Clarification of Terms

Recently, a friend in the Scottish Society of Louisville (a local Scottish heritage organization that helped fund my doctoral studies, and which I recommend to any interested Louisvillians) requested that I clarify what I mean by the terms ‘anarchism’, ‘anti-racism’, and ‘anti-capitalism’; and that I explain how they were connected to the promotion of Scottish Gaelic in Kentucky. This blog post is an elaboration of the answers I gave that friend: I share it here in the hope that it might help other interested people with similar questions to understand more clearly some of my objectives in helping to initiate the Kentucky Gaelic revival. If, after reading this, my thoughts on the terms in question still seem unclear, I’m sure the fault is mine, and I would be happy to attempt to explain further: don’t hesitate to get in touch at kentuckygaelic.com. For now, I invite you to read the following:

Dùthchas is Anarcachas ann an Ceanndachaidh / Folk-culture and Anarchism in Kentucky

This is the name of a podcast and Facebook page that I created with the three aims of promoting traditional knowledge associated with Kentucky (folklore about Kentucky regions, arts-and-crafts activities like quilting, etc.); anarchism (the goal of promoting a state-less, non-hierarchical society, or of promoting stateless or non-hierarchical activities within existing society); and the Gaelic language.

Anarchism

Although they might seem incongruous, I see these three things as being closely connected: folk-culture (that is, cultural knowledge transmitted intergenerationally within families and communities through mentor-to-apprentice teaching in homes and neighborhoods), and minority languages (which are essentially a form of folk-culture) are both endangered by hegemonic forces that replace local family and community knowledge with knowledge propagated by mass media, usually with the help or in the interests of either state-affiliated or state-protected formal institutions like schools and corporations. Take the example of Scottish Gaelic: its slow diminution over the course of around 1000 years has mostly resulted from its persecution by the Scottish state, the British state, or corporations and landed business people working in cooperation with these entities. If there had been no government in Scotland or elsewhere in the United Kingdom, then it’s very likely that Gaelic would be stronger today, and, although I advocate for the payment of reparations by the UK and Scottish governments for their ill-treatment of Gaelic over the years, I think it would be far better for the language if these governments had simply never existed.

When I speak against government, some people assume that I’m against cooperation or collective action, or that I’m anti-social – that, essentially, I’m endorsing Ayn-Rand style US libertarianism, which couldn’t be further from the truth. While I am a libertarian in the classical sense, in that I think people should feel free to make for themselves the choices that determine the courses of their lives, I also believe that human beings are fundamentally social creatures – that we are far happier in groups than in isolation, and that we tend to achieve far more by working together than by working alone. I see socialism, in the most basic sense of the word (that is, a conception of society in which people look out for one another’s interests, rather than merely their own, and in which maintaining the welfare of society itself is considered a laudable aim) as the best form of human social organization. 

However, unlike many socialists and social democrats, I believe that hierarchical organizations that exercise undue power over the actions of other individuals and groups within society by hoarding resources and deciding independently how to distribute these resources to others – whether they be corporations, or the organs of government – do not promote the wellbeing of society, but instead hinder it. I have come to the conclusion that the best way – indeed, perhaps, the only way – of creating a society wherein people have the right to exercise individual agency while belonging to maximally supportive and emotionally fulfilling communities is for people to rely on one another rather than on formal institutions: living as equals, unoppressed by governments and corporations, and keeping the production of the physical and cultural commodities on which they rely (from food to philosophy) as local and community-centric as possible.

Now, I know that some people – up to and including both the current and outgoing presidents of the United States – get upset at the idea of anarchy: that, for them, it connotes lawlessness and terror; an endless battle of all against all in which no one triumphs, especially the weak. That is one definition of anarchy, but not at all the vision of the future for which I hope. For me, anarchy means a system of social organization in which all people are equal; in which all members of every community protect and nurture the wellbeing of their fellows out of self-respect and a sense of love and duty to their neighbors, rather than a slavish devotion to the law, or the fear of punishment for breaking it; and in which people are free to follow their passions, to the extent possible without treading on others’ rights, instead of toiling away their lives as pawns of the market or virtual slaves of the state.  

That condition of maximal freedom and equality is the kind of anarchy I hope to bring about, and anarchism is the process by which that condition of anarchy might be realized – not, or at least not yet, in the form of actual societal revolution, but through conducting revolutionary acts of community-building, and attempts to dismantle the unjust hierarchies that harm society and its members.

Anti-racism

One of the greatest unjust hierarchies at work in the US today is the racial caste system that dominates and divides our social life. White people have controlled a disproportionate amount of wealth and power in North America since the invention of the construct of whiteness in the 1600s, while non-white people – especially Black and indigenous people – have continually suffered simply for not having been born white. Whiteness itself was only invented by wealthy plantation owners to prevent worker solidarity among their servants and slaves; before the late 1600s, and in many cases far later, ‘race’ was synonymous not with the modern idea of genetic- or color-based race, but with the concept of cultural nationhood (that is, ‘tribe’). It was once possible, for instance, to speak of the Gaels as a race; and, at the outset of whiteness, the only people truly considered ‘white’ were the Anglo-Saxons – a term which meant not pale-skinned people in general, as it does today, but specifically the English. 

Over time, the franchise of whiteness has expanded to include most people who look phenotypically pale, just as the British Empire once expanded to include many lands outside of England. However – in both cases, whether whiteness or Britishness – Englishness was the dominant force in the construct. It is for this reason that all indigenous and immigrant languages in the United States, including those of non-English ‘white’ people, have eventually given way to English. The American Revolution, rather than deconstructing the British Imperial project, merely replaced England with the United States as the dominant power in the Anlgo-Saxonization of the Western Hemisphere: the American colonial elite – that is, wealthy, land-owning English people in America – did not lose power during the Revolution, and those non-English European immigrants who ultimately became white were expected to adopt English language and manners in order to don the protective mantle of whiteness, thereby ceasing to belong to the cultural nations of their ancestors. 

