Anti-Gaelic Bingo Revisited
Since long before the days of internet trolls, the Scottish media have given a platform to ethnic and linguistic stereotypes, prejudice, and hate speech against Gaelic and its speakers in the name of journalistic “balance.”
For decades the BBC and most of Scotland’s national & regional newspapers have presented audiences with a false balance, drawing false equivalence between objective news about public funding announcements for Gaelic on the one hand, and ethnolinguistic denigration of Gaelic and Gaels on the other. The denigration often goes so far as to proclaim that the language and its speakers have no right to exist.
Researching Anti-Gaelic Media Rhetoric
I explored this pattern in my Ph.D. research in 1999-2000, and wrote a chapter of my dissertation about it. Later I published parts of it in academic articles here and here (free downloads if you sign up for a free Academia.edu account).
I found that the denigration of Gaelic speakers in the Scottish media recycled some themes dating as far back as the middle ages: calling Gaelic barbaric or peasantish, equating it with animal sounds, and treating Gaelic as though it were inherently funny, always the butt of a joke (rather than being a legitimate medium for jokes).
Other themes of the abuse have also developed over time. Starting under Thatcher and Major, when the Tories first designated a substantial sum for Gaelic television with the Broadcasting Act 1990, people began to incorporate neoliberal themes into their denigration of Gaelic, complaining about the excessive cost of Gaelic alongside its other supposed negative characteristics. Indeed the increased public visibility of Gaelic that came with the increase in public funding for Gaelic, and the ensuing increase in Gaelic media, is what sparked the new cycles of public denigration.
Ethnic hatred for Gaelic speakers is now couched in terms of complaints about the amount of money spent on government programs to support the language and its speakers, but we know it’s still basically about anti-Gaelic prejudice and hatred, because the complaints about spending are always accompanied by plain old, intolerance, disrespect, lies, and insults.
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (or more likely Disgruntled of Thurso) must think that he’s being really original with his letter to the editor complaining about funding for Gaelic road signs. And the newspaper editors obviously think these screeds should be published every time public funding is announced for anything related to Gaelic: dictionaries, research, road signs, media, education, anything at all.
But the fact is that anti-Gaelic rhetoric in the media is boringly predictable in its prejudice and spite.
So much so, that in 2015 I decided to make bingo cards of the themes as a way of coping. Humour helps. The cards were well received; someone started the Twitter account @GaelicBingo, and Bella Caledonia has used the cards as illustrations for several opinion pieces in support of Gaelic. (Note: if you want to use my bingo cards to illustrate your editorial or blog post, please ask my permission first and include a credit with an HTML link back to this blog post.)
I heard from Welsh, Irish, and other minority-language speakers who were inspired to make similar bingo cards for their languages. What unites Gaelic, Welsh, and Irish, of course, is not the inherent characteristics of these languages, but the bigotry of English speakers, as a comparison of the Gaelic and Welsh cards demonstrates:
Here’s a link to another Anti-Welsh Bigot Bingo card (possibly drawn from here). An Irish-language one is here. UPDATE: Someone has just produced one for Scots as well:
Well done! Now wouldn’t it be nice if the Scottish media — including BBC Scotland — would stop giving this kind of hatred a platform? Gaelic speakers have called it out in various ways; I remember Alex O’Henley writing a Gaelic column for the Scotsman newspaper in 1999 or 2000 titled: “Gràin a’ chànain ’se gràin-cinnidh” (Hatred of the language is ethnic hatred/racism). Formal complaints about specific articles can be submitted to the Independent Press Standards Organisation of the UK, but in 18 years I have not yet heard of IPSO or its predecessor responding to a complaint in a way that helped reduce the denigration of Gaelic in the UK media. If you have suggestions for Gaelic.co readers about where complaints can be constructively addressed, or can relate your experience in making such a complaint, please leave a comment below.
The Latest Anti-Gaelic Rhetoric
Incredibly, 18 years after my initial research, and 3 years after I made the first two Anti-Gaelic Bingo Cards, you can still find this rhetoric word-for-word in newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and comment sections.
