I'm a Canadian. Once, I was on a train in Scotland (Aberdeen to Thurso). In the car, on the other side of the aisle from me were two women, one elderly, the other probably in her twenties. They spoke to each other in Gaelic. But something was odd about it. The younger woman spoke Gaelic very differently from the older. She had a distinctive accent, and also a very different rhythm and pattern of stress. When the answer hit me, I leaned over and said: "Excuse me, but are you speaking Canadian Gaelic?". The answer was yes. The younger woman was from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and fluent native speaker of Gaelic. She had just married a man from the Scottish Isles. The older woman was her mother-in-law. I gave myself a buttered scone as a reward for keen (or accidental) observation.
10:00 I can confirm that there are young people speaking it amongst themselves! I'm a Gaelic-speaker in my early twenties from Australia and went to Cape Breton for a university short course in early 2019. I lived on campus at Colaisde na Gàidhlig and had to sign a Gaelic-only-on-campus agreement, but even when we went off-campus we kept speaking Gaelic to each other, and on a number of occasions met up with other young people from the community and spoke only Gaelic with them as well. I actually spoke English only once or twice while I was there because I was in such a sheltered environment, but it was pretty clear to me that most of the Gaelic-speaking young people I met usually spoke only Gaelic to each other. That goes equally both for the teenagers I met and for the people a few years older than me with small children.
my grandma passed away last year, she was the last native Gaelic speaker in my family, she was from the isle of Skye. it sad that they didn't pass the language down to me.
@Slightly Burned Pancakes yeah I just can't believe my mum wouldn't speak Gaelic when her mum did. I consider it a great loss for me because I would love to speak it and I tried to get my grandma to teach me over the phone when I was younger and I could tell my grandma loved teaching me, she would always ask me about the weather etc in gaelic.. but it was almost impossible to learn just from a little phone call.. my mum doesn't seem to care either.. for thousands of years my ancestors probably spoke that language and it stopped with her 🤬
@@HaiLsKuNkY I completely understand! You should come and learn it in Scotland and with every Gaelic phrase you learn, you should stop saying to your mam/mom/mum in english.
Glè Mhath! Tha mi à Baile Shidni ann an Alba Nuadh ach tha mi a’ fuireach ann am Melbourne ann an Astràlia a-nis agus tha Gàidhlig beag agam. (Very good! I’m from Sydney, Nova Scotia but I live in Melbourne, Australia now and I’ve got a bit of Gaelic.) Great to see the language getting some air time. Gaelic is alive and well in Cape Breton and amongst the Cape Bretoners, even if our numbers have declined. Interestingly, I spent my summers very near to where the Maxwell twins lived in Cape Breton.
@@deaganachomarunacathasaigh4344 For me I definitely struggle with Ulster the most. Tá píosa beag Gaeilge agam agus is aobhinn liom an teanga. Is fearr liom caint as Gaeilge.
You missed something -- there were two Canadian Gaelics, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the Newfoundland variety was Irish Gaelic. Also its disappearance kind of spurred Francophone fears.
The Codroy Valley area was an exception because it had a large population who came from Cape Breton and both their language and culture thrived for a few generations.
Please do. People of other backgrounds learning our language is incredible! It really helps calm fears of a gaelic revival movement being drowned out by tagalog and mandarin and all the other languages spoken in canada now.
Taanshi and maarsii! Crawling out of the woodwork! I'm a Scotch-Metis who grew up in Manitoba and I agree, Scotch folk are greatly overlooked in Canadian history. Scotch-Metis get grouped in with French Metis and Euro-Scots will almost without fail get grouped in with English folk. My Scots family left Orkney and the Aberdeen area during the highland clearances brought over by the Hudson's Bay Company to Rupert's Land via York Factory (modern day Manitoba) and eventually down to the Selkirk Settlement where they were given land after their HBC tenure. They intermarried with my Maškēkow (Cree) and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) ancestors and were part of the Scotch Metis community. My family up to my great nan all spoke Bungee and my great nan apparently had a strong Scottish-sounding accent (likely a very decreolised Bungee remnant). Unfortunately the language was not passed on- my great nan likely stopped speaking it to hide from being taken away to residential schools to instead go to an English-speaking day school. To the best of my knowledge, Bungee doesn't have any remaining speakers alive, there were very few in the 1970s when it was recorded. Also, modern Canadian Gaelic likely wouldn't have any Cree influence- the Red River / Manitoba community isn't very strong if it's around at all. The modern Canadian Gaelic community on Cape Breton Island and around Pictou would have Miꞌkmawiꞌsimk (Mi'kmaq) influence. It's also an Algonquian language like Cree, but it's from a different branch of the Algonquian family and mutual intelligibility would be limited if any.f
Great video. My grandmother was a native Gaelic speaker from Cape Breton. She would speak it with her grandmother who could only speak Gaelic. I will be sure to share this video with my family.
Your work on these topics is Amazing! Thank you sooooooo Much! (And you are Literally the only human I’ve ever encountered who can imitate the Scots accent! Congrats from a Canadian Gaelic learner in Calgaraidh!
A great video. I am a speaker of Irish and support all the Celtic languages (as well as 1st Nation languages). I look forward to seeing more videos from you.
Super cool video! I’m from Nova Scotia and I remember in grade 7 we got the choice to take either French or Gaelic classes in school. Most people chose French but I kind of wish they would make it mandatory. They also write Gaelic on a lot of the signs on the roads, in schools, etc. Also, my hometown of Antigonish has the largest annual Highland Games outside of Scotland 😄🇨🇦🏴
I had a French Canadian grandfather and a Welsh grandmother and neither of their ancestral languages were passed on to me. Actually, my great-grandparents cut off transmission of Welsh because they feared the stigma associated with the accent at the time. The end of the video hit real hard. 😢
Which is exactly why french speakers in Canada and everywhere in North america where a situation of minority is clear are afraid of losing their culture.
