You know, that's exactly the kind of approach that gifted us mygaelic.com. The amount of money, effort and time that has been wasted in minority languages because they took the approach of "who is a member of our group whom we can give this job to" rather than "out of all the people, who has the best skills to benefit our language overall".Cha cuir iongnadh orm idir gu bheil an luchd-eolas canan a farachdainn comhfhortail a cleachdadh Beurla a cuir air adhart argamaid gun e iadsan a tha comasach Gaidhlig a sabhailadh.
Yes OF COURSE in the long run the aim should be to foster native talent but look around you and smell the coffee. You can't grow your own linguist/dentist/whatever overnight, that takes time and in the meantime knowledge transfer models are the best we can do in a hurry. At a high estimate, maybe 1-2 linguists graduate each year that are Gaelic speakers. And as with any such subject, not all do the same thing so the pool of sociolinguistis who are also Gaelic speakers is tiny beyond belief. You could advertise until you're blue in the face and get no suitable applicants. Then what, hire the cleaner because he's a native speaker from Uist?
And like it or not, English is the language of international research, that hardly means that the message is meaningless. The people who invented the language nest spread the message - surprise surprise - in English. Does that mean language nests are shit?
