Rob Dunbar has been back and forth across the Atlantic more
times in the last two months than many of us have been in our entire lives. On
April 2nd he presented at the Dalhousie Gaelic Colloquium, and again
on the 9th up at the Gaelic College. This past weekend he was one
among many scholars to gather in Antigonish Nova Scotia for the Celtic Studies
Association of North America annual conference of 2016. He didn’t show the
jet-lag though, and was kind enough to sit down with me during the
scheduled lunch break last Saturday. I thought I was going to be attending this
conference just to interview Dr. Dunbar, but after hearing the first two rounds
of presentations I had to grab two others. Both Maggie Bonsey,
graduate student at the University of Limerick, and Nathaniel Harrington,
graduate student at the University of Toronto accepted my invitation and together
the four of us all sat down to a have a chat. It was a fantastic
opportunity to discover how these top-notch scholars first became interested in Gaelic
language and culture, and also to hear their thoughts on language loss and
revitalization.
INTERVIEWER How
did you first become interested in Gaelic language and culture?
ROB It started
off as a bit of curiosity. My grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles
spoke it. I heard a bit of it growing up. So I was interested, but never really
took an active interest.
Then I lived in Brazil for the better part of a year when I
was 22-23. When I was there people were always asking me, “Where’d your family come from?” I knew a
little bit, like the genealogies going all the way back to Scotland, but I really didn’t know anything about who those people were.
So that got me started wanting to learn a little bit of
Gaelic.
The
language is interesting but it was the living song tradition and aspects of the
oral tradition that were still surviving here in NS that really grabbed me, and that’s what kept me
going and wanting to get up to a level of fluency. And meeting people, other
learners and native speakers here and in TO. I had a level of fluency before I ever set foot in Scotland
at least as an adult, so it was my experience here, both here in NS and in
Toronto, that got me hooked.
NATHANIEL I’ve
been interested in minority languages in general, and Celtic languages in
particular, since I was about 9 or 10 because of the media that I was exposed to by my parents. Initially I was most interested in Welsh
but sometime around the beginning of High school I started shifting toward
Gaelic. Part of it had to do with the fact that my family is of Scottish origin
despite my very English name. So Gaelic was vaguely on my radar.
I tried teaching myself on and off through high school, but
I didn’t get that far along. So when I was doing my undergrad I finally said “no I’m
actually going to commit to this”, and I enrolled in a distance course through
Sol Mòr Ostaig. After I’d finished I was thinking about what my senior essay
was going to be and I thought, “I want to do something with Gaelic stuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if the university were to give me some money so I can go
to Nova Scotia and poke around, do some research, and talk to people?”
MAGGIE I’m from
Northern Arizona originally. I became
fascinated with Scotland and highland culture and thought that I was going to
go to Ireland and restore castles. I went to Berkley for my undergrad and
enrolled in an Irish course as part of a requirement for a Celtic Studies, and
that’s when I thought “okay maybe not castles, but Irish is wonderful!”
And so I kind of went head-first into language
revitalization for Irish. My family is Jewish, I don’t have a Celtic
connection. But my grandfather was a native Yiddish speaker and he didn’t pass
that onto his children so I didn’t grow up with Yiddish. So I do have this,
cultural memory of language loss and I don’t want to see that happen with
Ireland.
INTERVIEWER In
your view, what does language loss actually mean? And what are the consequences
for the communities and people that experience it?
ROB I think we
all have a tendency to abstract language from other things. This is language
loss-but it’s not just language loss. It’s everything else that goes with the
loss of a particular language though. The web of meaning, relationships,
literature, personal histories.
When I did start learning Gaelic in the early 1990s I spent
a lot of time here in Nova Scotia at various times in the year. There were many
fewer older native speakers here now than there were at that time, and even at
that time compared to 20 years before there was a huge reduction. And it was
quite clear to me that it wasn’t just sadness at the death of a language that
people were experiencing but everything else that goes along with that—a fundamental,
constitutive part of personal identities.
To me that was quite shocking. It
showed me that once language goes how quickly all sorts of things are erased with
it. That’s quite an unhealthy thing.
INTERVIEWER Speaking
Gaelic outside of the classroom setting and identifying oneself as a Gael both require some emotional buy-in with the culture. In your view, what are the ways
that we can foster that emotional connection between the language learner and
the wider culture, both in school and in the community?
MAGGIE I feel
like the best way to help these languages not to diminish further is just to
normalize them. That's why I am working with Irish and Gaelic media for my PHD. Specifically, I’m looking
at media produced in the last decade. There are cop shows in Irish, there’s a
musical comedy in Irish, it’s amazing. The fact that these things are being
well-received and that it’s a thing that is possible gives me a lot of hope. I know a lot of people who are watching a very popular
Danish cop show that everyone is obsessed with right now. They’re watching it
even thought it’s in Danish. If you can do a show like that in Danish, why
can’t you do a show like that in Irish?
ROB Associating the language with local stories, stories that are close to people’s
day to day lived experience is important. But as with anything, this way of thinking can become
a bit of a trap when it becomes essentialist. When people start saying, “We want to learn
our dialect”—well who are “we”? Does “we” include only people who have that
genetic link? Certainly the family story was part of the reason why I got
interested, but it wasn’t what kept me learning. Almost all of my cousins who
have the same story as I do, and they are completely indifferent to the language and culture. Why
should they count any more than interested people who love the language and
value the culture but who have no genetic tie to it?
For me, I think engaging people in a meaningful way, and a
way that is open and inclusive is what healthy communities are all about.
When I lived in Brazil nobody cared that I was learning
Portuguese, they didn’t care about my personal story, it was enough that I was
participating.
This is how we live our lives. We don’t live our lives by
saying “is this person just like us?" "Do they have the same background?” That’s
not a sign of a healthy community. Getting to a stage where our communities are healthy, means having a firm sense of self and tradition, but also being open.
NATHANIEL The
first step has to be to start valuing these communities for their own sake.
This is another issue I have with the way people talk about language endangerment
is that often times the way it gets framed especially for Western Anglophone
audiences especially if they’re talking about indigenous languages in places
like South America or wherever that a lot of the way it gets talked about is
“we need to save these languages because indigenous people\s know a lot about
the local bio diversity and imagine how much we can learn from them.”
We need
to start valuing these languages and communities for their own sake because
they’re human beings who are inherently valuable and whose cultures and
languages and traditions are valuable not because of what they can do for the
rest of the world, but because of who they are and what they do for themselves.
****
Maggie’s favorite word in Gaelic is Rance : It’s very
colloquial, I’ve never heard it used by anyone other than my Irish Professor’s
combination of Munster and Connacht Irish. It’s a dance word. As he described it
to us, “ it’s a jangly dance word”.
Nathaniel’s favorite word in Gaelic is “tlachd”. I just like
the sound of it. It means “comfort”.
Rob’s I’ll give you two: Laochan
(little hero), because that’s what I tend to call some of my friends and my
8 year old. And the other one that I used to hear from one of my uncles when he
greeted us and it was ghaolain’ (my dear
little boy).
Gach deagh dhùrachd!