Most recently the hate has ramped up again in response to announcements about funding for a desperately-needed Gaelic dictionary project and the opening of a new Gaelic-medium school on the Isle of Skye, among other things. Here are some of the most recent examples:
English-speaking students ‘treated as second class’ after Gaelic school opens in Skye, Mike Wade, 20 April 2018
New funding of £2.5m for next phase of Gaelic dictionary, BBC Scotland, 24 April 2018 (see the comments section)
Brian Beacom: If Gaelic is dying does it deserve a financial kiss of life?, 26 April 2018 (about the Gaelic dictionary funding; Beacom’s photo is the “free space” in the new bingo card below)
Should Gaelic really matter to us? Let the war of the words begin, Brian Beacom, 9 May 2018 (Beacom’s followup report of his conversation with Professor Wilson McLeod of Edinburgh University who responded to his 26 April article)
It’s time to dump Gaelic… you know it makes sense (and I’m going to to take a lot of flak), Frank McAvennie, 20 May 2018 (a famous Scottish footballer)
Responses to Anti-Gaelic Rhetoric
For the last few years, Art Cormack has been my hero for his well-written, level-headed responses to the hate. I republished one of his 2015 responses with permission in this blog post. Here is another response of his published in Bella Caledonia in 2014.
Over the past few months, Gaelic speakers have been responding to the prejudice online with opinion pieces of their own, memes, clapbacks, and the hashtag #IsMiseGàidhlig on Twitter showing how vital Gaelic is in the lives of so many Scots and others (“Is mise Gàidhlig” means “I am Gaelic” in the sense of “I am the Gaelic language”). Have a look, it’s inspiring. This was my contribution:
These tweets represent a range of other responses on Twitter calling attention to anti-Gaelic rhetoric and fighting back against it:
Graphic artist Andy Arthur has created parody maps that show how Scotland’s railway stations would be named if all traces of Gaelic and other non-English languages were eliminated from the placenames. These are a response to the complaints that Gaelic was “never spoken here” and therefore there should be no bilingual Gaelic-English road signs or railway station signs:
A Monoglot’s Railway Map of Glasgow and West Scotland
A Monoglot’s Railway Map of Central and East Scotland
Gaelic poet Marcas Mac an Tuairneir has written longer responses to recent anti-Gaelic journalism in Bella Caledonia, The National, and the Hebrides Writer blog.
Anti-Gaelic Bingo Card #3
Since the hate keeps on coming, I decided to make a third anti-Gaelic bingo card. (The first two cards can be found in my blog post Anti-Gaelic Bingo, 2015.)
A List of All the Anti-Gaelic Bingo Card Squares
Here’s a complete list of the squares on all three bingo cards:
ANTI-GAELIC BINGO CARD 1
[here]
declining
barbaric
dead
poetic
has no word for ______
can’t do maths or science
tiny
ancient
waste of money
dangerous
obsolete
island
gibberish
painful
‘Gael farce’
tongue-twisting
has no written form
peasant
guttural
on life support
forced to listen to it
rural
endangered species
mafia
ANTI-GAELIC BINGO CARD 2
[here]
distracting on road signs
artificial
random consonants
remote
can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
grunting
costs £__ per head
dying out
Garden of Eden
more speakers of Urdu
never spoken in ____
primitive
teuchter
forced down our throats
‘Gael force’
nazi
‘Nighay naghay noo’
lilting
backward
has no word for helicopter
beautiful
hobby language
compared to animals
pointless
ANTI-GAELIC BINGO CARD 3
gargling with Irn Bru
[I’m] not anti-Gaelic but
burn it down [referencing a real-life suggestion/threat to burn down a specific Gaelic-medium school with the children inside]
up there but not here
millions down the stank
middle class
no-one speaks it
isolated
English [is what] unites us
Gaelic vs. NHS [funding]
useless abroad
elitist
divisive
[I have] so much respect [for Gaelic] but
Angus Og
the Gaelic lobby
garlic
unpronounceable
an SNP plot
fake snat grievance
unnecessary
but whatabout poverty
BBC Alba football
wrong kind of diversity
A 4th ANTI-GAELIC BINGO CARD?
