1. Gaelic and Gaels in Scotland and Nova Scotia: A Historical and Contemporary Account
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gaelic and Gaels in Scotland and Nova Scotia:A Historical and Contemporary AccountIn the twenty-first century, ever greater numbers of individuals are engaging with Scottish Gaelic as a second ('L2') or additional language on both sides of the Atlantic, whilst communities of first language ('L1') speakers persist in spite of ongoing language shift within the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (National Records of Scotland 2024; Statistics Canada 2022).This chapter provides an overview of the key questions the monograph will address, linking the relevance of the research to a diverse audience of scholars, educators and policymakers.It will contextualise the key themes of the book within the sociological and historical settings of Gaelic in Scotland from the sixth century ce, and in Nova Scotia from the eighteenth century, before discussing the theme of language revitalisation and current initiatives to develop and renew minority languages internationally.Previous research has suggested that whilst new Gaelic speakers' language use in both countries is by definition substantial, their numbers are small, and crucially, their social identities and language learning motivations vary widely.Recent years have witnessed a resurgence in Gaelic language learning activity using various methods, in diverse settings internationally.Conversely, in Scotland, Gaelic has now been in decline for almost a thousand years, since at its zenith it was the dominant tongue over a large majority of the country's territory.The most widely accepted historical account holds that Gaels (Old Gaelic: Godil; Latin Scotti) in north-eastern Ireland settled the western seaboard of northern Britain from around the early sixth century, and possibly much earlier ( Baoill 2010; Clancy 2011).As the Gaels (or 'Scots') extended their dynastic and cultural influence across the mainland of Alba over the next five centuries, their language expanded over most parts of the northern third of Great Britain, as previously Pictish-and Brythonic-speaking societies were absorbed within the Kingdom of Alba (Dumville 2002; Baoill 2010).Whilst Woolf (2007: 17) has cautioned that written evidence for the social history of Scotland is 'appallingly slight' in the early medieval era, the incidence of Gaelic place names over
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".