Scotland

I put on my anthropology hat, dust off a previously unpublished conference paper, and look at how different Nova Scotia Gaelic users orient to place in culturally Gaelic ways, in the construction of their Gaelic identities.

Can a Gaelic song change your life forever? Here are ten of my favourite solo artists and groups who sing in Scottish Gaelic, with links to purchase their work and support the language. Perfect for gift-giving, or for learning more about Gaelic language and culture any time.

You’re learning Scottish Gaelic, and you need to buy a dictionary. Which one is best for you? No dictionary is perfect, but there are good and bad Gaelic dictionaries out there. Based on my experience and an informal survey of some Gaelic language teachers and scholars, I recommend which Gaelic dictionaries to buy and why, which ones to avoid, and how to use a dictionary as a learning tool.

Nancy Dorian is well known in linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Celtic studies for her research on East Sutherland Gaelic, language obsolescence, and the sociolinguistics of minority languages. Emily McEwan-Fujita reviews her 2014 book, an edited volume of her “greatest hits.”

Minority languages like Scottish Gaelic got 99 problems and information technology is one. I interview Michael Bauer about the challenges of Gaelic software localization and the problems of English-Gaelic machine translation.