The Visit

This week I took a drive up to Aberdeen in Inverness county, Cape Breton to pay a visit to the participants in A’Togail na Gàidhlig / Lifting the Gaelic. 13 Participants moved into the beautifully spacious house overlooking the Bras d'Or Lakes on April 4th, and there they will stay until April 29th. There is a small room off to the side of the kitchen where people are allowed to speak English. Everywhere else is Gaelic. Morning, noon and night. This small room was handy for conducting interviews with organizers Shay MacMullin and Emily MacDonald, and participants Bradley Murphy and Andrea Moore.

You would be wrong to assume that everyone participating in A’Togail na Gàdhlig had prior experience speaking Gaelic. In fact, participants' Gaelic fluency varied a lot. Some had taken Gaelic language classes 2-3-times / week as well as more intensive study at the Gaelic College, while others had as little as 2 or 3 Gaelic classes under their belt. Some even less than that.

Andrea Moore, is one of those participants who started the program as a relative beginner.
“I didn’t have very much Gaelic when I came so I’m pleased that my Gaelic is better than someone else’s now."-- Meaning mine :)

"We’ve had a ceilidh every Wednesday, so this is the third one. During the first one, I was hiding in a corner and I didn’t want to talk to anyone, because I didn’t know how to.  And now It’s nice to be able to invite people in, offer them some tea, have a little chat, and have it not be stressful.”

When I asked Andrea about the things that motivated her to undertake this immersion experience she had this to say:

“Gaelic is my heritage. Before Gaelic I had learned 7 languages. Of all of them that I’ve learned this is the one that’s meant the most.”

That desire to reach within themselves and connect with family roots was echoed by Bradley Murphy. Bradley is a musician who has recently returned to Cape Breton after living in Montreal.

“I always wanted to learn Gaelic because my grandmother spoke it, but she didn’t really pass it onto her kids. She only spoke it to her sisters when no one wanted the kids to know what they were talking about. Unfortunately, that stopped it from being passed on. However, they still lived a Gaelic life. When my grandmother passed away two years ago I felt that I missed something. There was a way of life that I was missing.”

Emily MacDonald, and Shay MacMullin both host/facilitate the event, and we talked about the motivation that makes people  juggle work, school, family and living commitments in order to pursue A’Togail na Gàdhlig.

 “I can’t speak for everyone in the group, but I know for some of the people in the group were born and raised in Cape Breton and they want to stay here. Gaelic is part of their culture and I think for them, getting the language ties a lot of those things together,” said Shay.

However, the Gaelic Immersion experience is not something that should only draw people with Gaelic ancestry. I asked Emily how she would promote this kind of experience to someone with no ancestral connections to the culture. Her response spoke to the benefits of being exposed to different cultures:

“When you learn about a new culture, you are learning more about yourself. It makes you think about who you are and where you came from. How are we similar and how are we different? It helps solidify who we are.”

By this point in the evening the sounds of the ceilidh taking place outside of the English room were becoming harder to ignore. You could hear tunes starting up and the rhythmic stamp of a step dance session starting to build steam. Underneath it all there was the happy sound of people talking and swapping stories. Before we left the English room to join the fun, Shay added one last thing:

“I don’t think I can emphasize enough the commitment that these people are making. We said on day one that we’re going to live like a family and people really are. It’s a really lovely and supportive group. People are really tuned into each other’s needs. We all cook together and clean together. We all contribute together. It’s a rare and beautiful opportunity.”

Gach deagh dhùrachd / Every good wish!

Depth Perception

“I’ve had a very intense interest in Language since I was about 15 and it ended up serving me very well.”

Yes, indeed.

Patrick Yancey sat down with me this week. Patrick teaches an adult Gaelic immersion class here in Antigonish every Tuesday. He is not a native Gaelic speaker, but neither is he a native French, Spanish, Dutch or German speaker, and that hasn’t hindered him in his pursuit of speaking any of these languages. In fact, Patrick is currently the President of the association of translators and interpreters of NS and is certified to translate from French, Spanish, Dutch, and German into English. 

