British Minority language Thread...Irish Gaelic/Welsh/Gaidhlig..

[macmam]

I am a Mum who is a Scottish Gaidhlig speaker...I have dc's to whom I speak to only in Gaidhlig they speak in English to their Dad, and would love to chat to other mams and dads in a similar situation. They go to a mainland (Scottish) Gaidhlig School and are the most fluent ones in their year groups. (They went to school fully fluent.) The class sizes are 23/24/25 and are still the most native/fluent in their years. We are very lucky in that we have close family nearby and very strong family ties to the Western Isles so they think of themselves as very 'Gaidhealach' (Island). Am losing hope in GME school though and am thinking that the local school couldn't do worse than me on my own and local schooling...Kids are in large classes amongst kids who are NOT fluent..all their language acquisition is from me, talking ALL the time at and to them...they come home with all tha crappy mistakes and horrific accent they acquire at school..I spend all my time correcting their mistakes...

(I am a pain..someone help me to get some kind of perpective....I only want them to be as fluent as me in 20 yrs time...is that too much..., yes probably..)

I see what you mean. At the same time, to get a bit of perspective, some MNers are bringing up their children to be bilingual without any exposure to their second language apart from one parent. So even if yours are picking up a few mistakes at the moment- which must be very annoying- they still have the advantage of seeing Ghaidlig as something moderately cool, something other young people do, not as Mum's whim. So a huge positive there.

My dcs Dad does actually speak some of my language but very badly: awful accent, can't grasp basic grammatical rules, keeps mixing up words that sound vaguely similar. And yes, I do get annoyed, but at the same time, I still think it is better for them to hear that he is trying and that he does think it worthwhile. The families I know who have failed in establishing bilingualism are the ones where noone has a positive attitude except the one parent. Those children have been exposed to a faultless accent and perfect grammar all their lives, but they still don't want to speak it.

And children's language is a flexible thing. Dd made mistakes in her Swedish grammar when she was 7 and she doesn't now. Ds still does- but I have hopes.

But I appreciate it's a tricky one, particularly where the language is small and potentially threatened.

That's the thing all the celtic languages are under threat some more than others, though I know that Welsh is in good condition.

They don't always use it between themselves at home and I am on them for that. At school they are using it in the class but not amongst the others when playing...I suppose I am being pernickety...

Well - I see what you mean too, but in terms of perspective, I think you are in a strong position.

I am not a Gaidhlig speaker yet, but I'm a learner and my DH is learning too. My DD is in a GME school and does not use Gaidhlig with her friends as far as I can tell (but she's only in P1). I know of no fluent speakers in her class at all. We use some pidgin Gaidhlig at home and throw in the odd word here and there because it's all we can manage atm.

I have a forlorn hope that my DC will both be fluent at some point (DS is not school age yet) and DH and I would love to reach some degree of fluency too. But it feels impossible.

I love hearing DD using any Gaidhlig whatsoever.

You have a great advantage because you are fluent and they hear the language at shool as well.

Stupid question maybe - but do your DC watch BBC Alba? DD loves Dè a-nis? because she sees cool older kids speaking Gaidhlig.

Cory is right too about attitude being more important than perfect grammar

(but then I would say that, because I have no grasp of the language but I have a positive attitude )

I am not a Mum but a Dad.I was married and have two ons to my ex-wife. I am a native Gaelic speaker borna nd brought up on the west side of Lewis. Although my ex is not a Gaelic speaker or even learner she was very suppportive of Gaidhlig.We sent our sond to croileagan (Gaelic-medium playgroup) and on to Gaelic medium in primary and secondary school. My sons are 18 and 20 now and both are away from home , the youngest in Uist and the oldest in Paisley in college. I was in a very fortunate position in that I stayed at home looking after our sons whilst my ex went to work, she is a nurse. I only spoke Gaelic to my sons since they were born and still do and luckily they speak to me in Gaelic all the time as well. I didn't have an English conversation with my oldest son until he was 17. It was the most disjointed conversation I had in my life, neither of us was comfortable in speaking in English. I work in local radio in Stornoway and have been presenting Gaelic music programmes for the last 10 years. I am now working on a series of GAelic childrens programm suitable for pre-school and lower primary, and an accompanying series for parents who have children in Gaelic medium but have little Gaelic themselves. These programmes will be available to community radio stations and hopefully will be available on the web, both audio and text. I can recommend a couple of websites that might be of help to parenst with children in Gaelic medium : Sabhal Mor Ostaig (the Gaelic college in Skye , where I spent two happy years as a student). On this website there is a link "Goireasan air an lion / Gaelic resources on the net". When you follow this link through you will find hundreds of links to other Gaelic-related sites. THe links are themed, ie, education, learning Gaelic, music, stories, etc. Anothersite is Storlann Naiseanta Na Gaidhlig, the Nationsal Gaelic Database. This site has audio and text for some of the reading schemes used in Gaelic medium and other resources. They even have a homework helpline whereby parents can phone up and ask for advice on Gaelic homework. You should be able to get the number from your local aelic-medium unit or school. I hope that that this info is useful. If i can help anyone else, do not hesitate to get in touch. Les gach deagh dhurachd.