Part of my mission in restoring Gaelic in Kentucky is to help challenge the false consciousness of whiteness: I want white people in Kentucky to reflect on the cultural heritage(s) that their immigrant ancestors had to give up in order to become white, and to consider how poorly those sacrifices have actually served them. Not all whiteness is created equal: the white people who descend from the English upper-classes have always had an economic and cultural advantage over late converts to whiteness from other European immigrant groups. Kentucky – mostly colonized by European immigrants from the lower classes of non-English speaking areas of the British Isles, and long bedeviled by economic inequality – has seldom if ever been looked on as hosting the most prestigious sort of white people. In light of this reputation, Kentuckians of all ‘races’ have often been disparaged by people from other regions in a similar (albeit markedly less severe) way to that in which people of color have been disparaged by whites. In order to combat this regionalism, and the racism with which it is bound up, I would like all Kentuckians, including white Kentuckians, to reflect on the fact of their marginalization as Kentuckians; and for white Kentuckians to begin to feel more solidarity with other Kentuckians (including and perhaps especially Kentuckians of color) than with white people from elsewhere in the US and Europe.  Only by liberating ourselves from the false-consciousness of whiteness can white people in Kentucky, or anywhere else, cease to be dangerous to people of color, and, indeed, to ourselves. As such, my efforts to promote Gaelic and the Gaelic identity – thereby hopefully helping to undermining the hegemony of whiteness – are calculated to be anti-racist.

Anti-Capitalism

Just as statism and racism have often endangered the future of Gaelic – the first, by driving Gaels from their lands, or by coercing them into speaking English; and, the second, by replacing their Gaelic-language-centered identity as Gaels with an English-language-centered identity as whites, whether in Britain or North America – capitalism, too, has proved itself an enemy of the Gaelic language. Over the course of the last three hundred years, Gaelic has been constantly derided as unprofitable. For the most part, this assertion has been true – Gaelic is not, in general, a language of economic advancement – but this alone would not make it seem worthless if not for the capitalist belief that the essential worth of any given thing stems exclusively from its economic value. In contrast to this capitalist outlook, I believe that the fundamental worth of a thing rests in its ability to contribute to human wellbeing and happiness, and that people themselves are intrinsically valuable. Whereas many a capitalist has looked at Gaelic’s historically limited earning power, and concluded that the language should be either allowed to die or even hastened to its proverbial grave; I see the joy it brings its learners, and the sense of pride and cultural continuity it affords the Scottish Gaels, and have come to feel that Gaelic’s survival as a living language is a moral imperative. These two conceptions of value – one capitalist, and one humanist – are fundamentally at odds: they cannot coexist in the same mind without a high degree of cognitive dissonance, and they cannot be implemented in the same social system as a means of assessing the value of things without coming into direct conflict with one another. Therefore, declaring that Gaelic has worth despite its low profit potential – which I do, often and loudly – is fundamentally at odds with capitalism, and is, as such, an anti-capitalist act.

Above and beyond that theoretical argument for the incompatibility of Gaelic and capitalism is the concrete fact that the Highland Clearances – the forced mass-exodus of the Gaels from their traditional homelands in the Scottish Highlands – was conducted in the name of capitalist economic progress. After the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden Moor in 1746, the Highland aristocrats ceased being clan chiefs in all but name, and began to effectively function as landlords. Their people, who had traditionally paid rent in kind, or in military service, had little recourse to the money economy of the Lowlands, and so were unable to pay the rent when it was requested in cash. When it became clear that the traditional Gaelic way of life – that of communally organized subsistence agriculture – could not be profitable in monetary terms, and that more money could be had by replacing the Highland tenants with red deer and cheviot sheep, the landlords did exactly that: they drove away the tenants by fire and sword (often wielded by hired mercenaries and complicit police), destroyed Gaelic farmsteads, and converted the then-emptied land into sprawling deer parks, grouse moors, and sheep pastures.

The Highland Clearances were not inevitable or necessary – no more than the expulsion of Native Americans from their former lands East of the Mississippi River, or the use of African slaves in the plantation economy of the Southern US and the Caribbean. People who had bought into notions of progress built on white- and English-language hegemony treated the Gaels, the American Indians, and the enslaved West Africans as callously as they did because they believed that people’s worth was based solely on their productivity, and that some people were either fundamentally unproductive, or truly productive only when used by others as tools. Treating people as objects instead of as people, and judging their worth solely according to their productivity, is the fundamental moral failing of capitalism; in order to unironically promote Gaelic, one must instead believe that people – and by extension their cultures – have an inherent worth beyond their ability to generate wealth. In that sense, all minority language promotion – including Gaelic promotion – is fundamentally anti-capitalist. 

(An explanation of the purposes and goals of the Kentucky Gaelic Revival)

A case for Gaelic in Kentucky

Sin sibh, a chàirdean! (Greetings, friends!) After the better part of a decade abroad, I’m coming home to Kentucky. As is true of most people who undertake journeys of comparable length, my travels have changed me quite markedly in some respects, and left me unaltered in others: where I was a Centrist Liberal, I’m now a Leftist; where I was single, I’m now married; and where before I spoke only English and Spanish, I am now also a speaker of Scottish Gaelic. Unchanged is my admiration for Kentucky, and the people, places, and cultural traditions that make the Commonwealth beautiful and distinctive. It is for the sake of that admiration, and in hopes of furthering that beauty and distinctiveness, that I hope to help revive Scottish Gaelic as a living language in the Commonwealth. The people of Kentucky stand to benefit from the local revival of Scottish Gaelic in several ways, and –  by enumerating some of these potential benefits in the passages to follow, and by explaining at least in part my plan for undertaking that revival – I hope to generate interest in the project of Gaelic’s reintroduction, and to inspire readers to work with me toward the accomplishment of that goal.