Haha my dad is fluent in Scottish Gaelic and well it’s different from Scottish Gaelic he can still make out most of what they are saying in Irish Gaelic
@maryrankin indeed plausible, it’s akin to a Spanish and Portuguese speaker, as they were more or less the same language a few hundred years ago with a good ear you can make out the essentials
@@lewiitoons4227 Irish and Scottish Gaelic shared Classical Gaelic (the written medium) up until the 1600s, but the spoken languages had been diverging long before that. There is a dialect continuum from the south of Ireland to the north of Scotland, but the people from the extreme ends of that continuum cannot readily understand each other unless they have studied the other language. They are separated by 800 miles as the crow flies. Before the 20th century it could have easily taken you one to two weeks to travel that distance. Nevertheless, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx are still closely related. More so than Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish and Portuguese were not really more or less the same language. Spanish is descended from Castilian, while Portuguese is descended from Galician. They were already separate languages more than 1000 years ago. However, both Castilian and Galician descended from different branches of Vulgar Latin (now usually called Colloquial Latin) from about 1500 years ago. The intelligibility between Spanish and Portuguese is a bit one-sided. Portuguese speakers understand Spanish speakers better than the other way round.
@@alicemilne1444 i was oversimplifying to keep it nice and short but like all language variation there is ofc a dialect continuum, even with the Spanish and Portuguese example you’ve still got a buffer zone, my point was more that as there’s a common root there’s going to be some degree of mutual intelligibility, but yeah someone speaking Ulster Irish gaelic and someone speaking southwestern Scot’s gaelic will have a much easier time than south Ireland and northern Scotland, much like a Portuguese a gallacian and aragonese and a castellano speaker will have a continuum as well the further you go the more divergent usually. on the note of one sidedness, as well, as a Spanish speaker I have to say that is only noticeably true for European Portuguese I understand Brazilians very well and even at that I could understand my friend from Lisboa after a few hours of chatting but that’s a form of study.
@@lewiitoons4227 I grew up bilingual with English and French (trilingual if you include Scots - sister language to English) and studied Latin at school. I learnt Spanish directly in Spain, greatly helped by my background in French and Latin, spent time working there and got to understand Catalan, Aragonese, Galician, and some Andalusian. I was only ever in Portugal once many years ago. I managed to have conversations with Portuguese people in Lisboa and Sagres by talking to them in Spanish and asking them to speak very slowly in Portuguese. The thing with people in Portugal is that they swallow half the syllables. But Brazilian Portuguese has its own dialects too, as my translator colleagues kept telling me. As for Gaelic. I have been listening to it since I was a child 60 years ago. Scottish Gaelic sounds quite different from Irish Gaelic. And if you listen to native Gaelic speakers from Scotland and Ireland speaking English, their accents in English are completely different. I only started actually learning Scottish Gaelic properly myself 18 months ago. I'm avoiding learning Irish for the moment because I know what a bummer it can be to learn related languages at the same time and never get proficient in either one. (I started learning Italian at the same time as Spanish and very, very quickly gave that up.)
I've lived in Pictou all my life, seen all the bilingual signs. Every event has kilts and bagpipes (Multiple family members own both) The replica of the ship Hector sits in the bay and everyone I know without exception has Scottish last names. The culture is alive and well except for Canadian Gaelic, In all my years I've never heard a word of Gaelic. Its a shame but if you don't live in Cape Breton it seems that very little is being done to prevent further extinction of the language.
Interesting that you mention that it called 'gay-lic' there and yet when listening to the speakers in your clip they clearly say 'gah-lic'. I wonder if it changed over time under English speaking influence. Really enjoyed this, thank you.
In Cape Breton most of the younger generations call the language "gay-lic" when speaking in English but pronounce it "gah-lic" when speaking in Gaelic. I hope that makes sense!
Canadian Gaelic has also recently (well, the last thirty years anyway) had a presence in music, with recording artists Mary Jane Lamond and The Rankin Family.
Grew up near West Bay. Lot of Gaelic speakers there when I was a kid. At least among the older generations. There were unofficial Gaelic lesson taught in elementary school (in the 1970s). We would have preferred that to having to learn French. My background is neither, but I found the Gaelic cool sounding.
Very nice video. If you are wondering why Manitoba had such an isolated community of Gaelic speakers, it is because there were two completely different migration and settlement events.The Selkirk settlement in Manitoba consisted to a great extent of people from Orkney, who were brought in via Hudson's Bay and the Nelson River-terrible story, that. Also, there is a Metis language called Michif. As I understand it, it features a Cree structural base with a lot of French vocabulary. Very roughly.
Gaelic learning speaker from Nova Scotia here. Towards the end with the spellings, I noticed the differing accents. From what I've learned, Scottish Gaelic uses forward facing accents (àlainn, for example) whereas Irish Gaelic uses backwards facing accents (such as cailín).
@Jai - Scottish Gaelic used to use both grave and acute accents, but more recently, the GOC standardized spellings & accent usage, taking away the acute accent. BUT Canadian Gaelic still uses both the grave and acute accents because Canadian Gaelic is not bound by Scotland's GOC language reform rules.
The video at 9:50 has been deleted from UA-cam, or at least been hidden in my country. Could you please reupload the full version of it, if you have a copy? Or else give a reference to which documentary it appears in? I really liked the full interview and would like to share it with some people.
