In search of Gaelic: The social linguistic soundscape as an indicator of minority language use in a bilingual English/Gaelic island community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gaelic is a minority language of Scotland, with 1.1 % of the population claiming to be able to speak the language, around a quarter of these individuals live in Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the most north-westerly of Scotland’s 32 administrative regions which consists of 15 inhabited islands and is considered the last remaining heartland of the language. This article looks at the findings of a unique study in the context of Gaelic which explored the social linguistic soundscape of one such island community: Barra. Using observational language use surveys, the results of this study show that the overall use of Gaelic in the public spaces of this community was very low, and, in the absence of clear linguistic or identity markers associated with Gaelic, English was the default unmarked code choice of most spoken interactions. This does not mean however that Gaelic has disappeared from this community altogether: the use of Gaelic is associated with social networks and prior acquaintance of the (preferred) linguistic norm of the participants in the interaction. The dispersed nature of this community means that opportunities for day-to-day spontaneous interactions in public spaces with those that are part of an individual’s social Gaelic network are very small, but that community events allow for these linguistic practices to become a more definite feature of the social linguistic soundscape. This highlights the importance of these events for current and future Gaelic language practices. El gaélico es una lengua minoritaria de Escocia, con un 1,1 % de la población que afirma poder hablar el idioma; alrededor de una cuarta parte de estas personas vive en Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, la región administrativa más noroccidental de las 32 que hay en Escocia, que consta de 15 islas habitadas y que se considera el último núcleo de la lengua. Este artículo examina los resultados de un estudio único en el contexto del gaélico que explora el paisaje sonoro lingüístico social de una de estas comunidades insulares: Barra. Mediante encuestas de observación sobre el uso de la lengua, los resultados de este estudio muestran que el uso general del gaélico en los espacios públicos de esta comunidad es muy bajo y que, a falta de marcadores lingüísticos o identitarios claros asociados al gaélico, el inglés es el código elegido por defecto en la mayoría de las interacciones orales. Sin embargo, esto no significa que el gaélico haya desaparecido por completo de esta comunidad: el uso del gaélico está asociado a las redes sociales y al conocimiento previo de la norma lingüística (preferida) de los participantes en la interacción. El carácter disperso de esta comunidad significa que las oportunidades de interacciones espontáneas cotidianas en espacios públicos con aquellos que forman parte de la red social gaélica de un individuo son muy reducidas, pero que los eventos comunitarios permiten que estas prácticas lingüísticas se conviertan en un rasgo más definido del paisaje sonoro lingüístico social. Esto pone de relieve la importancia de estos eventos para las prácticas lingüísticas gaélicas actuales y futuras.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".