Domhnall thanks for your post. My main problem is having the time to make the most of the all the great resources that are out there! The programmes you are involved in making sound great, I hope they will be available on the web eventually.

DH and I have just decided that we're going to use the gaelic4parents site to get more Gaidhlig spoken at home. With kids you repeat yourself all the time anyway so we'll try and nag them do some key phrases in Gaidhlig to begin with.

It's nice to hear that your sons are still using their Gaidhlig.

Just saw this!

Neither dh or I are native Gaidhlig speakers but we lived and worked in the Western Isles for 10 years and dd1 started school there, in GMU (as the English P1 teacher in her school was just beyond hope, to be honest!).

We now live in Glasgow and our 3 children are at Sgoil Gaidhlig Ghlaschu and tbh I think they are getting a better education there from a language pov than they did in the Western Isles! Talking Gaidhlig is encouraged at all times and it is fabulous to hear my kids sitting round the table doing homework, talking to each other in Gaidhlig, working away ..... I think it works partly as the entire school is talking the same language!

Macmam - I see your point but I think you have to accept that all children come home with crappy mistakes and horrible accents from school - no matter what language they are speaking. There is a benefit to bilingual education beyond the language acquisition - music, maths etc. You also come over just a teeny bit arrogant about it - my kids are the "not so fluent" kids you talk about, cos they don't have it at home. But do you want Gaidhlig to survive? Cos if you do, then my kids and others like them are the way forward. And as good as my children's school is, there is still a divide - between the non-native speakers encouraging our kids to learn, and what is referred to, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, as the "Gaelic Mafia" - the native speakers who come over all superior cos they use a different word for milk than the school do, or have a different way of saying "eighty".

I delight in the fact my kids have had the opportunity to grow up bilingual. I'm not too worried about their accent.

Although my sons went thgrough Gaelic-medium education, they still make mistakes in their Gaelic. I try to correct them but they don't use their Gaidhlig enough, especially since they are away from home. They went to a Gaelic medium class in a predominantly English medium school, which meant Gaidhlig in the classroom and Beurla in the playground. I envy the Gaidhlig school in Glasgow where there is total immersion in Gaidhlig, from teacher to janitor to cooks etc. I think this is the way ahead for Gaelic medium. At the moment there is talk about creating a Gaidhlig school - not unit in the Western Isles. In the Western Isles some Gaelic speaking parents are complacent in that they send their kids to Gaelic medium and think that that is enough and their childrem will be fluent Gaelic speakers or bilingual by Primary 7. Children need Gaidhlig around them all the time,not just school. Even if parents don't speak Gaelic in the home there are plenty resources out there, i.e story tapes, audio books, nursery rhymes - opps sorry, we don't have any traditional nursery ryhmes, but we have puirt-a-beul. Feasgar Math

Just talking to my dd1 - funny enough it is the Janny and the cooks that don't speak Gaidhlig at SGG. But everyone else does!

We do have the language at home in the form of books/music/tv/radio but mainly in the kids talking to each other, which I encourage. Certainly my older 2 kids have been told they sound like native speakers - ds's teacher is from Nis and apparantly ds now has a very strong accent!

What I have found fascinating recently is that we have introduced a third language - I've been studying Spanish and the children have started lessons. And they are learning Spanish through the medium of Gaidhlig! (their private tutor is a native speaker). Now that is wonderful!

That's wonderful Weeglemum. Comunn na Gaidhlig produced a set of phrase books a number of years ago, i'e Spanish to Gaidhlig, Gaidhlig to Spanish, same with German, French and Italian. These books are not available now but might be available in the library or round the corner from the school at the Gaelic Books Council. I am afraid that I am just bilingual - I am still learning Beurla. A number of years ago I was working in a wholesalers and a customer phones in an order. I answer the phone and I take the order, both of us speaking in English. After a couple of minutes the fellow giving the order said to me in Gaidhlig "Donald is that you". I replied "Yes". He then said "Why are we talking in English. We shouldn't be wasting the little English we have - we might need it some day!". Good way of thinking!. 'S math a rinn e.