I found a reupload of it on the Internet Archive and this sketchy-seeming website called AltCensored. I'll try to link it in another reply but in case the link gets blocked, if you google "suppression of gaelic language in canada unlockthepower" then check the videos tab you should be able to find it, though you might have to go through a couple other videos to find it.
Canadian Gaelic is a dialect of Gàidhlig. It may have different pronunciations etc. but it is still easily understood. I really hope they can revive it.
I never met my grandfather who died before I was born, but he moved to Hamilton Ontario from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. His family were native Gaelic speakers.
How totally fascinating, thank you for such thought-provoking linguistic details... ps: love your Scottish accent too. Such a pity that so much history was tossed aside as a joke or irrelevant when it all truly serves to enrich and cement our common human history. I am a british European amateur linguist- devastated by brexit... we should be coming together and respecting our common links, not hating and dismissing. Thank you again. Merci, grácias, danke schon, grazie, dziekuje, xie xie, obrigada, and and and... :)
Highland Clearances... not so much to make way for industry, as to make way for large-scale sheep farming, and also for hunting estates for the wealthy
Don't forget that the Scottish people who were forced to the new world or Australia had more profitable sheep farms than the people who "cleared" them.
Many native speakers of Gaelic in Scotland say "gaylick" when speaking English. This insistence on "Gahlic" is quite recent. Both arre fine! Suas leis a' Ghaidhlig! I have been watching your videos for a while - but only recently discovered that you have some interest in Celtic languages. Mar Albainneach a fuireach 's na Staitean, tha mi toilichte . Beannachdan!
the French Colonist who settled in Québec where in majority from Brittany and Normandy. The Norman settled in Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean. So the Majority of Québécois where Breton and spoke Gallo a langue d'Oïl with hight celtic influence and some of the Breton also probably spoke Breton. Its after the second wave of colonist who came principaly from Paris with the the Fille du Roi who settled in Québec who spoke Franciens. That result to Québécois langage ressembling more to French speaking in Paris but the way we speak, our accent and a lot of our expression came from Brittany. So We Québécois are in majority have a Celtic origins.
A few facts -- it is a standing joke among Canadian historians that Canada was really a Scottish colony, not an English or British colony, because the large majority of the mid-level positions in almost all institutions and businesses were help by people of Scottish origin. In fact people of Scottish origin form the fourth largest element in the Canadian population, only very slightly behind those of Irish origin. As for Gaelic, it is commonly said that there was a period in 18th and 19th century Canadian history when there were more speakers of Gaelic in present-day Canada than in Scotland. Don't ask me for a source of this idea but it seems very likely. I am interested in family history and often ask people in Canada about their family origins. A very high proportion of them turn out to have Scottish highlander Gaelic speaking ancestors a couple of centuries back including several of my closest friends.
In Scotland, in English, the language should also be called Gaelic, not Gaidhlig. It would be like saying, in English, that I speak Zhong Wen, rather than saying I speak Chinese. It doesn't make sense. We refer to every other language by how it is said in English, we don't switch over and pronounce the name of the language in the language. We say German, we say French, we say Spanish, etc. Gaelic is exactly the same, meaning the language of the Gaels. Calling it Gaidhlig in English is nonsensical.
@@avrilbroekhuizen4758 quite right. This pronunciation is near-universal in the English spoken during The Scottish Parliament proceedings, and by Scottish broadcasters. More importantly, perhaps, most native Scots do likewise.
I’m cracking up at the fact that a Rudyard Kipling character explained that “Scotch” is not Gaelic way back in the 1800s, and, more than a century and a quarter later, I’m still having to explain to people that Scots and Scottish Gaelic are different languages, and still having to defend Scots being categorized as a language at all, even though it’s an official language of Scotland alongside Scottish Gaelic and English. It’s funny how people aren’t as skeptical of Luxembourgish being considered its own language rather than a dialect of German, or the Scandinavian dialect continuum not being considered one language, or countless Romance languages in the same position.
I don't think you can say the Scottish colonized anywhere in North America as they never had Imperial power but rather after they were cleared off their lands by the imperial British they were sent to north America.
Very sound how the Gaelic ethnicities were treated like such shit. But shur look, what can you do. I'm Irish, speak Irish too. I have never studied Gàihilg, Gàihilg Cheanadach or Gaelg (Manx) but I can understand 70-90% of what they say. Manx is the most difficult to understand because it had alot of influences from Welsh. But if we all sat at a table, we could all communicate with relative ease
Canadian here, the point made at 7:24 is actually very true. During Canadian history classes (even in Nova Scotia, where I live and have lived all my life), we never were really taught about the Gaels who lived here, opting more for focuses of the African Canadians, Indigenous groups, and the Acadians. Most of the education was not on the settling of the Brits and French either, a lot of it was on the Brits oppressing others and it included a very good amount of colonizer's guilt, we never even got a proper WWII education until 8th grade and it was only 2-3 months long. Anyways, good point and fantastic video.
This would have been a very interesting video if the narrator had spoken a bit more slowly. The fast pace of his speech makes him impossible to follow.