What is Scottish Gaelic?

It might be helpful, before explaining my reasons for proposing a Kentucky Gaelic revival, to give a description of the language involved. Scottish Gaelic belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European languages, making it a distant cousin of the Romance languages (such as French and Spanish), the Slavic languages (such as Russian and Czech), the Baltic Languages (such as Lithuanian and Latvian) and the Germanic languages (such as English and German), among others. Its fellow Celtic languages are further divided into the Brythonic or Brittonic languages (Breton, Cornish, and Welsh), and the Goidelic or Gaelic languages (Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic itself). Although, in colloquial English, the word ‘Gaelic’ is often used indiscriminately to refer to any of the three Goidelic languages, and some speakers of each of the three languages find them all to be at least somewhat mutually intelligible with one another, it is important to note that each does constitute a distinct form of speech, and that, outwith the context of pan-Gaelicism – that is, the movement to politically or culturally unite the speakers of the three Goidelic languages under the banner of one pan-Gaelic nation or state – it is considered both technically and politically incorrect to treat them as through they were merely dialects of the same language. In this piece, from here on out, I will use the term ‘Goidelic languages’ to refer to Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic collectively; and both ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Scottish Gaelic’ to refer to the Scottish Gaelic language specifically.

How should Gaelic be pronounced?

In using the word ‘Gaelic’ to refer to the Scottish Gaelic language, it should be noted that Scottish Gaels from Scotland tend to pronounce the name of the language in such a way that its first syllable rhymes with the English word ‘gal’, even when speaking English; whereas Scottish Gaels from Nova Scotia tend to pronounce it in such a way – at least when speaking English – that the same syllable rhymes with the English word ‘whale’. This has to do mostly with ideological differences concerning the conception of Gaelic identity and the different priorities of the two speech communities. In Scotland, the Scottish Gaels have been eager to assert their identity as Scottish, in opposition to the view among some people from outwith the Gaelic community that Scottish Gaelic is merely a highly divergent form of Irish. This outsider perspective implies that the Scottish Gaels and their language are not as Scottish as the other surviving local Scottish ethnic group, the Scots – who, since around the year 1400, have traditionally called Gaelic ‘Erse’ (Irish) in their own language, which they call ‘Scots’ (Scottish). By insisting that Gaelic be pronounced in English the same way it is in the Scottish Gaelic language itself (Gàidhlig), the Scottish Gaels in Scotland can more easily assert their Scottishness by avoiding confusion between their language and Irish, which – at least historically – was also identified in English by use of the word ‘Gaelic’. Confusingly for learners, Scottish Gaels in Scotland still do occasionally use the English-language pronunciation of Gaelic (that is, ‘Gael-ik’) when translating the Gaelic word Gàidhealach, an adjective used to describe things that are culturally – rather than linguistically – Gaelic; and there are some dialects of Scottish Gaelic in the southern Inner Hebrides that pronounce Gaelic as ‘Gael-ik’ even in Gaelic! Even so, it’s generally safer and more respectful to pronounce Gaelic as ‘Gal-ik’ in Scotland even when speaking English.

By contrast, the Scottish Gaels of Nova Scotia have had no local challenges to their ancestral Scottishness, and, in any case, are not citizens of Scotland, but of Canada. Consequently, they can assert the general Gaelicness of their cultural and linguistic identity without running the risk of being misidentified as Irish or Manx, and have chosen to pronounce the name of their language accordingly: Gàidhlig (Gal-ik) in Gaelic, and Gaelic (Gael-ik) in English.  Because I learned Gaelic in Scotland, I tend to pronounce it the Scottish way, although – since I now live in North America – I will not attempt to impose that pronunciation on others, especially on Scottish Gaelic speakers from Nova Scotia.

Indigeneity versus autochthony, and revival versus revitalization

Scottish Gaelic is considered indigenous (that is, ‘native’) to Scotland, where it is the country’s oldest living language, and where it has enjoyed official recognition as a national language since the passage by the Scottish Parliament of the 2005 Gaelic Act. It was once believed that Gaelic had come to Scotland with Irish migrants sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, but the preponderance of evidence now suggests that –  rather than the Irish Sea serving as the evolutionary barrier between the Goidelic and Brythonic languages, as was once thought – the dividing line in the evolution of the two branches of the Celtic languages was actually the Druim Albann (or, in a more modern Scottish Gaelic turn-of-phrase, Druim na h-Alba – that is, ‘the Spine of Scotland’), the mountain range dividing the West Coast of Scotland from the Scottish Interior. According to this theory, proto-Goidelic had begun to evolve in Western Scotland as early as it had in Ireland, centuries earlier than had previously been supposed.  In any case, Scottish Gaelic was the founding language of the Scottish state, as is attested by the country’s Latin name, Scotia: the Latin word for Gaels – the ethnic group that has historically spoken the Goidelic languages – was Scoti, meaning that both Scotia and its English-language equivalent, Scotland, translate to ‘Land of the Gaels’, and, therefore, ‘Land of the Gaelic Speakers’.