Weegiemum, I am not in the same situation as you. My dc's are not going to GME to learn Gaidhlig but to be educated in their first language, so I am very concerned about language acquisition and bad pronounciation and poor accent. And I would be equally as concerned about this were they going to a mainstream school. Their teachers tell me that they are fluent and that their blas is excellent and even then I can sometimes detect poor sentence construction and tenses going awry and I'm fluent.

Of course I want Gaidhlig to survive and flourish but I don't think that it'll be learners who went to GME who'll be speaking instinctively to their kids in 20 years time who'll be doing the rescuing. I think they'll contribute but I also think GME is in danger of making Gaidhlig a "museum curiosity" and it'll take more grassroots approaches to firm up the way Gaels in general look at their language.

As far as the so-called "Gaidhlig Mafia" is concerned I think that that is all in people's heads, after all at mainland GME schools and units, you as the English Mafia are in the majority and in our school can be a bit stand-offish and as I've said in previous posts I don't discriminate, but I will happily chat away in Gaidhlig or English if someone's friendly, it makes no difference to me. It does worry me that you think that the Gaidhlig speakers are being superior!

As for being a "teeny bit arrogant", well I think that's a bit uncharitable of you. Passionate and pro-active is how I like to see myself!

From the other end of the country, I'm in an English-Cymraeg bi-lingual family - dh is Welsh-speaking, and I'm the Saes ... dh has always spoken Welsh with the children, and now the elder is at school, he's learning alongside children who have no Welsh-speaking background at all, but who do have parents who are keen for them to be educated through the medium of Welsh.

When R started at school, I was at first despairing of how those with no Cymraeg background would cope, but now, in the yard, you cannot tell who is from a Welsh-speaking family, and who isn't.

Just a word of caution - if you try to force Gaidhlig onto your children when they play, they may well reject it - a person's linguistic make-up is very sensitive - if they are used to playing with each other in English, then it will not seem natural to change to another language.

Thats reassuring to hear from a Welsh pov. You can't tell in our yard either sadly because they all play in English (moan moan)! Yes I don't try to "force" the Gaidhlig during play as such, more in conversations around the play... and generally only if I hear them. Thankfully they still chat away to me in Gaidhlig.. They used to play all the time in Gaidhlig with me and themselves and their cousins and gaidhlig pals..so I am trying to "remind" them, iyswim...they're still pretty young yet so not so far removed hopefully from the habit,

The best thing to have happened for a while is that they are now as keen if not more so on BBC Alba, which is only eighteen or so month old. It's great having cartoons for them to veg for half an hour infront of before homework instead of Nick Jnr etc!

I loved being in Wales last year, where we were EVERY one spoke Welsh, marvellous...

Penny drops ... I'd wondered what BBC Alba was ... now I know!

If they're happy to chat to you in Gaidhlig, and they have input from school and media in Gaidhlig too, then they'll be growing up "in the zone" (my term) ... the Welsh-speaking world here where we are (Cardiff) is not necessarily so obvious as it is in other parts of Wales, but it is most definitely there, like a secret society .My children consider it totally natural to have home and school contact in Welsh - as far as they are concerned, that is the norm for everybody - they seem to be confused that not everybody speaks more than one language (I have learned Welsh so that we can use it more fully at home, but am also fluent in French, so for them, bi-lingualism really is the normal thing!)

macmam - we are in germany, so my children get the same exposure to english as yours do to Gaelic - ie from me, and from EFL classes in the school.
I also spend a lot of time correcting them, they often get verbs wrong even though dd1 is now 13 and ds1 12.
I think this is just part of bringing up bilingual children, tbh, it is hard work, but worth it.

This is a really interesting thread. My children are in a welsh-medium school and I'm a welsh learner (DH is english and only speaks a small amount of welsh) - I speak a bit at home but not much.

I'm really surprised that your fluent gaidhlig speaking children are suffering in a gaidhlig school because of other non-fluent children. I'm wondering if fluent welsh speakers have similar experiences? It seems such a shame for those who are fluent. Here though, the children ARE expected to be fluent by the end of their reception year. And they're not allowed to speak english in school - despite something like 95% of the children at my DD and DS's school being from english-speaking homes, they all speak welsh to each other in the yard.

Are gaidhlig schools relatively new or have they always been around?

Macmam - this is a really interesting thread for me as we've been considering whether or not to put DS in Gaelic medium education. (Despite my name I am not a Gaelic speaker!).