I am Scots, and while I appreciate the main intent of your video I'm sad to say that I found parts of it either historically inaccurate or culturally a mockery. I'm posting this in the hope that my comments will encourage you to be a lot more careful in your research and more respectful towards others. The word "British" is much misunderstood. It has only imperial context, and before the 20th century was never used internally in Britain, only externally. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is made up of four nations: English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. These national identities have *never* been subsumed into "just British". The Hudson Bay Company did not cause people to begin "moving to North America en masse". Migration was initially very slow. It was mainly the Scots and the French who moved to the interior, not the Irish. The Irish only began moving to Canada in any appreciable numbers in the 19th century. The Highland Clearances were not to "make way for industry". They were to clear the land of people to make way for the more profitable sheep farming and grouse and deer hunting. 2:42 That "fake Scots" accent is both excruciatingly bad and historically anachronistic. The majority of people recruited to emigrate via the Hector came from the area of Loch Broom in Wester Ross. They were monoglot Gaelic speakers. Even if anyone had spoken anything other than Gaelic to the emigrants, it would have been either in real Scots (a sister language to English) or in English with a Highland accent, and not that fake modern would-be Glasgow accent that sounds like a really stupid five-year-old boy. Do NOT imitate accents unless you really know what you are doing! Otherwise it comes across as mockery, is insulting as hell, and when you get them wrong it makes you yourself look silly and ill-educated. 4:28 That accent is also really bad and totally inappropriate. Rudyard Kipling's book was written in the USA when he was living in Vermont. The accent there is supposed to be that of fishermen in Massachussetts, so the characters are all either American or Canadian, not some weird mish-mash of faux Cockney/faux Scots. 7:00 Scottish Gaelic may never have been an official language in the United Kingdom, but neither has English. English was "de facto" official, but never "de jure" (by law). The minority languages in the UK now have official protection under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. However, it is wrong to say that Gaelic only gained formal recognition in 2005. There has been officially recognised Gaelic-medium education (i.e. schooling through the medium of Gaelic only) since 1985. That followed more than a century of repression after the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 which made state primary education compulsory and through the medium of English only.
I think you miss the active, very aggressive and often violent suppression of languages by the English government. In the case of Scots and of Scottish Gaelic no doubt, children as young as 4 years were struck and whipped with belts and birch canes for speaking the languages. Screaming at and viciously humiliating children was more common. During the 7 years I lived in Scotland I took time to study Scots and some Gaelic since it influenced Scots. I am not talented in languages but knowing and learning multiple languages is common in the Baltic countries. So I found it shocking at the crazed manner that the English controlled government in the islands of Ireland and great Britain sought to exterminate any non English language. But we all see now how xenophobic the English people are from the last few years. It has always been my experience that any person can speak 2 languages like a native speaker. With a bit of education that number could be 3 or 4 languages. This all makes the attitude of English people where they hate other people speaking another language and refuse to learn even the basics of another, incomprehensible. I have heard to English people travelling on public transport in Wales and Scotland, screaming aggressively at people involved in private conversations in another language. At Welsh speakers in Wales, Gaelic and Scots speakers in Scotland, as well as tourists, foreign students and diplomatic staff.
don't get me wrong, I love the fact that people still speak gaelic, even youngsters. But giving that language a special status? Do that for Dutch in Canada... there's over 1 million people in Canada that came from the Dutch ;)
Between 13 and 25% of Canadians claim Scottish descent. At minimum that’s about 5 million people. And Dutch isn’t endangered in Holland like Scottish Gaelic is in Scotland. The more we can do to protect endangered languages the better, IMO, including giving Scottish Gaelic special status in Nova Scotia. I say this as someone with both Scottish and Dutch roots.
Gaelic and Dutch background here. Idk about making Gaelic an official language in all of Canada back then but I think an official language in Nova Scotia at that time would have been warranted. Nowadays I would say make it official in the northeast of the province along with the Indigenous Mi’kmaw language
Gaelic speaker from Nova Scotia here. Well done!
Halò mo charaid!
Dia dhuit! Conas atá tú?
I didn't know there were still Canadian Gaeliec speakers!? This is fascinating
I'm a Canadian. Once, I was on a train in Scotland (Aberdeen to Thurso). In the car, on the other side of the aisle from me were two women, one elderly, the other probably in her twenties. They spoke to each other in Gaelic. But something was odd about it. The younger woman spoke Gaelic very differently from the older. She had a distinctive accent, and also a very different rhythm and pattern of stress. When the answer hit me, I leaned over and said: "Excuse me, but are you speaking Canadian Gaelic?". The answer was yes. The younger woman was from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and fluent native speaker of Gaelic. She had just married a man from the Scottish Isles. The older woman was her mother-in-law. I gave myself a buttered scone as a reward for keen (or accidental) observation.
10:00 I can confirm that there are young people speaking it amongst themselves! I'm a Gaelic-speaker in my early twenties from Australia and went to Cape Breton for a university short course in early 2019. I lived on campus at Colaisde na Gàidhlig and had to sign a Gaelic-only-on-campus agreement, but even when we went off-campus we kept speaking Gaelic to each other, and on a number of occasions met up with other young people from the community and spoke only Gaelic with them as well. I actually spoke English only once or twice while I was there because I was in such a sheltered environment, but it was pretty clear to me that most of the Gaelic-speaking young people I met usually spoke only Gaelic to each other. That goes equally both for the teenagers I met and for the people a few years older than me with small children.
That’s amazing!
Good on ya Anna. Im an Aussie of Gaelic heritage (Islay and Ardnamurchan)..but back living in the Highlands.
Hearing that makes me so happy
That gives me some hope for the culture
Wait, they forced you to agree to only speak gaelic on campus? Why?
wow your Scottish accent is like, worryingly good
Wasn’t the worst I’ve heard but it certainly wasn’t good 😂
Take it from a Scot, it was awful.
It wasn't awful - I'm Scottish @@alicemilne1444
@@alicemilne1444: True! Worse than James Doohan! But, his heart’s in the right place🙂.