By the eleventh century AD, Gaelic had replaced the Brythonic-Celtic Pictish language and out-competed the Old English language to become the most widely spoken language in Scotland. However – because of centuries of state persecution beginning with its rejection by the Scottish monarchy during the eleventh-century reign of Malcolm III,  and escalating to outright cultural genocide against Gaelic speakers during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Jacobite Risings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – it has declined so dramatically over the course of the last millennium that it is spoken by only around one percent of the Scottish population today. At present, census data and expert consensus indicate that there are likely fewer than 60,000 fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic world-wide. Most of them (around 57,000) live in Scotland, but many dozens are scattered throughout non-Gaelic speaking communities in the global Scottish diaspora (including right here in Kentucky); and a few hundred native speakers reside in Nova Scotia, Canada.

In Nova Scotia, especially in the area known as Cape Breton, Gaelic is considered not indigenous, like the local Mi’kmaq language, but ‘autochthonous’ – a word assembled from ancient Greek roots that means literally ‘self-earthed’ or ‘self-rooted’. Designating a language autochthonous means that, although the language in question is not native to a particular area, it nonetheless has a community of native speakers who are local to that area.  It should be noted that some academics make a slightly different contrast between ‘indigenous’ and ‘autochthonous’ than the one I have just outlined, using the former term to describe languages or cultures that are not only native to the areas in which they now reside, but which have been victims of colonial processes; and the latter term to describe languages or cultures which have been both the victims and the beneficiaries of such processes; for now, however, we will use the simpler definition of the term as introduced at the start of this passage, whereby, when a language has native speakers born in, raised in, and local to to its place of origin, it is indigenous to that area; and, when a language has native speakers born in, raised in, and local to an area from which it did not originate, it is autochthonous to that area.

In the case of Gaelic in Nova Scotia, the ‘autochthony’ of the language means that some Nova Scotians speak it as their first language, even though they were born and raised in Nova Scotia and the language itself originated in Scotland. Scottish Gaelic took root in Nova Scotia as the result of large-scale emigration to the area by Gaelic-speaking refugees expelled from Scotland during the Highland Clearances. Because of similar migration, Scottish Gaelic used to be autochthonous in some parts of the United States: anyone in the US who has any Scottish heritage likely has ancestors who spoke Gaelic, and some of these ancestors might have passed down knowledge of the language for a few generations even after settling in the New World. Many Kentuckians can trace their ancestry back to Scotland, but, sadly – unlike in Nova Scotia – the Gaelic-language heritage of Kentuckians has been largely lost to cultural assimilation, and there are currently no communities in Kentucky where Scottish Gaelic is spoken as a living language. It is our goal, however, to change that situation, by reviving Gaelic in Kentucky.

In Scotland and Nova Scotia, Gaelic is being revitalized – that is, restored to health – since it has never ceased to be spoken in those areas. In Kentucky, where no locally-born native speakers of Gaelic remain alive today, Gaelic will have to undergo not revitalization, but revival – that is, a figurative resurrection. Although this may seem like a lofty aim, it is entirely achievable. Two of the six Celtic languages – Manx and Cornish – have already been successfully revived after dying out completely even in their countries of origin. It is our belief that, by learning from their examples and applying those lessons to the Kentuckian context, we can have similar success with Gaelic in the Commonwealth. If anything, it should be easier for us than for the Manx and the Cornish revivalists, since there are two regions – Scotland and Nova Scotia – in which Gaelic still survives. By enlisting the help of native speakers from these areas, and using the two regions’ Gaelic communities to provide language immersion opportunities for would-be Kentucky Gaelic speakers, we can restore Gaelic to life with relative ease by comparison to those revivalists who had no living native speakers to assist them in their efforts, but who nonetheless succeeded.

Living languages versus dead languages

Throughout this blog post – for example, in the preceding sentence – I have been using the metaphor of life and death to describe the status of spoken languages. Many linguists dislike comparisons drawn between languages and living things, because they are necessarily inaccurate: languages, of course, are not actually alive. When people refer to a language as ‘living’, they generally mean that it is known and used on a regular basis by people who learned it in early childhood, ideally as a first language. In Kentucky, English is a living language with some autochthonous dialects. English has been transmitted from generation to generation as a first language in Kentucky for around twenty-five decades, and speakers of English have developed regional dialects of English distinctive to different parts of the Commonwealth. Spanish is another living language of Kentucky, and is in the early stages of its autochthonization, although it might not fully autochthonize: many Kentuckians have been raised in Spanish-speaking households by fluently Spanish-speaking parents; however, because of the process of cultural and linguistic assimilation, most of these Spanish-speaking Kentuckians will not transmit fluent Spanish to their own children, who will instead grow up speaking English, be it an autochthonous Kentuckian dialect or a form more closely approximating American Standard English – which has become increasingly hegemonic in Kentucky owing to its higher prestige and greater media presence than the local dialects.

We cannot, at present, know with certainty whether Gaelic fully autochthonized in Kentucky the way it has in Nova Scotia; or the way that Spanish may yet do throughout the Southern United States. Kentucky Gaelic speakers are not known to have produced any Gaelic-language print media, and so what little evidence we have of the presence of historical Gaelic-speakers in what is now the Commonwealth comes from English-language anecdotal accounts – whether written contemporaneously, or, much more frequently, passed down orally to the present – that note or imply the presence of Gaelic speakers in Kentucky in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the absence of native Gaelic speakers in Kentucky today demonstrates that, sadly, the process of autochthonization, however advanced it may or may not have been, eventually succumbed to the more pervasive process of linguistic and cultural Anglophone assimilation. This means that Gaelic in Kentucky is today a ‘dead’ language – that is, a language which is either wholly unknown and unused, or learned by specialists exclusively for institutional or ceremonial purposes.

The loss of Gaelic in Kentucky and elsewhere in North America represents a diminution in linguistic and cultural diversity, and – in some ways – a victory for racism, since many Gaelic speakers abandoned their language as part of the process of ceasing to belong to minoritized European immigrant communities and instead becoming ‘white’ Americans. It is my hope that by reviving Gaelic, those Kentuckians of all races who participate in the revival can help undo some of the damage done by the construct of whiteness, which has so negatively impacted the Commonwealth by endangering the wellbeing and social solidarity of its citizens.