Hopefully we won’t need to make a 4th card, but if you have suggestions for it, please leave them in the comments below. I omitted the following from card #3:
cliquey
not real Scottish culture
discriminating against English
I speak more [other language] than Gaelic
Gaelic is Irish not Scottish
Interesting shift over time from “peasant” to “middle-class”……
Tbh I have seen both accusations over the past few decades and I don’t know if there’s been a shift. A more quantitative study of anti-Gaelic media discourse 1990-2020 (!) could make a great honours paper or master’s thesis topic. I feel that “middle class” and “elitist” get slung more for education-related complaints. I guess we saw peasant & teuchter more in 1995-2000 but I feel like they’re always waiting in the wings. Colm Ó Broin summed up prejudice against Irish speakers in the Irish press yesterday on Twitter and while the specifics are slightly different for Gàidhlig vs. Gaeilge, overall this is absolutely the pattern of contradictory false accusations:
“Or to summarize, I’ve nothing against Irish speakers – they’re just inferior, extinct, dead, poor, rich, snobby, dishonest, fundamentalist, sinister, savage, skinhead, racist, terrorist, Sinn Féin-IRA, Commie, Nazi child sex abusers.”
https://twitter.com/colmobroin/status/1007157173586137088
(Also his entire Twitter thread is excellent.)
There’s a blog post version of Colm Ó Broin’s tweet thread as well:
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2018/06/13/ive-nothing-against-irish-speakers-but/
“Why would anyone want to learn THAT?!” (I’ve actually been asked this numerous times)
“I think it’s stupid.” (This from my mom.)
“Why aren’t you learning Norweigian?” (Also from my mom, who dislikes anything my dad was interested in, and who is of Scandinavian descent.)
I stand with the barbarians.
(Prof. Conor Quinn’s tweet sent me here)
Somewhat tongue in cheek, might I suggest an additional bingo card answer : “Beautiful language, I wish I had been taught it as a child” ?
I spent a week on Skye in April and never heard a negative word about the Gaelic language. But possibly foreigners are kept out of the locals rift.
Tapadh leibh! I’m just barely learning Gaelic (considering signing up with the Atlantic Gaelic Academy), but I love it so much and every one of these comments wounds me to my core. With your bingo cards, though, it makes scrolling through abusive tweets and comments and articles fun instead of heartbreaking and infuriating. I’ve actually sat there going, “Ooh, if only you’d said ‘Gael farce’, I would have had bingo!” XD
I feel as though there’s maybe a few comments I’ve seen that aren’t on the bingo cards, but then maybe I just chose the wrong card 😉
Anyhow, I just wanted to say thank you for these cards – they take so much of the sting out of the bile and the nastiness – and thank you for your beautiful blog in general! It’s been just one of the many delights I’ve discovered as a Gaelic enthusiast and learner. Math sibh fhèin!
’Se do bheatha, agus tapadh leibh fhèin! Yes, that’s my intent, to find a creative way to refute the negativity. I admire comedians who can do an end run around this kind of hate. If you see any others that aren’t covered on the cards, definitely post them here. Hopefully there won’t be enough to make yet another card, but I did have a few left over from this latest card so somehow I think it might still be possible…
Hello, just reading about AL of this now. My mother was a Gaelic speaker and like many lost the language when she went to school. However my grandparents spoke it but we children did not learn It. There was still a love and respect for the Gaelic. What are the bingo cards and where do I find them?
Card #3 is right in the blog post above — under the heading “Anti-Gaelic Bingo Card #3”. The first two cards are in the original post at https://gaelic.co/anti-gaelic-bingo/. Mòran taing!
Halò Emily, unfortunately I do have some more suggestions for another card…
“aging population” or something similar; basically, “Yeah, there’s speakers, but they’re old!”
“Are we going to bring back Pictish?”
“Just let it die”
“Languages die all the time”
“Scots should be the focus”
On a nicer note, I’m curious, what do you call yourself in Gaelic? I ask because when I looked up “Emily” in the dictionary there were two versions and I wondered which one you used. 🙂
Thank for the suggestions (although as you say it’s unfortunate that they can be made)! I will add them to the list…
I was named after my German-American grandmother, and the name doesn’t have a Gaelic equivalent, so I just go by “Emily.” Some people have tried to Gaelicize the spelling of it as Eimilidh, but for myself I don’t really care for it, although it’s fine for other folks. 🙂 In any case, Gaelic is as Gaelic does!
You’re welcome, for what it’s worth. And again, unfortunately, I have yet more…I’m starting to think there’ll be a never-ending stack of bingo cards. Anyhow:
“Foreigners in our own country”
“I’m/my __ is Scottish and I/they…”
“Pictish/Norse/Cumbric/Brythonic is more/just as Scottish”
“That didn’t happen” (in response to a story of prejudice)
“That happened but it was not that bad/so long ago” (same)
“But everyone else speaks English!”
