Fòram na Gàidhlig

Thachair mi air na leanas nuair a lean mi ceangal thall a Facebook

'Language revival efforts that originate within the community are more likely to succeed than those that originate outside of the community.

Community members are more likely to be in it for the long haul.

A sense of ownership will produce better results.

Language revival efforts that are coordinated by the community or members of the community are more likely to succeed than those that are coordinated by some outside organization or person.

Community members have more at stake.

Funding from outside organizations tends to be short-lived.


Having an outside institution run a language revival may have a condescending or even insulting effect by suggesting that community members are unable to manage their own culture.

Language revival efforts should not rely too much on institutional support but rather focus on individual and family efforts.

Institutional support is fickle and depends on funding.

Individuals and families can learn the language without funding.

Individuals are the ones who ultimately learn the language, not nstitutions.

Having the efforts initiated and controlled by an institution can give a false sense of accomplishment (e.g., The schools are teaching the language now.)'

Tuilleadh an seo:
http://www.ipfw.edu/trlc/Principles.html




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Isn't that what we are doing here in a small way?

Although I don't think it will really matter in the long run, unless people take something from what they have gained from this place back into their RL communities.

But the principle is the same: I needed an online community like this, because where I'm living I couldn't get it offline, so when the old place went down I took over the running of it. Why did I go this? Because I have a personal stake in it, which is basically pleasing myself And it's running on my homepage which I'm paying for ayway, so it's doesn't cost a sgillin ruadh

I think the same goes for all the members who contribute here - we all do everything we do here voluntarily while we could just as easily spend our time elsewhere.

Yes, those principles seem relevant in the virtual sense too. For example the mygaelic.com attempt at virtual community building is dependent on continued funding and ignored the possibility of integration with existing social networks.

...perhaps from now on we should call it "theirgaelic.com", then...

Regarding the point on "outside" bodies running revival... one can overestimate the "community" when it comes to strategic thinking and planning. Now I'm NOT saying that the community shouldn't be stringly involved in any such planning etc BUT a group of locals is not necessarily the best informed group of people either. Many mistakes and dead ends in language planning can be avoided by carefully studying what other countries have done and I'm really not convinced the "community" would do that a lot. You'd get a lot of people pushing their own views...

It strikes me as odd that a language board might be considered as being alien to the community as in most cases it is made up by members of the community. But if it is, then there's probably a disconnect that needs to be addressed.

Depends what's meant by 'community' too.

The whole language-learning as well as local Gaelic-speaking community?

As a great deal of the forum and board traffic, as well as what I can see on Twitter and Facebook etc, is learner, not native-speaker, and geographically not in Gaelic-speaking areas.

I share the concerns expressed in the Indiana document - older, local, Gaelic-speakers often DO feel passed by, or simply themselves dissociate themselves from the learning/teaching/political community, as threatening or 'not us'.

If they don't care, or are philosphical, or feel helpless about Gaelic dying, that intergenerational link is gone, as we have discussed before.

I dont want to stop qualified strategic planning or Gaelic teaching and learning or activism, far from it, but neglecting or alienating the grass-roots is the worst thing we can do.

It is clear that the vast majority of older native Gaelic speakers feel completely outside the developments that are happening today as they are expected to participate in language learning which has little in common with adults who are unable to write their own language.

The second part of this whole situation is that many learners are learning through English or using tr*nsl*t**n which often means they are using English as the base thinking language which often mangles the Gaelic they use.

For some strange reason learners talk about using simple Gaelic which usually ends up with tha or bha or bi at the beginning of every sentence, something many older Gaelic speakers clearly don't want to listen too.

I am not sure how many people here spend time speaking to older Gaelic speakers either on the telephone or by visiting them in their homes but if they did they would find out after a short period of time why the language planning initiatives we have in Scotland are doomed to failure and so out of touch.
Treating Gaelic as you would Welsh or Irish or English simply will not work as the circumstances of the Gaelic population and their coming together as a community or what is even meant as a community is very different indeed.
Maybe, just maybe if you had to set up a group or organisation in a Gaelic speaking area from scratch you may just get a small insight as to how the psychology of the real Gaelic community is so different from the rest of Scotland.