@@alicemilne1444harsh. it was ten times better than any English persons attempt I’ve heard and their country borders ours
my grandma passed away last year, she was the last native Gaelic speaker in my family, she was from the isle of Skye. it sad that they didn't pass the language down to me.
@Slightly Burned Pancakes yeah I just can't believe my mum wouldn't speak Gaelic when her mum did. I consider it a great loss for me because I would love to speak it and I tried to get my grandma to teach me over the phone when I was younger and I could tell my grandma loved teaching me, she would always ask me about the weather etc in gaelic.. but it was almost impossible to learn just from a little phone call.. my mum doesn't seem to care either.. for thousands of years my ancestors probably spoke that language and it stopped with her 🤬
@@HaiLsKuNkY I completely understand! You should come and learn it in Scotland and with every Gaelic phrase you learn, you should stop saying to your mam/mom/mum in english.
Thats so sàd ,its à familar story, Gàidhlig should be seen às something to treasure not às à burden.
Glè Mhath! Tha mi à Baile Shidni ann an Alba Nuadh ach tha mi a’ fuireach ann am Melbourne ann an Astràlia a-nis agus tha Gàidhlig beag agam.
(Very good! I’m from Sydney, Nova Scotia but I live in Melbourne, Australia now and I’ve got a bit of Gaelic.)
Great to see the language getting some air time. Gaelic is alive and well in Cape Breton and amongst the Cape Bretoners, even if our numbers have declined. Interestingly, I spent my summers very near to where the Maxwell twins lived in Cape Breton.
It's mad, I'm am Irish speaker and I understood everything you siad🤣
@@deaganachomarunacathasaigh4344 Bro same! And most of my Irish is of the Munster dialect too!
@@internetual7350 Oh cool. Mine is Connacht Dialect. I always found Munster the hardest to understand. An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?
@@deaganachomarunacathasaigh4344 For me I definitely struggle with Ulster the most. Tá píosa beag Gaeilge agam agus is aobhinn liom an teanga. Is fearr liom caint as Gaeilge.
You missed something -- there were two Canadian Gaelics, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the Newfoundland variety was Irish Gaelic. Also its disappearance kind of spurred Francophone fears.
The Codroy Valley area was an exception because it had a large population who came from Cape Breton and both their language and culture thrived for a few generations.
there's also Argentinian Welsh :0
Oh
Student of Scottish Gaelic, it’s a beautiful language. Gaelic was the first spoken/written language for my Nova Scotian grandfathers.
My great-grandfather spoke Gaelic as a child in the 1920s. Apparently that's what everyone spoke on Cape Breton Island. I wish he had passed it down.
I'm Filipino-Canadian but I want to learn Canadian Gaelic!
Please do. People of other backgrounds learning our language is incredible! It really helps calm fears of a gaelic revival movement being drowned out by tagalog and mandarin and all the other languages spoken in canada now.
That’s so touching to hear! I’m a Gaelic Canadian and would love to learn Tagalog or another Filipino language
Taanshi and maarsii! Crawling out of the woodwork! I'm a Scotch-Metis who grew up in Manitoba and I agree, Scotch folk are greatly overlooked in Canadian history. Scotch-Metis get grouped in with French Metis and Euro-Scots will almost without fail get grouped in with English folk.
My Scots family left Orkney and the Aberdeen area during the highland clearances brought over by the Hudson's Bay Company to Rupert's Land via York Factory (modern day Manitoba) and eventually down to the Selkirk Settlement where they were given land after their HBC tenure. They intermarried with my Maškēkow (Cree) and Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) ancestors and were part of the Scotch Metis community. My family up to my great nan all spoke Bungee and my great nan apparently had a strong Scottish-sounding accent (likely a very decreolised Bungee remnant). Unfortunately the language was not passed on- my great nan likely stopped speaking it to hide from being taken away to residential schools to instead go to an English-speaking day school. To the best of my knowledge, Bungee doesn't have any remaining speakers alive, there were very few in the 1970s when it was recorded.
Also, modern Canadian Gaelic likely wouldn't have any Cree influence- the Red River / Manitoba community isn't very strong if it's around at all. The modern Canadian Gaelic community on Cape Breton Island and around Pictou would have Miꞌkmawiꞌsimk (Mi'kmaq) influence. It's also an Algonquian language like Cree, but it's from a different branch of the Algonquian family and mutual intelligibility would be limited if any.f
Great video. My grandmother was a native Gaelic speaker from Cape Breton. She would speak it with her grandmother who could only speak Gaelic. I will be sure to share this video with my family.
Your work on these topics is Amazing! Thank you sooooooo Much! (And you are Literally the only human I’ve ever encountered who can imitate the Scots accent! Congrats from a Canadian Gaelic learner in Calgaraidh!
A great video. I am a speaker of Irish and support all the Celtic languages (as well as 1st Nation languages). I look forward to seeing more videos from you.
Super cool video! I’m from Nova Scotia and I remember in grade 7 we got the choice to take either French or Gaelic classes in school. Most people chose French but I kind of wish they would make it mandatory. They also write Gaelic on a lot of the signs on the roads, in schools, etc. Also, my hometown of Antigonish has the largest annual Highland Games outside of Scotland 😄🇨🇦🏴
I had a French Canadian grandfather and a Welsh grandmother and neither of their ancestral languages were passed on to me. Actually, my great-grandparents cut off transmission of Welsh because they feared the stigma associated with the accent at the time. The end of the video hit real hard. 😢
Which is exactly why french speakers in Canada and everywhere in North america where a situation of minority is clear are afraid of losing their culture.
Super interesting video. I’d be interested to know more about the interaction between Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia.
