What we lose when a language dies

Hallo, is mise Ashely agus tha mi à Halifax.

Hello, my name is Ashely and I am from Halifax.

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These were some of the first phrases we learned in Scottish-Gaelic class at Saint Mary’s University. I needed a language credit during my undergraduate degree, so I chose to learn the language of my ancestors. I expected to learn grammar and pronunciation of some painfully un-phonetic words. What I did not expect was that it would change the way I understood the world.

I had grown up adjacent to the language, but never properly immersed. I spent many summers on Cape Breton Island, where my mom grew up and where our MacDonald ancestors have lived for generations. We would drive to the Highlands listening to The Rankins, sing folk songs in Gaelic and marvel at bilingual road signs. Cape Breton is the only place outside of Scotland where the language is still spoken fluently. But Scottish-Gaelic is under threat.

Earlier this month, The Gaelic College in Cape Breton announced programming cuts because of decreased funding. According to the 2021 Canadian census, only 305 native Scottish-Gaelic speakers remain in Cape Breton. Meanwhile, Gaelic research professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin cited Scotland’s 2022 census to show that Scottish-Gaelic could die as a native language within a generation. Learning Scottish-Gaelic helped me understand what we stand to lose if the language becomes extinct.

The most important thing I learned is that Gaelic is an animate language, meaning that everything in the world is seen as alive in some sense. In my class, we learned the gender of weather, water and mountains, reflecting a pre-Christian worldview in which these elements were living beings. That sense of aliveness extends into the language itself. In Gaelic, you cannot simply say “I am sad,” but rather “there is a sadness upon me,” as emotions have a fluid, transient quality. Even the 18 letters of the alphabet were named after trees, considered sacred to the Celts.

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Through ancient words, we traced the history of pre-Christian holy days into Christian ones. Samhain (pronounced sow-in), now known as All Hallows Eve, was a time when the Celts considered the veil between the human and the spirit world was at its thinnest.

This sense of aliveness still permeates Cape Breton’s culture. My Catholic grandmother experienced premonitions of family deaths, known as an dà shealladh or “second sight.”

But nothing stood out to me more than the concept of Dùthchas. Difficult to translate directly, the word describes a relationship with the land based on continual stewardship rather than individual ownership. Dùthchas stresses the interconnectedness of humans and the rest of the living environment, and the need for ecological balance. Today it is used by an environmental movement seeking revitalization and care for the Highlands.

To lose this language is to lose a cultural and geographical encyclopedia. And keeping an endangered language alive requires not only community enthusiasm, but also institutional support. Gaelic, like the 70-plus Indigenous languages spoken across Canada today, has survived government efforts to eradicate it. The Scottish Highland Clearances of the 1800s forced out much of the Gaelic-speaking population. From 1872 to 1918, the remaining Gaelic-speaking children were forced into English-language schools and beaten for speaking Gaelic.

Ó Giollagáin projects that native speakers in the Scottish Highlands could disappear within a generation. Both Scotland and Cape Breton need greater financial resources, cultural support and teachers.

When we lose a language, we lose an important opportunity for new generations of learners to expand how we understand the world — and how we might better inhabit it.

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Ashely L. Crouch is a freelance writer and editor based in Montreal.