I must say though, have my doubts about the whole approach to Gaelic. I would tend to agree that the children that go to Gaelic medium primary schools, who don't have Gaelic at home, are unlikely to be the ones continuing the language tradition. After all, certainly in my area, by the time they get to secondary school provision is limited and many lessons will be in English.

I personally think the heavy-handed top down approach that we're currently seeing is all wrong. I don't see how forcing all public sector bodies to publish all their sterile, soulless documents in Gaelic as well as English going to help it survive as a living, breathing, evolving language? [That point's a bit off topic, but I'd be interested in a native speaker's viewpoint on this - do you care if official documents are in Gaelic or not?]

I believe that somehow the survival of Gaelic has to come from the grass roots, along with all its wonderful traditions and folklore, but then how?

Oh man, I don't want to put anyone off but I could drone on and on! And though I feel my opinions reflect the reality, not very many will come off the fence and state them because we're all so 'eternally grateful' the the Government is putting a pittance into resurrecting something that previous governments have spent fortunes on eradicating. (Thank goodness for Malcolm Rifkind for the start of the TV money!)

Personally, I think that GME works if your kids have had a nursery start and one or both parents make a concerted effort to learn some/a good level of Gaidhlig. I'm not talking fully fluent, but some effort is required at the very least to encourage it at home, after all, children live what they learn..(I read that poster all through school!) I know I'm repeating others here but I wouldn't send my kids to a french/italian/mandarin school unless I could actively help them when they were doing homework. After all if you're sending your kids to a second language school you expect some level of fluency don't you? Not just pidgin. It's doing Gaidhlig a great disservice otherwise. (It's all very well being educated in a bi-lingual setting but what on earth will you do with a really ropey second language?)
The very best learners are either teaching/broadcasting/academically minded, but what about the mammies and daddies bringing up future generations? It's not good enough when what the language needs is real effort to speak it and speak frequently.

BTW, Gaidhlig signs in properly Gaidhlig areas that have actual Gaidhlig names are a must.

There was spoken Gaidhlig in Ayrshire, Aberdeenshire, and other areas until as recently as 50-odd years ago....

Mrs Gravy GME has been on the go in Scotland for at least 20yrs so relatively newish in comp. to Wales and Ireland...

Another non-Welsh speaker (understand, but don't speak well at all) here with dd in Welsh medium education. Her school is dominated by English-first-language children (to the extent that maybe 1 or 2 children in each class will speak Welsh at home. (Funny situation - we're in a 'planted' town where there has always been a lot of English spoken since the Middle Ages, though surrounded by Welsh speaking countryside.)

I know some parents falling on the edge of the catchment area do choose to send their dcs to other primaries where Welsh is the 'playground' language as well as the school language. I don't think its so much about accent etc (although maybe people wouldn't say that!) but more about avoiding the dominance of English for as long as possible.

Having said that, I know plenty of young adults who have come through dd's school who are clearly fluent Welsh speakers and use it at work as well as in the community. But maybe Welsh is different in that it is very much alive and used around us all the time.

What we tend to find is that DS (in yr 2) switches between his "school" Welsh when talking to his teacher and "Daddy" Welsh when speaking to DH - even I as a non-native speaker can tell when he's doing it!

He's now starting to learn that what DH says isn't necessarily wrong, merely different - dh is from the Amman Valley - quite different to the correct Welsh DS is taught at school!

I notice that too with the Gaidhlig, they often switch from the homogenous school generic to the more dialectual (is that a word?) Gaidhlig we have here at home. The same in English too. Very correct with Dad and very vernacular with english speaking pals....It's like they have variants of the languages they speak...

Now I'm not a Gaidhlig speaker, or even a Welsh speaker any more despite 2 years of WME in Ceredigion but I did get annoyed when I saw a sign that complaints to the immigration authority could be submitted in English or Welsh, no mention of Gaidhlig at all. Encouraging the survival of a language is much more than encouraging children to speak it - it's also validating it in the eyes of the general public who don't speak it so they aren't dismissive of it.

The way Welsh has been protected and is now regarded is a wonderful example, as is Breton in France and Catalan in Spain. But ask people to name other minority langauges and they can't. It's a shame because awareness is such a powerful tool and raising the profile of a language is likely to help its survival.

wanders off loving accidental thread clicking

pops back

The other thing this thread brings to mind is the languages of the Channel Islands. I wonder if there's anyone on MN trying to continue those?

CrochetDiva - small world! I lived and went to school in the Amman Valley. Still have family there. I'm learning 'conversational welsh' and can definitely see a difference in the welsh I'm learning and the 'proper' welsh my DD is learning in school.