The Kentucky Gaelic revival as anti-racist action

Among the foremost reasons for reviving Gaelic in Kentucky is its potential to further the cause of anti-racism. As many of you may already know, the construct of race in America is not organic, timeless and immutable; but artificial, relatively recently created, and constantly changing. The concepts of whiteness and Blackness were invented by British North American plantation owners in the late seventeenth century to keep their servants and slaves from uniting to overthrow the plantation system. Previously, the masters had divided the population according to the religious categories of Protestant, Catholic, and non-Christian – with the Protestants at the top of the hierarchy, the non-Christians on the bottom, and the Catholics in an uncomfortable liminal space in between. However – with more and more non-Christians and Catholics converting to Protestant Christianity – the possibility that worker solidarity might lead to revolution against the colonial elite seemed ever more likely. By dividing the colonial underclasses according to skin color, in addition to religion – according white workers better treatment and more rights than Black slaves, and thereby creating a sense of false solidarity between working-class whites and the wealthy plantation owners – the colonial land barons were able to destroy the solidarity that had begun to exist between white and Black victims of exploitation, and thus protect themselves and their wealth from the threats of both systemic reform and armed revolution.

At first, whiteness was the exclusive right of ‘Anglo-Saxons’, a term which today is synonymous with all white people, but which during the colonial-era referred only to the ethnic group historically associated with the English language – whether the English-descended landowners in the American colonies, the English-descended servants whom they were trying to coax into class betrayal, or their relatives back in England. Other kinds of people who are today considered white – such as people of German, Mediterranean, and Slavic descent – were only gradually granted access to white identity over the course of the ensuing decades. Among the last ethnic groups to be fully admitted into the club of whiteness were the Celtic peoples – that is, the non-Anglo-Saxon Britons (the historical speakers of the Welsh, Cornish and Breton languages) and the Gaels (the historical speakers of the Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic languages). It is to one branch of these peoples – the aforementioned Scottish Gaels – that the Scottish Gaelic language belongs, and that their conversion to whiteness furthered their disuse of that language is significant. Indeed, the surrender of the Gaels’ indigeneity in exchange for whiteness, as exemplified by their rejection of the Gaelic language in favor of English, provides a model for the group self-investiture of ethnic identity which I would like to emulate in reverse – using Gaelic to dismantle white identity among avowed descendants of the Gaels (at however great a remove) just as English was used to dismantle their purported ancestors’ indigeneity. Put simply, whereas the Gaels and more distantly Gaelic-connected ethnocultural groups in North America gave up Gaelic to become white, thereby increasing the power of whiteness and Anglo-Saxon cultural assimilationism on the national stage, I would like their awoved descendants in Kentucky – and anyone of any other heritage interested in helping those descendants in their mission – to relearn Gaelic as a way to reject white identity and its privileges, and help make space for greater cultural and ethnic diversity in Kentucky.

The Gaels, the Ulster Scots, the Scots-Irish, and their transformation into white Americans

Most of the of the people in Kentucky who today predominantly call themselves ‘white Americans’ are descended from various cultural groups whose languages and cultures were slowly erased over the course of centuries so that they could be replaced by the white American identity. Two of the largest of these groups, in Kentucky at least (or, to qualify further still, in the oral histories and identitarian self-conceptions of modern-day Kentuckians) were the Scottish Gaels and the Scots Irish (also known as the Scotch Irish) – both of whom would have been historically connected to the Scottish Gaelic language at the time of their immigration to Kentucky (albeit in different degrees), and whose Kentuckian descendants would stand to benefit from a reconnection to that language and its cultural traditions.

The Scottish Gaels are one of three branches of Gaeldom who, along with the Irish Gaels and the Manx Gaels, make up the Gaelic ethnic group, the languages of which form the the Goidelic or Gaelic language family (which is, in turn, a sub-division of the larger Celtic and still larger Indo-European language families). The Scottish Gaels – so called because their branch of the Gaelic ethnic group historically resided in Scotland – founded the Scottish nation through a cultural and political merger with the Brythonic-language-speaking Picts in around 900 AD. In the eleventh century, Malcolm III of Scotland (a Scottish Gael) married Margaret of Wessex (an Anglo Saxon). Under her influence, the Scottish royal court and the Scottish clergy began to abandon the Gaelic language; an influx of Anglo-Saxon nobility fleeing the Norman conquest of England were invited to settle in Scotland; and trade with England and the Germanic-language-speaking Low Countries dramatically increased. As a result of these changes, Gaelic eventually ceased to be the official language of Scotland, and the Scottish Lowlands transitioned, by around the year 1350 AD, from speaking Gaelic to speaking Middle English – the language that would eventually become Scots. By the mid-1500s or so (and far earlier in some parts of Scotland), the Scots-speaking Lowlanders had come to think of themselves as belonging to a different ethnic group than the Gaels, and believed that their language and culture were more ‘Scottish’ than those of the Gaels. It was at this stage that they stopped calling Gaelic ‘Scots’ (Scottish) and began using that term for their own language, which they had previously called ‘Inglis’ (English).