Haha my dad is fluent in Scottish Gaelic and well it’s different from Scottish Gaelic he can still make out most of what they are saying in Irish Gaelic
@maryrankin indeed plausible, it’s akin to a Spanish and Portuguese speaker, as they were more or less the same language a few hundred years ago with a good ear you can make out the essentials
@@lewiitoons4227 Irish and Scottish Gaelic shared Classical Gaelic (the written medium) up until the 1600s, but the spoken languages had been diverging long before that. There is a dialect continuum from the south of Ireland to the north of Scotland, but the people from the extreme ends of that continuum cannot readily understand each other unless they have studied the other language. They are separated by 800 miles as the crow flies. Before the 20th century it could have easily taken you one to two weeks to travel that distance. Nevertheless, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx are still closely related. More so than Spanish and Portuguese.
Spanish and Portuguese were not really more or less the same language. Spanish is descended from Castilian, while Portuguese is descended from Galician. They were already separate languages more than 1000 years ago. However, both Castilian and Galician descended from different branches of Vulgar Latin (now usually called Colloquial Latin) from about 1500 years ago. The intelligibility between Spanish and Portuguese is a bit one-sided. Portuguese speakers understand Spanish speakers better than the other way round.
@@alicemilne1444 i was oversimplifying to keep it nice and short but like all language variation there is ofc a dialect continuum, even with the Spanish and Portuguese example you’ve still got a buffer zone, my point was more that as there’s a common root there’s going to be some degree of mutual intelligibility, but yeah someone speaking Ulster Irish gaelic and someone speaking southwestern Scot’s gaelic will have a much easier time than south Ireland and northern Scotland, much like a Portuguese a gallacian and aragonese and a castellano speaker will have a continuum as well the further you go the more divergent usually.
on the note of one sidedness, as well, as a Spanish speaker I have to say that is only noticeably true for European Portuguese I understand Brazilians very well and even at that I could understand my friend from Lisboa after a few hours of chatting but that’s a form of study.
@@lewiitoons4227 I grew up bilingual with English and French (trilingual if you include Scots - sister language to English) and studied Latin at school. I learnt Spanish directly in Spain, greatly helped by my background in French and Latin, spent time working there and got to understand Catalan, Aragonese, Galician, and some Andalusian. I was only ever in Portugal once many years ago. I managed to have conversations with Portuguese people in Lisboa and Sagres by talking to them in Spanish and asking them to speak very slowly in Portuguese. The thing with people in Portugal is that they swallow half the syllables. But Brazilian Portuguese has its own dialects too, as my translator colleagues kept telling me.
As for Gaelic. I have been listening to it since I was a child 60 years ago. Scottish Gaelic sounds quite different from Irish Gaelic. And if you listen to native Gaelic speakers from Scotland and Ireland speaking English, their accents in English are completely different. I only started actually learning Scottish Gaelic properly myself 18 months ago. I'm avoiding learning Irish for the moment because I know what a bummer it can be to learn related languages at the same time and never get proficient in either one. (I started learning Italian at the same time as Spanish and very, very quickly gave that up.)
I've lived in Pictou all my life, seen all the bilingual signs. Every event has kilts and bagpipes (Multiple family members own both) The replica of the ship Hector sits in the bay and everyone I know without exception has Scottish last names. The culture is alive and well except for Canadian Gaelic, In all my years I've never heard a word of Gaelic. Its a shame but if you don't live in Cape Breton it seems that very little is being done to prevent further extinction of the language.
Interesting that you mention that it called 'gay-lic' there and yet when listening to the speakers in your clip they clearly say 'gah-lic'. I wonder if it changed over time under English speaking influence. Really enjoyed this, thank you.
In Cape Breton most of the younger generations call the language "gay-lic" when speaking in English but pronounce it "gah-lic" when speaking in Gaelic. I hope that makes sense!
Gay-lic is Irish, Gah-lic is Scottish & its very common for people to mix up the names of these languages
I love this channel. You're so smart and funny.
Edit: OMG your Scottish accent is impressive.
Awesome presentation!! 🏴🇨🇦
Canadian Gaelic has also recently (well, the last thirty years anyway) had a presence in music, with recording artists Mary Jane Lamond and The Rankin Family.
Grew up near West Bay. Lot of Gaelic speakers there when I was a kid. At least among the older generations. There were unofficial Gaelic lesson taught in elementary school (in the 1970s). We would have preferred that to having to learn French. My background is neither, but I found the Gaelic cool sounding.
Very nice video. If you are wondering why Manitoba had such an isolated community of Gaelic speakers, it is because there were two completely different migration and settlement events.The Selkirk settlement in Manitoba consisted to a great extent of people from Orkney, who were brought in via Hudson's Bay and the Nelson River-terrible story, that. Also, there is a Metis language called Michif. As I understand it, it features a Cree structural base with a lot of French vocabulary. Very roughly.
Gaelic learning speaker from Nova Scotia here. Towards the end with the spellings, I noticed the differing accents. From what I've learned, Scottish Gaelic uses forward facing accents (àlainn, for example) whereas Irish Gaelic uses backwards facing accents (such as cailín).
@Jai - Scottish Gaelic used to use both grave and acute accents, but more recently, the GOC standardized spellings & accent usage, taking away the acute accent. BUT Canadian Gaelic still uses both the grave and acute accents because Canadian Gaelic is not bound by Scotland's GOC language reform rules.
My mind is blown. Why have I never heard about this?
9:54 I love how he managed to rhyme out of nowhere.
Haha yeah
The video at 9:50 has been deleted from UA-cam, or at least been hidden in my country. Could you please reupload the full version of it, if you have a copy? Or else give a reference to which documentary it appears in? I really liked the full interview and would like to share it with some people.
