Gaelic Speakers: Nova Scotia Gaelic

Nova Scotia S Office Of Gaelic Affairs Dept: Both Yiddish and Gaelic made it over to the New World and, for a while, did fairly well; Yiddish was once very strong indeed in New York where the Yiddish edition of the newspaper The Forward is still published and Montreal, just as Gaelic was once an inescapable part of the life of Cape Breton. And both languages have declined very sharply, according to The Chronicle Herald. It does not have to be that way. Gaelic speakers have rights, and they could start to assert those rights more forcefully. Nova Scotia s Office of Gaelic Affairs offers a model of how that could be done. Anyone who has visited their website knows that every-thing they do is available in Gaelic. Everyone who has been to an event where they are present has seen their indefatigable chief Lewis MacKinnon speaking mellifluous Gaelic; whenever he says anything in public, he says it in Gaelic first, and then repeats it in English. The office is fully capable of doing the everyday and sometimes tedious work of government in Gaelic and nova Scotia Gaelic is facing its Yiddish moment. Yiddish was, for generations, the language of the shtetl, the small Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe whose culture was dealt its final blow by the Holocaust, just as Gaelic was once the language of the Highlands and was dealt its near-death blow by the Highland Clearances. Both have some fluent speakers left, but with Yiddish as with Gaelic, most are elderly. Younger people who consider either language part of their identity rarely not never, but rarely know enough to hold down a conversation. It s more typical for them to know snatches: songs, little sayings, a few words and phrases. Nobody who spends any time getting to know either Gaelic or Yiddish can avoid seeing that reality. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.