Here come the Gaels

Every December, my sister and I host a Christmas party at our parents’ house on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. We call it a “shot-luck”. For the past decade, friends and family have turned up with various bottles of alcohol, and then presented a mixed shot for everyone. (Past favourites include a Chambord-Frangelico concoction, which tasted like peanut butter and jam.)

A toast is a necessary part of presenting the shots, and our guests usually thank us for hosting and express gratitude for the coming year. Typical toast stuff. 

At last year’s bash, our friend Connall had a few words to say: Cum fada beò sibh le smuid as ur similier biadh air ur buird ‘s ceol anns ur taigh. 

My aunt — an absolute rig, as Cape Bretoners might say — stood just behind him, eyebrows knit together. “Long life with smoke in the chimney, food on the table and music in the house,” Connall translated for us English-speaking folk.

Shrieks of delight erupted from around the room. These days, it’s not often you hear Gaelic spoken in the wild.

Understatement of the century: Things were different back in the 1700s, when Gaelic-speaking immigrants settled in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia’s eastern counties. During the Highland Clearances of 1750-1860, thousands of Scottish people journeyed for several weeks across the Atlantic until they reached the shores of Nova Scotia.

Many Gaels ended up in Cape Breton. The language came with them, along with their songs, culture and traditions. That legacy was reinforced through the place names they chose. Drive across the island today, and you’ll pass through Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Loch Lomond, Iona and many others. 

At the time of Canada’s Confederation in 1867, Gaelic was the third-most spoken language in the country, after English and French, with an estimated 250,000 Gaelic speakers. It wasn’t long, however, until Gaelic language and culture became repressed in Nova Scotia. At the island’s Highland Village Museum in Iona, there’s a wooden paddle on display. If kids spoke Gaelic at school, they would have to carry it around. At the end of the day, a child wearing the paddle would be physically beaten with it. Assimilation, unsurprisingly, was deemed the only option for many.

“There was a lot of shame around the language,” says Kenneth MacKenzie, who runs two Gaelic schools on Cape Breton, and is a founding director of the island’s only Gaelic primary school. “My own father is from Scotland, and he was actively encouraged not to use Gaelic in school.” By the 1930s, the number of Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia had dwindled to just 30,000. By the 1970s, as Cape Breton’s industrialisation saw Gaelic communities move into urban centres and assimilate further, the language was heading for extinction.

At last year’s Christmas party, Gaelic was a foreign tongue to many guests, but the language, songs and cultural practices remain part of their identity. Many of our friends — MacDonalds, MacInnises and MacArthurs among them — had ancestors who grew up speaking Gaelic. And in recent years, many have been doing their bit to save their ancestral language from extinction. In 2019, Duolingo launched a Scottish Gaelic course, and it has since attracted nearly two million learners. 

Two years later, there were an estimated 2,000 Gaelic speakers in Canada. Can Gaelic’s decline be reversed?

Growing up in Dartmouth, NS, in the 1980s, Stacey MacLean didn’t feel compelled to dig up her Gaelic roots. Though her grandparents were speakers, it wasn’t until after they passed away that she became interested in the language. As a teenager, the Celtic music revival of the 1990s further sparked her interest, with acts like Mary Jane Lamond blending traditional Gaelic songs with contemporary pop sounds. “There was an awful lot of music going on,” MacLean says. So she added Gaelic classes alongside other extracurricular activities. “And I flew with it.”