By that time, there was real animosity between the Lowland Scots and the Scottish Gaels, with the former group thinking of the latter as barbarians, and the latter regarding the former as foreign usurpers of the Scottish Lowlands, despite the ongoing self-identification of both parties as Scots, and their fealty to the same monarch. To this day, the Scottish Gaelic word Gall can refer to either a foreigner or a Lowlander, and the phrase Beurla Gallda (foreigner’s English/ Lowlander’s English) can be used to refer to the Scots language. The persecution of Gaels by Lowland Scots increased dramatically after the Protestant Reformation of 1560, since the Gaels were slower than the Lowland Scots to adopt the new religion. From that time on, attacks on the Gaels and their culture could be disguised as evangelism, and the Scottish parliament passed various laws in the 1600s attempting to force the Gaels to abandon the institutions – such as support of Gaelic poets by the nobility, and education of the ruling classes in Gaelic – that made them culturally unique. When, in the 1680s, the Protestant King William of Orange became the ruler of Scotland and England, most of the Scottish Gaels sided with his rival, the exiled King James VII, hoping that they would be well-treated by the old monarch if they helped restore him to the throne. Ultimately, that struggle – called the Jacobite risings after Jacobus, the Latin name for James – would rage off and on for decades, outliving both King William and his successor Queen Anne.  However, despite great tactical skill and martial valor on the part of the Gaels, the final Jacobite rising of 1745 ended in Jacobite defeat at the 1746 battle of Culloden, after which the Scottish Highlands were invaded and occupied by the British Army, the Scottish Gaels were forcibly disarmed, and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge introduced, with government support, a school system designed to turn the Gaelic children into Protestant English-speakers. Meanwhile, the heirs to the Scottish Gaelic aristocrats, having been forced to conform to the customs of the English-speaking nobility and no longer able to act as the war-leaders of their people, began to think of themselves simply as landlords. As such, they became increasingly frustrated with the poverty of their Gaelic-speaking tenants, who – conquered and disarmed – were no longer able to provide military service in lieu of the rents they could not afford to pay. So, beginning in the 1750s, the Highland landlords began to evict their tenantry by the thousands, driving them off the land with hired mercenaries often authorized to use deadly force, and replacing them with the sheep and red deer whose over-grazing has reduced the Scottish Highlands to the treeless condition in which one finds them today.

It was only at this stage, in the 1750s and later – when they had been forcibly disarmed, forbidden from wearing their traditional clothing, made to send their children to English-language-only schools, forced to give up their ancestral methods of social and political organization, and in many cases driven violently from their lands in the aforementioned mass-evictions (known today as the Highland Clearances) – that it became the norm for people in the English-speaking cultural mainstream to accept the Scottish Gaels as ‘white’ on an equivalent basis with the English. Even then, the moniker only fully extended as far as those Gaels who had ceased to speak Gaelic; even today, Gaelic language use in Scotland is looked on in some quarters as a marker of subaltern status within whiteness, and a threat to the cultural and political unity of the United Kingdom.

Most of the Scottish Gaels who emigrated to North America during the time of the Highland Clearances (roughly 1760 to 1860, but somewhat earlier or much later in some cases) encountered the same forces of Anglo-Saxon assimilationism that they had hoped to leave behind them in Scotland. The choice before them in the New World was simple, but stark: they could remain as Gaels, speaking Gaelic and honoring the traditions of their ancestors, but living as social outcasts in North American society; or they could assimilate to the Anglophone mainstream, be recognized as ‘white’, and have the possibility of accessing economic stability and political power in their new countries. Not surprisingly, most chose the second option – and that’s why no Goidelic languages are natively spoken in Kentucky today.

Interestingly, one group of people who were granted whiteness far earlier than the Scottish Gaels were in some ways their cultural descendants. The Scots Irish (or Scotch Irish) are so called because (at least in their own oral histories and self-conception as a people) their ancestors came from Scotland to invade and colonize Ulster (the northernmost of the traditional five provinces of Ireland) at the behest of King James VI of Scotland in the early 1600s, so that they could militarily conquer the local Irish Catholics. These colonists consisted of Lowland Scots (the aforesaid historical speakers of the Scots language, whose ancestors would, some 300 years before, have been mostly Gaelic-speaking) and, to a lesser extent, Scottish Highlanders (at that time, essentially another term for Scottish Gaels) who had converted early to Protestantism, as well as members of various other ethnic groups, including English people (especially from northern England), Manx people, and various groups of Travelling People (such as Highland Travellers, Lowland Travellers, Roma, and Sinti). By the late 1600s, as the construct of whiteness was developing on the North American frontiers of the British Empire, these disparate groups had coalesced, through their shared involvement in the Ultonian settler-colonial process, into a more-or-less culturally unified people now called the Ulster Scots – a group which, by the 1700s, would generally be considered Protestant and white in contrast to the Catholic and, initially, non-white (socially, if not phenotypically) native Irish.

For many of those of Highland descent among the Ulster Scots, the motivations underlying their ancestors’ initial Protestant conversion would have doubtless resembled those undergirding the North American Gaelic-speakers’ later conversion to whiteness, and the adoption of white identity by the Ulster Scots themselves – although, for some, it might also have been a question of sincere religious conviction.

It must be said that ultimately, despite the initial danger it posed to Gaelic culture when wielded by the Lowlanders as a justification for anti-Gaelic bigotry, Protestantism took on a wholly different character in the hands of the Gaels themselves, on both sides of the Irish Sea: Protestant Goidelic-language-speakers would rank among the leaders of both the unsuccessful but inspiring 1798 attempt to liberate Ireland from the British Crown, and in various movements in Scotland throughout the 1800s to resist the Highland Clearances, including the activities of the formidable Highland Land League in the 1870s and 1880s; and Presbyterian denominations such as the Free Presbyterian Church served as institutional bastions of Scottish Gaelic during the twentieth century.