I found a reupload of it on the Internet Archive and this sketchy-seeming website called AltCensored. I'll try to link it in another reply but in case the link gets blocked, if you google "suppression of gaelic language in canada unlockthepower" then check the videos tab you should be able to find it, though you might have to go through a couple other videos to find it.
Canadian Gaelic is a dialect of Gàidhlig. It may have different pronunciations etc. but it is still easily understood. I really hope they can revive it.
I never met my grandfather who died before I was born, but he moved to Hamilton Ontario from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. His family were native Gaelic speakers.
Could you do a video on North American Irish (both Canada and the US)?
How totally fascinating, thank you for such thought-provoking linguistic details... ps: love your Scottish accent too. Such a pity that so much history was tossed aside as a joke or irrelevant when it all truly serves to enrich and cement our common human history. I am a british European amateur linguist- devastated by brexit... we should be coming together and respecting our common links, not hating and dismissing. Thank you again. Merci, grácias, danke schon, grazie, dziekuje, xie xie, obrigada, and and and... :)
Awesome video Shawn! 🇨🇦
Nathanael de Boer A Wild Nathanael appears ❤️
I checked my configurations to see if the speed was in normal
Really well done! Sin thu fhéin!
Highland Clearances... not so much to make way for industry, as to make way for large-scale sheep farming, and also for hunting estates for the wealthy
Don't forget that the Scottish people who were forced to the new world or Australia had more profitable sheep farms than the people who "cleared" them.
Many native speakers of Gaelic in Scotland say "gaylick" when speaking English. This insistence on "Gahlic" is quite recent. Both arre fine! Suas leis a' Ghaidhlig! I have been watching your videos for a while - but only recently discovered that you have some interest in Celtic languages. Mar Albainneach a fuireach 's na Staitean, tha mi toilichte . Beannachdan!
Glad I found your channel
Bungee is Ojibway for “a little bit”
Manitoba also has a huge Icelandic population, and in small mining towns Cornish people made their Mark.
And Manitoban French is moliere era French.
Senator Kaulback sounds a lot like many Irish politicians today talking about the Irish language.
the French Colonist who settled in Québec where in majority from Brittany and Normandy. The Norman settled in Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean. So the Majority of Québécois where Breton and spoke Gallo a langue d'Oïl with hight celtic influence and some of the Breton also probably spoke Breton. Its after the second wave of colonist who came principaly from Paris with the the Fille du Roi who settled in Québec who spoke Franciens. That result to Québécois langage ressembling more to French speaking in Paris but the way we speak, our accent and a lot of our expression came from Brittany. So We Québécois are in majority have a Celtic origins.
Great video, thanks for sharing
Mr. John, Dr. John and the Johns Three... Could make for a good movie title or something :P
Amazing video bro
Your Scottish accent is soo good actually haha
10:34 road signs are offering gaelic courses?
Handsome guy. 😍
A few facts -- it is a standing joke among Canadian historians that Canada was really a Scottish colony, not an English or British colony, because the large majority of the mid-level positions in almost all institutions and businesses were help by people of Scottish origin. In fact people of Scottish origin form the fourth largest element in the Canadian population, only very slightly behind those of Irish origin. As for Gaelic, it is commonly said that there was a period in 18th and 19th century Canadian history when there were more speakers of Gaelic in present-day Canada than in Scotland. Don't ask me for a source of this idea but it seems very likely. I am interested in family history and often ask people in Canada about their family origins. A very high proportion of them turn out to have Scottish highlander Gaelic speaking ancestors a couple of centuries back including several of my closest friends.
Dude, what an awesome video! Is toil leam imshawngetoffmylawn!
Very informative. Thank you.
10/10 english accent when readin Kipling, Hilarious! Also amazing video!
Bhideo math dha-rìribh. Tha an seanal agad a' còrdadh rium gu mòr. Dè a' chiad chànan a th' agad, ma dh'fhaodas mi faighneachd?
Great video.
In Scotland, in English, the language should also be called Gaelic, not Gaidhlig. It would be like saying, in English, that I speak Zhong Wen, rather than saying I speak Chinese. It doesn't make sense. We refer to every other language by how it is said in English, we don't switch over and pronounce the name of the language in the language. We say German, we say French, we say Spanish, etc. Gaelic is exactly the same, meaning the language of the Gaels. Calling it Gaidhlig in English is nonsensical.
Although I don't disagree that it's an odd practice, it is done to distinguish Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) from Irish (Gaeilge).
@@avrilbroekhuizen4758 quite right. This pronunciation is near-universal in the English spoken during The Scottish Parliament proceedings, and by Scottish broadcasters. More importantly, perhaps, most native Scots do likewise.
Canadian Gaelic is the St. Kilda dialect.
I’m cracking up at the fact that a Rudyard Kipling character explained that “Scotch” is not Gaelic way back in the 1800s, and, more than a century and a quarter later, I’m still having to explain to people that Scots and Scottish Gaelic are different languages, and still having to defend Scots being categorized as a language at all, even though it’s an official language of Scotland alongside Scottish Gaelic and English. It’s funny how people aren’t as skeptical of Luxembourgish being considered its own language rather than a dialect of German, or the Scandinavian dialect continuum not being considered one language, or countless Romance languages in the same position.
Yeah, lol. SCOTS IS A LANGUAGE! Have you SEEN Polish and Czech?
I don't think you can say the Scottish colonized anywhere in North America as they never had Imperial power but rather after they were cleared off their lands by the imperial British they were sent to north America.
Very sound how the Gaelic ethnicities were treated like such shit. But shur look, what can you do.