Sadly, few of the language planners have had any real experience at ground level.

Fionnlagh wrote:It is clear that the vast majority of older native Gaelic speakers feel completely outside the developments that are happening today as they are expected to participate in language learning which has little in common with adults who are unable to write their own language.

While I agree that the early teaching of writing is a mistake, I'd say that's nothing to do with the old folk! What goes on in the classroom is only relevant to members of the class -- what affects them is what comes out of the classroom.

The second part of this whole situation is that many learners are learning through English or using tr*nsl***** which often means they are using English as the base thinking language which often mangles the Gaelic they use.

I don't think that's as relevant as you like to make out.

For example, do you teach "Madainn mhath" in your classes? I know that in many Gaelic-medium schools this is taught through Gaelic and said every day, but being taught through Gaelic doesn't magically make it real Gaelic. On the other hand, I was taught to say "latha math dhuit" via English, and by an old man to boot.

The idea that tr*nsl*t*ng makes things somehow wrong is, to me, a massive leap in logic, and in fact a total non-sequitur.

A man who can tr*nsl*t* "I am hungry" to "tha an t-acras orm" will never need to say "tha mi acras" or "tha mi acrasach" or any similar nonsense. But a person who has never translated will not ber able to tr*nsl*t* what they want to say to what they should say. If they suddenly want to say it in English, they won't be able to find the Gaelic -- the English will get in the way. This is a particular problem when it's something you haven't really covered in class. Even if you can't say it quickly, knowing the rules a bit more explicitly allows you to at least construct the sentence and you can continue your learning outside the classroom . With immersion you really aren't given any useful strategies for increasing your language independently -- ie immersion actually reduces learner independence.

For some strange reason learners talk about using simple Gaelic which usually ends up with tha or bha or bi at the beginning of every sentence, something many older Gaelic speakers clearly don't want to listen too.

Yes. This is due to bad teaching, which can and does happen in both immersive and bilingual learning environments.

In fact, I believe the main cause of grammatical oversimplification in learner language can only be addressed bilingually. That cause? Excessive vocabulary.

If you think about it, most of what we say doesn't mean much -- I'm talking lexical density here.

Lets look at the sentence above more closely

If you think about it, most of what we say does not mean much -- I am talking lexical density here.

Now there's 14 italic words and 6 bold words. The bold words are what we call "lexical words" (which have their own independent and relatively unambiguous meaning) whereas the italicised words are "function words" (words which take their meaning from or change the meaning of the surrounding context).

That sentence had 30% lexical density (number of lexical words divided by the total number of words) and this is fairly typical of natural language. Instead of using lots of lexical words, we tend to favour function words, but these words are extremely difficult to teach monolingually.

You can't point to "most" in the same way you'd point to "tree" or "fork".

You can point to "here", but how do you tell someone with only "there" the difference between "an sin" and "an siud"? A bilingual classification is simple: "seo" is near me, "sin" is near the person I'm speaking to and "siud" isn't near either of us. It's clear and unambiguous, even though it does take practise to get used to it.

So immersive classes fall back on lexical words -- lots of them. Brothers, sisters, legs, apples, boxes... etc.

In order to prevent boredom, you have to keep things interesting by introducing more and more vocabulary, and this slows down the ability to cover the various combinations and permutations of grammar. Even when you do cover grammar, it's hard to get any sort of complexity involved because you can't explain it.

Hell, I've seen people make mistakes in English because they're not tr*nsl*t*ng. The Spanish structure for expressing "If I were rich I would..." is actually word for word equivalent to the Spanish. Tell them that and they know it, and they say it right. Don't tell them that and they struggle for years, saying it in a massively incorrect way.