In the 1600s, however, the relationship between Protestantism and Scottish Gaelic – and, indeed, between Protestantism and any Goidelic language – was still a largely antagonistic one. Although most of the Lowland Scots in Ulster had at least some Scottish Gaelic ancestors, and the Highlanders among them were Gaels themselves, all of the Ulster Scots ultimately gave up the use of the Scottish Gaelic language – probably because it was closely related to Irish, the language of the Catholics they had been sent to Ireland to oppress. It remains unclear, however, how long it took this process of linguistic abandonment to unfold; I hold out hope that, among the Ulster Scots settlers in eighteenth-century Kentucky, some Gaelic speakers still remained – although, in the absence of compelling evidence, that cannot be asserted as fact.

Eventually, the Ulster Scots settler-colonists of what became the Upland South had contributed considerably to the area’s distinct regional culture, and, through immersion in that culture, had ceased to be Ulster Scots. Those Upland Southerners who continue to claim Ulster Scots ancestry (whether genealogically; through a personal, familial, or communal affinity to Ulster Scots culture; or simply because they adopted the usage from their elders) nowadays tend to call themselves Scotch Irish – a term which many people, myself included, use to describe Upland Southern culture at large, even while acknowledging the tremendous diversity of its cultural antecedents.

Scotch Irish identity arose in the Upland South in the mid-nineteenth-century, in the decades before the US Civil War. By this time, Upland Southern culture had coalesced from various immigrant and, to a lesser extent, local indigenous cultures into a distinct ethnocultural entity. Since many or even most Upland Southerners lived in small rural communities that existed in relative isolation from members of other cultures, most had no need of an ethnonym by which to differentiate themselves from members of other ethnocultural groups.

When, during the early 1800s, new waves of immigrants – many of them from Scotland and Ireland (especially, from the later area, during and in the years immediately preceding the Great Hunger of the 1840s and 50s) – began to settle in the Upland South, some Upland Southerners felt the need for a term that would distinguish their shared cultural identity from those of the newcomers.

Previously, many Upland Southerners, especially those of Ulster Scots descent, had called themselves simply ‘Scotch’ (a historical variant of ‘Scots’ or ‘Scottish’ nowadays reserved – at least in Scotland itself – mostly for foodstuffs, such as ‘Scotch whisky’ or ‘butterscotch’), or ‘Irish’. Others called themselves simply ‘American’ – a practice which in some quarters persists today. However, increasingly confronted with the presence of self-identifying Scottish and Irish people who clearly did not belong to the Upland Southern ethnocultural group, as well as that of Americans from elsewhere in the ‘American’ nation (that is, in the opinion of many residents of the United States, the US) and the American Continent at large who also had non-Upland-Southern ethnocultural identities, many Upland Southerners intuited that terms like Scotch, Irish or American no longer aptly described, with sufficient specificity, the culture to which they belonged. That consideration was, in some respects, long overdue, as not all Upland Southerners claimed descent from either Irish or Scottish people, and, although Upland Southerners themselves might well have thought of themselves as the archetypal American ethnocultural group, numerous other such groups had at least equal claim to the title (not least of all those of indigenous North Americans).

Some have interpreted the process of Scotch Irish identity formation as inherently antagonistic to the newcomers in response to whose presence it occurred – and perhaps especially as a reaction against the Catholicism of many of the incoming Irish – but this need not have been the case. The recognition of cultural distinctness can imply contempt for the values or practices of other cultural groups, but can as easily be value neutral.

In any case, it was in this context that the term Scotch Irish (or, in keeping with the Scottish reservation of ‘scotch’ to denote foodstuffs as opposed to people, ‘Scots Irish’) was first deployed. For many who claim that identity – myself included – it is synonymous with Upland Southern identity more generally, and, given the paucity of other terms available at the time of its coinage in the early-to-mid 1800s, its use in this capacity at least initially made good sense. The term ‘Upland Southerner’ was unavailable, since, at that time, everything west of the Appalachian mountains was considered the West rather than the South of the United States, whether it lay north or south of the Ohio river valley. The term Appalachian (increasingly preferred by modern Upland Southerners, or at least those geographically in or near the Appalachian Mountains) was similarly unavailable, since that mountain range was at that time called the Alleghenies. Conceivably, the Upland Southerners of the time might have called themselves Alleghenians, but, if anyone ever proposed that term as an ethnocultural identifier, it seems never to have been widely accepted as such. Thus, it appears to me that the use of Scotch Irish as an Upland Southern ethnonym was an understandable and relatively unproblematic choice – although not all commentators agree.

One issue cited by critics is that, from its inception, Scotch Irishness was often seen not only as synonymous with Upland Southernness, but with Ulster Scottishness, as earlier mentioned – with many who claimed the identity seeing it as marking them as either genealogical or cultural descendants of the Lowland Scottish settler-colonists of seventeenth-century Ulster. This is reflected in the term’s etymology, with the ‘Scotch’ in Scotch Irish locating the ultimate ancestral origin of those who bear the moniker in Scotland, and the ‘Irish’ alluding those ancestors’ colonization of the north of Ireland during the Ulster Plantation. This problem is exacerbated by the tendency among some self-identifying Scotch Irish people to equate Scotch Irishness not only with Upland Southernness, but with Ulster Scottishness – proposing, essentially, that the Ulster Scots ethnic group, the Scotch Irish ethnic group, and the Upland Southern ethnic group are one and the same, and that anyone claiming an ethnocultural heritage other than that of the Ulster Scots is not truly Upland Southern.

It should be noted, however, that the term ‘Scotch Irish’ is not universally interpreted along these lines: many self-identifying Scotch Irish people in the Upland South today treat the term ‘Scotch Irish’ as simply meaning ‘partly Scottish, and partly Irish’, in terms of either genealogical ancestry or ancestral cultural affinity, and therefore as not necessarily implying any direct connection between its bearers and the Ulster Scots. While the contingent who treat the term in this way are often thought of by academics as recent phenomenon, and as constituting a decided minority, there is no reason to dismiss the validity of this interpretation of Scotch Irishness off hand, or to discount the possibility that at least some communities of self-identifying Scotch Irish people might have espoused that definition even from the time of the term’s initial coinage and diffusion in the nineteenth century.