I'm Irish, speak Irish too. I have never studied Gàihilg, Gàihilg Cheanadach or Gaelg (Manx) but I can understand 70-90% of what they say. Manx is the most difficult to understand because it had alot of influences from Welsh. But if we all sat at a table, we could all communicate with relative ease
Tapadh leibh!
It's been a month
Tha Gaidhlig agam agus tha mi à Eilean Cheap Bhreatainn Alba Nuadh. Tha seo fìor. 😊
The word "schooner" is pronounced "skooner" not "shooner"
Erin go braugh. Alba gu brath.
Glè inntinneach 🇦🇺
Canadian here, the point made at 7:24 is actually very true. During Canadian history classes (even in Nova Scotia, where I live and have lived all my life), we never were really taught about the Gaels who lived here, opting more for focuses of the African Canadians, Indigenous groups, and the Acadians. Most of the education was not on the settling of the Brits and French either, a lot of it was on the Brits oppressing others and it included a very good amount of colonizer's guilt, we never even got a proper WWII education until 8th grade and it was only 2-3 months long. Anyways, good point and fantastic video.
Those free farms were stolen from the Acadians
love this, for obvious reasons haha
This would have been a very interesting video if the narrator had spoken a bit more slowly. The fast pace of his speech makes him impossible to follow.
You're making me feel dumb because I have to watch at 0.75 speed
😂
Dont call us British lol
Is this person's accent real? Or is he acting?
I am Scots, and while I appreciate the main intent of your video I'm sad to say that I found parts of it either historically inaccurate or culturally a mockery. I'm posting this in the hope that my comments will encourage you to be a lot more careful in your research and more respectful towards others.
The word "British" is much misunderstood. It has only imperial context, and before the 20th century was never used internally in Britain, only externally. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is made up of four nations: English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. These national identities have *never* been subsumed into "just British".
The Hudson Bay Company did not cause people to begin "moving to North America en masse". Migration was initially very slow. It was mainly the Scots and the French who moved to the interior, not the Irish. The Irish only began moving to Canada in any appreciable numbers in the 19th century.
The Highland Clearances were not to "make way for industry". They were to clear the land of people to make way for the more profitable sheep farming and grouse and deer hunting.
2:42 That "fake Scots" accent is both excruciatingly bad and historically anachronistic. The majority of people recruited to emigrate via the Hector came from the area of Loch Broom in Wester Ross. They were monoglot Gaelic speakers. Even if anyone had spoken anything other than Gaelic to the emigrants, it would have been either in real Scots (a sister language to English) or in English with a Highland accent, and not that fake modern would-be Glasgow accent that sounds like a really stupid five-year-old boy. Do NOT imitate accents unless you really know what you are doing! Otherwise it comes across as mockery, is insulting as hell, and when you get them wrong it makes you yourself look silly and ill-educated.
4:28 That accent is also really bad and totally inappropriate. Rudyard Kipling's book was written in the USA when he was living in Vermont. The accent there is supposed to be that of fishermen in Massachussetts, so the characters are all either American or Canadian, not some weird mish-mash of faux Cockney/faux Scots.
7:00 Scottish Gaelic may never have been an official language in the United Kingdom, but neither has English. English was "de facto" official, but never "de jure" (by law). The minority languages in the UK now have official protection under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. However, it is wrong to say that Gaelic only gained formal recognition in 2005. There has been officially recognised Gaelic-medium education (i.e. schooling through the medium of Gaelic only) since 1985. That followed more than a century of repression after the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 which made state primary education compulsory and through the medium of English only.
I think you miss the active, very aggressive and often violent suppression of languages by the English government. In the case of Scots and of Scottish Gaelic no doubt, children as young as 4 years were struck and whipped with belts and birch canes for speaking the languages. Screaming at and viciously humiliating children was more common.
During the 7 years I lived in Scotland I took time to study Scots and some Gaelic since it influenced Scots. I am not talented in languages but knowing and learning multiple languages is common in the Baltic countries. So I found it shocking at the crazed manner that the English controlled government in the islands of Ireland and great Britain sought to exterminate any non English language. But we all see now how xenophobic the English people are from the last few years.
It has always been my experience that any person can speak 2 languages like a native speaker. With a bit of education that number could be 3 or 4 languages. This all makes the attitude of English people where they hate other people speaking another language and refuse to learn even the basics of another, incomprehensible. I have heard to English people travelling on public transport in Wales and Scotland, screaming aggressively at people involved in private conversations in another language. At Welsh speakers in Wales, Gaelic and Scots speakers in Scotland, as well as tourists, foreign students and diplomatic staff.
Your sound is terrible … and you speak too fast
I agree, this is a video I really want to refilm in an improved quality.
don't get me wrong, I love the fact that people still speak gaelic, even youngsters. But giving that language a special status? Do that for Dutch in Canada... there's over 1 million people in Canada that came from the Dutch ;)
Between 13 and 25% of Canadians claim Scottish descent. At minimum that’s about 5 million people. And Dutch isn’t endangered in Holland like Scottish Gaelic is in Scotland. The more we can do to protect endangered languages the better, IMO, including giving Scottish Gaelic special status in Nova Scotia. I say this as someone with both Scottish and Dutch roots.
Gaelic and Dutch background here. Idk about making Gaelic an official language in all of Canada back then but I think an official language in Nova Scotia at that time would have been warranted. Nowadays I would say make it official in the northeast of the province along with the Indigenous Mi’kmaw language
Bidh iad a-nis a ’tilgeil air falbh ìomhaighean den luchd-cruthachaidh ann an Canada
Arrogant. It's a gallicist jok !!!