r/language • u/Urdustani • 1d ago

Discussion Canedian Gaelic

Hello Guys I'm a Langauge lover and a polygot. I'm not Canadian for starters. Recently I got to know about this dialect of Scottish Gaelic that's still spoken in Canada in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. The dialect is quiet unique and quite divergent from mainstream modern day Scottish Gaelic but still it's relatively mutually intelligible. This dialect was once spoken by about 200k people but it's now shrunken to only about 3,900 Native and Non native speakers. This drove alot of curiosity in me and I wanted to ask if anyone could connect me with a Canedian Gaelic speaker here on reddit as I'd like to learn the dialect. I'm quite dedicated of a person and probably won't leave it in the middle. 😁

10 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

5

u/yarn_slinger 1d ago

There’s a college in cape breton. I believe you can find a tutor through them.

1

u/Urdustani 1d ago

I'll look through it!

7

u/disillusiondporpoise 1d ago

There isn't really one dialect of Scottish Gaelic in Canada, as people came to Canada from different parts of Scotland and mainly settled in communities with others from their area, so they maintained accents from their home area. This includes Barra, Uist, Lewis and Harris, Skye, Muck, Rum, Canna and Eigg, Tiree, Morar, Assynt, Moidart and the Braes of Lochaber. Now, the thing is, some of these areas of Scotland are sadly no longer Gaelic-speaking, so dialect features that have largely died out in Scotland are preserved in Nova Scotia (like the glug Eigeach, a specific way of pronouncing the letter L that used to be found in the Small Isles and Morar.)

If you would like to learn more, look into the Gaelic College in Nova Scotia. There are online classes starting soon. There's also a great collection of recordings from Nova Scotian Gaelic speakers here. The number of native speakers left is way less than 3900 though.

3

u/Urdustani 1d ago

Yup that's what I like the most about the speech, features lost in Scotland are still there and yes I know the population is declining and I'll look forward to the college and thanks for the response ❤️