3. Gaelic Language Ideologies in Scotland and Nova Scotia: An Ethnographic Introduction to the Research Sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter illustrates key language ideologies that I observed to operate in Scotland and Nova Scotia over the course of my fieldwork in both contexts, and on my own journey towards becoming a new speaker of Gaelic.To depict these sets of ideologies I employ ethnographic vignettes from participant observation in both territories.In particular, field notes compiled over the course of my participation in language learning events and community organisation activities in both field sites form the basis of this chapter's analysis of relevant language ideologies and practices in each site.I initially disclose an autoethnographic biography of my own journey toward learning Gaelic from the age of fifteen into adulthood, my motivations and methods for acquiring the language and my relationship to the current Gaelic community on either side of the Atlantic.Providing this linguistic background and reflexively unpacking my positionality in the research, as well as my own pathways to language acquisition, can thus be seen as requisite context for interpreting the dataset I outline and analyse in the following chapters.Ethnographic observations in both contexts bring into sharp relief some of the major contrasts between the Gaelic communities of Scotland and Nova Scotia, and the relationship of new speakers to the traditional culture and identities associated with the language.This rich description will conceptualise the two research contexts and set up the analysis of interview and survey data presented over the following three chapters.The subtitle of this book, 'Heritage, Motivation and Identity' evokes the initial stages of my own journey to becoming a new speaker of Gaelic in the early years of this century.Growing up within a Scottish family in suburban England, I first started working through a softback copy of the well-established Teach Yourself Gaelic course book aged fifteen, in 2001.The TYG workbook was accompanied by an audio tape of language exercises, which I would faithfully work through with the aid of a battery-operated cassette player, and dutifully listen to on a (near) daily basis until I completed the course.I had developed a keen interest in languages at secondary school, and an awareness from my mother that
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".