“I/someone I know tried to learn it once but it was too hard”
“I know it’s culturally important but”
“Not trying to stop you from speaking it but” (My mom, when I told her about these cards, said there should just be one square saying “BUT”, lol.)
“Looks difficult”
“Excluding people from your conversations”
“Most Scots don’t…”
“If the language is dying it’s your own fault”
And my personal “favorite”…
“Why are you speaking/writing in English if you speak Gaelic?”
I like it best when it’s said by someone who’s just been complaining about how “isolationist” it is to speak Gaelic, and who has proudly proclaimed that they do not speak it, to people who are speaking to them. To quote Charles Babbage, “I am not rightly able to apprehend the confusion of ideas that should provoke such a question.”
Wow, that is…way too many. Apologies for dumping all this bigotry on your site at once. 🙁 Merry belated Christmas, anyhow! I hope it was a good one 🙂 And thanks for the info about your name! I’ve been pretty curious about names with no Gaelic equivalent and how to handle them, given that several of my family members have such names.
Hi Emily.
My late father was an Irish speaker and was very proud of his Fáinne, basically a written commitment to speak Irish Gaelic when communicating with another Irish speaker. He was also able to converse with Gaelic speakers when we holidayed at Ardnamurchan.
The Gaelic language has been treated the same way as the languages of the native people of North America and other places. Parents told their children not to speak their language as they would not get on as well as they should.
I’ve always felt that the deliberate elimination of a language is part of the past and continuing “colonial “attitude. It was dangerous to the colonisers if they couldn’t understand the people they were colonising. So they deemed it best to banish the language.
It has taken a long time to turn these attitudes around and there’s a long way to go. Meantime I fully use the resources of Radio nan Gaidheal to absorb what I can.
Bùrn It Down,is also a record by Dexys Midnight Runners ,taking anti Irish sentiment and sticking it where The sun dont
shine
“Burn It Down”
I’ll only ask you once more
You only want to believe
This man is looking for someone to hold him down
He doesn’t quite ever understand the meaning
Never heard about, cant think about
Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan,
Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw.
Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Lawrence Stern.
I’ll only ask you once more
It must be so hard to see.
This man is waiting for someone to hold him down
He doesn’t quite fully understand the meaning.
Never heard about, won’t think about
Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan,
Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw.
Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Lawrence Stern.
Sean Kavanaugh and Sean McCann,
Benedict Keilly, Jimmy Hiney
Frank O’Connor and Catherine Rhine.
Shut it You don’t understand it
Shut it That’s not the way I planned it
Shut your fucking mouth ’til you know the truth
Just wish Peat n Diesel ,would do à cover of this with the great Gàidhlig writers n poets,in place of The great Irish writers.
Just come across your blog and as a native gaelic speaker I can relate to all of this! My dad’s side of the family is from Lewis and so Gaelic has always been a huge part of my life. My first language is Gaelic and I have spent my whole life putting up with so much ignorance and càc-tairbh! (excuse my language haha!)
When I was fresh out of college I used to go round local primary schools providing short Gaelic lessons to get kids interested in learning this wonderful language, which I loved doing. However I’ll never forget the smugness of one of the teachers when he asked what the Gaelic for Helicopter was, and various other “modern” words that aren’t so easily translated to an older language. Made me feel like such an idiot in front of the children I was trying to teach. He also asked me why I thought it was important to keep this language alive? So I told him that my Granaidh and Seanair were given the belt for speaking their native language at school, as was my Dad for a short while. A huge part of Scottish culture was nearly beaten out of 2 generations. But it’s still here. And we owe it to those who weren’t allowed to speak it to keep it up. It needs to be given the opportunity to flourish again. Which it will.
I’ve also had debates with proud Scots who are pro-independence but anti-Gaelic because they think it’s a waste of money, resources etc. Like, no. That’s not how it works. It’s exhausting!
Anways, keep up the great work! You’re doing a fab job and I wish you all the best.
Mòran taing!
When my grandmother arrived in Pictou County she was advised by everyone not to speak “The Gaelic”. You’d never get a job and people would think you were stupid. For that reason, it was lost in my family. In my generation, there are two of us trying to learn Gaelic. We both frequently hear from other relatives some heartwarming phrases like, “why don’t you study something useful” or “what a waste of money”.