“Usually when I move to a new county I like to learn the local language, and I was a bit disappointed when I got here. Gaelic was pretty much gone compared to what it had been 100 years earlier. Then I found the adult language immersion group in town, and I met a professor Katrina Parsons who was nice enough to let me sit in on her classes.”

I asked Patrick about his experience of first learning Gaelic in Nova Scotia and how it has been different from his experience learning languages elsewhere.

“When you’re learning about Gaelic culture here, a lot of the time you’re also learning about things from the 1920s or earlier. There is a sense in which the culture was frozen a bit. That’s also false to say that it was “frozen”, because there’s still new words all the time being coined by natural native speakers and it is evolving, but when you’re learning about Gaelic you’re also learning a lot of old crafts and the old way of passing information along before radio and television. It’s very unfortunate that Gaelic was so artificially interrupted in its development and lost so many of its speakers. It’s unfortunate that this happened, but the side-effect is that it has carried a lot of its past into the future.”

Patrick continued.

“When people learn English, they are learning a completely modernized culture that in many senses has let go of its connection to the past. Whereas with Gaelic, there is certainly a sense in which those things are still around. So a Korean person who is learning English will learn about Pizza and Hollywood movies—typical things that an American, Canadian, British or Australian person might do—but in Gaelic culture you’re going to visit cèilidhs, have a cup of tea, tell a story, someone sings a song or does a dance, and all of these old style gatherings and ways of keeping community together.”

Like me, Patrick also spent time teaching English in South Korea. Unlike me, Patrick actually took the time to learn Korean. Looking back at that time, my one regret is not learning the local language. I learned enough to order food at a restaurant, or to give directions to a taxi driver. I spent most of my time with other Ex-Pats anyway, so when it came to learning a new language the thought that most often popped into my head was: “why bother?”

Patrick had the answer:.“Languages give you another perspective on the world. They have a vast array of ways to describe things, of concepts that do and do not apply [to one’s native language]. If you have two different ways of looking at the world, you can see it much more clearly, the same way that having two eyes gives you depth perception. To a linguist, seeing a language go out of existence is the same as seeing an animal go extinct. We lose a part of the richness of our heritage on earth, and we can’t get it back.”

Depth perception refers to the ability to perceive the world in 3-dimentions. The marginalization of our heritage languages, like Gaelic or Mi'kmaq, deprives us of the cues that we need to see deeper. What gets left for us to look at is an impoverished version of what used to be.

Asking a linguist what he appreciates the most about any language is like asking a historian to rank the event that they most wish they could travel back in time to bear witness to. It’s a long and fascinating conversation and well-beyond the scope of a single blog post. If you’re interested in learning about what makes Gaelic intriguing to the men and women who love language, then I strongly suggest that you take a class and see for yourself. However, if you’re lucky enough to sit down and chat with someone who is as knowledgeable and passionate about Gaelic language and culture as Patrick is, then please ask them to speak a little bit about some of the aspects of that culture which they feel strongly about. Culture is such a multi-faceted subject, and so you can bet that their answer will never be boring:

“You have the folk stories. One symbol I really like is the Lady of the Land. She appears the tale of Niall of the Nine Hostages. A man wants to become king. There is a haggard and hideous old woman who wants the man and his three brothers to give her a kiss. The first three say “no” but the third says “yes” and she turns into a beautiful woman. The lesson is that the king must accept the land as it is, and that a good king will create a good environment and make the land flourish, whereas a bad king will make the land poor. For the Gaels of that time, there was this almost magical belief that if the King was virtuous then that would be reflected in the land. And right now, with the environmental movement and climate change, a lot of people are coming to terms with the fact that this has become our modern struggle. We’re seeing that reflected in Gaelic tales from over 1000 years ago.”

Gach deagh dhùrachd / Every good wish!

Patrick’s favorite word in Gaelic is: mac-meanmna / imagination (lit. son of mind/spirit)