Why Gaelic is dying a death

and write; she never left the island, and only once -- at the age of 78

-- did she leave her village, going for a day to my grandparents by

Stornoway, and being motored home that night. A great adventure.

My grandfather, who died in 1986, was her son. He worked in Glasgow

before the war, at John Brown's shipyard; afterwards, as a joiner in

Stornoway. A native Gaelic speaker, he spoke English well: hesitantly,

but very correctly.

My father, still spared, is a Free Church minister and a fine Gaelic

preacher: he appears now and then as an interviewee on Gaelic

programmes. But his domestic, colloquial Gaelic is not as good as my

mother's.

I am the fourth generation. And I cannot speak Gaelic at all, save for

a few phrase book expressions and the odd mild sweary word.

Such dynastic decline in the language of Eden is only too typical. But

it imparted a frisson of guilt when I hearkened to the Gaelic scene last

week. The 1991 census figures were released, and showed a decline in

Gaelic far worse than any had predicted: since 1981, Scotland's Gaelic

speaking population has crashed from 80,000 to 65,000. And by great ill

luck this was announced in the middle of the National Mod at Oban,

Gaeldom's premier festival.

The Mod -- unkind souls know it as the ''Whisky Olympics'' -- is

mothered by An Commun Gaidhealach. That is virtually all An Commun does.

Which is why her leaders strongly resent being blamed for the Gaelic

slump. But, as luck would have it, last week's National Mod was a

turkey. Competitors were low and standards were dire. This year's

singing gold medallists, even by the rating of the last decade or so,

were peculiarly awful. Local organisation, by all accounts, was not what

it should have been. The people of the town showed little interest in

the festival and hardly turned out at all.

Even the BBC, whose coverage of the Mod is usually splendid, stumbled

badly. The Gaels en fete won two daily TV slots throughout the week,

presented by the likable and gifted John Urquhart and Cathy Macdonald.

Grim was their lot for five long days, as they wrestled to force

quality from appalling material. Mod '92 seemed designed by John Byrne

and directed on mescaline: studios were heaped with fish boxes and

strung with artful nets, and there were long high-speed camera chases

through the streets of Oban. Furthermore, there was Mary Macinnes.

Now Mary Macinnes is a very good singer, for all that she is from

Skye; but, on last week's evidence, she had better quit presenting and

keep her day job. She appears to have gone on one of those

TV-star-in-a-fortnight courses, and not a very good one. To be sure, she

could tilt a simpering head and flash a cheesy grin, but her eyes were

glazed on the autocue and her entire persona modelled on wine-fiend Jill

Goolden -- whom, by the end of the week, she horribly resembled.

Friday's last episode of Mod 92 surpassed all. Time and more time was

squandered on instrumental music, with one long weepy guitar piece by a

Breton, of all guys; there was another manic high-speed chase through

the streets of Oban, five minutes of pointless, voiceless frenzy; and,

finally, there was a ghastly pub scene starring Mary Macinnes and a bad

piper and a guttered audience. The piper piped, Mary Macinnes bounced

and simpered, the worst drunkard clapped with erratic abandon, and the

scene went on and on till the credits rolled, like the grim small hours

of an overlong party.

And, all the time, Gaelic declines. The 1991 census figures show that

less than half the children even of the Outer Isles speak Gaelic

fluently. There remains a chronic shortage of Gaelic-speaking teachers,

and especially of Gaelic-speaking journalists. For such, presently,

there is a great demand: #10m of Government slush-fund slopping into

Gaelic television, and this crowning a decade of great blessing for

Gaels -- the advent of Gaelic nursery schools, Gaelic-medium education,

and the expansion of Gaelic radio. But still, the language goes down.

Now let us talk some sense. And let us dismiss the absurd idea that 10

hours of Gaelic television a week will save the tongue. The truth is

that Gaelic is ebbing, and will continue to ebb, and that it is a dying

language: the truth is that within the lifetime of many of us, Gaelic

will be extinct as a living language.

There are two wee reasons for this, and one big one. The first wee

reason is education. The dawn of compulsory education in Scotland (1872)

was the death-blow for the Gaelic language. The second is television.

The arrival of a full television service in the West Highlands (reaching

Lewis only in 1976) destroyed the Gaelic sub-culture of Hebridean

children; it is a decade and more since I heard school-age youngsters

talk Gaelic to one another outside the classroom. To put it crudely:

every week, perhaps two dozen fluent Gaelic speakers die and are buried.

And only a handful of babies born in those seven days will be raised in

the Gaelic language.

And the big reason is that the Gaels do not have a nation state. No

polity, no government, no sovereignty over their own affairs and their

own land. We are but a tiny tribe at the edge of one of the biggest and

most influential cultures in history, and its language fast emerging as

a lingua franca of the world. The Gaelic language, by contrast, cannot

fill a stadium: it is rent by dialects, grammatically irregular, and

with a spelling only tenuously connected to pronunciation -- which

requires, in any event, glottal and palatal effects beyond the range of

most English speakers.

I am not saying that the Gaelic language was fatally stabbed at

Culloden. I think it was long before that, in the fall of the Lordship

of the Isles, around the time of the Battle of Harlaw in 1411, which

confirmed the demise of Scotland as a Gaelic realm.

And, though I am saddened by the loss of an ancient tongue, I refuse

to lose perspective. Ten million pounds to aid the beleaguered Western

Isles after the BCCI debacle would do far more good for Highland culture

than this TV feeding trough. For the riches of that culture go beyond

its language: the ties of blood, the strength of the family unit, the

bond to the land, the tenets of faith, the culture of humour and

hospitality and understatement.

Gaelic is only a language. A language must be a tool of communication,

to help you function in the world. Gaelic no longer does that job: that

is why I shed no tears, and that is why it is doomed to die.