson each day during covid lockdown and found it quite fascinating.
Can I share something I discovered that may interest others…our political slogan in 2024 was ‘For a fair deal”, but do people know why it is called a ‘slogan’?
Slogan is derived from a Gaelic phrase that translates as ‘war-cry’.
Great blog! I learnt Gaelic as an adult too and love your enthusiasm and passion.
Just one small historical point:
You said:
Gaelic was once spoken virtually everywhere in Scotland except Caithness and East Lothian.
It would be safer to say that Gaelic was once spoken everywhere in Scotland except Orkney and Shetland.
Gaelic was certainly spoken in Caithness and there were native Caithness Gaelic speakers into living memory. There’s a lot of Gaelic placenames in Caithness. It wasn’t the community language in and around Wick but in the rest of the county it was much stronger. You can track the number of the speakers in Caithness in the early censuses.
There is evidence of Gaelic use in East Lothian too. Check out the Ainmean-àite na h-Alba map for some examples of placenames that come from Gaelic originally: https://www.ainmean-aite.scot/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Lodainn-an-Ear-600-dpi-scaled.jpg.
Thanks Caron. Information gu leòr – from which of course comes galore as in whisky galore. The Esgoil Gaelic Youtube lessons are rather good if you want to build Duolingo phrases into proper sentences and paragraphs. If you want a traditional text book Teach Yourself Gaelic is good. Several of the TinTin and Asterix books have been translated into Gaelic.
Was the Gaelic spoken in the SouthWest of Scotland the same variant? I understood that this was a Celtic version closer to Welsh. Wallace means Welsh, for what that’s worth. I learnt a smattering of Gaelic when I had a girlfriend in Linlithgow whose mother came from Islay. I can only sing a little now, but would like to recover it. She introduced me to the local minister’s son, incidentally, one David Steel.
In the words of Max Boyce “I was there”.
I found your rendition of “Ode to Joy” at An Talla Mhòr very moving. To my shame I didn’t recognise you, I am afraid, or I would have introduced myself. Abair saoghal beag (It’s a small world).
@maurice – small world indeed! What course were you doing? It was a fabulous week. Did you stay on campus?
@alasdair You are right of course. For heaven’s sake fon’t tell Alistair Carmichael I forgot about Orkney and Shetland.
And thank you for the info about Caithness and East Lothian. Very interesting.
@william That is fascinating.
There are so many different variants of Gaelic – Lewis, Skye, Barra and Uist are all different and the Argyll/SW variants are different again but I am not sure if they are related to Welsh.
But English is very different in different parts of the country too.
The language spoken in southern Scotland was old Welsh – not a variety of Gaelic, but rather a form of Brythonic. Gaelic was brought to Scotland from what is now Northern Ireland by the Scotti (an Irish tribe) who set up the Dál Riada kingdom which encompassed an area in both Scotland and Ireland.
Brythonic – from which Welsh, Old Cumbric and Breton derive – is distantly related to Gaelic, Irish and Manx, the former being Celtic P languages, the latter being Celtic Q languages; the difference being most clearly heard in the “son of” prefix mac / mab.
Nowadays the opinion held by most linguists is that Celtic P languages were originally spoken over the whole of what is now Scotland at the time of the Roman invasion. You can still see traces of this in place names such as Aberdeen.
There is still some extant literature written in Old Cumbric – the type of Welsh spoken in Cumbria and southern Scotland. Especially famous is the poem Y Gododdin about the old kingdom of Gododdin in what is now called Y Hen Ogledd – The Old North. Gododdin has its own Wikipedia entry for anyone interested.
Charles Fraser MacKintosh was the Liberal MP for Inverness Burghs at the end of the 19th Century. He was on the Napier Commission and helped steer the first Crofting Acts through Parliament. At that time he was the only Gaelic speaker in the House? He was the first Chair of the Inverness Gaelic Society.