Even so, in designating themselves and their culture as Scotch Irish, Upland Southerners who espouse the term do effectively – at least figuratively, if not literally – claim the historical legacy of the either the Ulster Scots specifically or the Scottish and Irish peoples more generally as their own, to the relative or total exclusion of the legacies of various other ethnocultural groups (African and African-derived cultures, Indigenous American and Indigenous-American-derived cultures, Continental European cultures, Travelling Peoples, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, etc.) that are known to have played a role in forming the Upland Southern ethnocultural group that they elect to describe as Scotch Irish.

As such, the equation of Upland Southern-ness and Scots Irishness is, understandably, contested by Upland Southerners who do not subscribe to Scotch Irish identity. This equivocation is viewed as especially problematic to the extent that Scotch Irishness has been synonymized with whiteness: after the Civil War, particularly after the failure of Reconstruction and the resurgence of white-supremacy in the Jim Crow era, it was the case in many Upland Southern communities that white and passing-as-white Upland Southerners could claim (or were arbitrarily assigned) a Scotch Irish identity, whereas non-white or not-passing-for-white Upland Southerners were denied the right to identify as such. This process is especially evident in the history of the Melungeons – an Appalachian ethnocultural group largely consisting of people who, owing to a high incidence of Indigenous, Iberian, African, and other phenotypically dark-hued ancestry, were racially categorized as non-white, and who thus – although in most respects culturally identical to other Appalachians, and therefore part of the Upland Southern culture which by the 1850s was often labelled Scotch Irish – were denied the right to Identify as such themselves. The problematization of Scotch Irishness vis-a-vis Melungeons only intensified in the early-to-mid twentieth century, when those Melungeons who could pass for white often felt societally compelled to self-identify as Scotch Irish, which resulted, in some instances, in the erasure of the Melungeon cultural consciousness from formerly Melungeon families and communities. Now that Melungeon identity is undergoing something of a renaissance, many Melungeons see Scotch Irishness as a cypher for whiteness, and as a tool of their erstwhile oppression, with some of them even going so far as to argue for the abolition of Scotch Irishness as a basis for personal and group identity.

As a personal subscriber to Scotch Irish identity, I cannot easily countenance its dissolution – and, indeed, I feel that calls to do so smack of a tendency toward ethnocide, albeit one which is, ironically, rooted in resistance to ethnocide. However, in acknowledgement of Melungeon suffering and cultural erasure at the hands of past advocates of Scotch Irishness, and in recognition of the various component ancestral identities of Scotch Irishness not currently reflected in its naming, I would be willing to adopt a common-use byname for members of the Scotch Irish ethnocultural group that was more inclusive, and less tainted by the legacies of the colonial process. That name, ‘Tramontane’, will be the subject of future blog post.

Some current adherents of Scotch Irish identity do little to secure the good will of its ideological opponents and alleged victims. Indeed, many have exacerbated negative perceptions of the ethnic group by emphasizing the militaristic and ethno-chauvinist tendencies it supposedly inherited from its Ulster Scots antecedent. Today, the reputed conquering military prowess of the Ulster Scots is seen by many of their descendants and admirers among the Scotch Irish as something to be celebrated and perpetuated. This is in itself is unsurprising, and hardly objectionable: indeed, martial valor is upheld as a praiseworthy trait by members of many cultures throughout the world. However, it must be remembered that the stereotypical battle-readiness of the Ulster Scots, and, by extension, the Scotch Irish, has always had a dark side: from the beginning of their history as a people, the Ulster Scots did not fight on their own behalf, but as cannon-fodder for imperial regimes – a role which, arguably, their self-proclaimed cultural descendants in the United States, the Scots Irish, have continued to play down to the present. What could arguably be characterized as a culture of servility and blind loyalty in military service to morally bankrupt powers – reminiscent of the Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks and their anti-Jewish pogroms in service to the Czars – cannot form an ethically acceptable basis for ethnic pride, and should not be pressed into service as such.

Certainly, dogged loyalty to the cause of empire – whether British or American – has never seen either the Ulster Scots or the Scots Irish well rewarded by the powers they served. Although, because they had willingly become tools of English imperialism early in their history, the Ulster Scots were accepted as white almost as soon as the English themselves (that is, from almost the dawn of the construct of whiteness in the late 1600s), and although the Scots Irish – partially by claiming cultural continuity with the Ulster Scots – have likewise been welcomed into North American whiteness (at least to the extent that they appear phenotypically pale) from the earliest days of their self-identification as Scotch Irish, the Anglo-American powers-that-be have never let the Scotch Irish fully ascend the hierarchical ladder atop which all whites theoretically stand together. The sort of whiteness awarded the Scotch Irish – like that granted the relatively pallid but non-English servants of the Virginian and Caribbean planters at the time of the inception of whiteness – has, for the most part, never granted them the same protections that whiteness guarantees the bloodline descendants and direct cultural heirs of the Anglo-Saxon elite. To the extent that Scotch Irishness is seen as synonymous with Upland Southernness, Scotch Irish people are largely dismissed as ‘white trash’ by the US national elite, and mercilessly exploited, whether for profit or mere entertainment, whenever they aren’t simply ignored and left to languish in their poverty. As ever, ‘white solidarity’ is the naught but the hollow rallying cry of rich, powerful whites to poor, powerless ones – urging them to put their lives and livelihoods on the line to defend privileges they will never fully enjoy against people of color with whom they have more in common than their supposed betters do with them.  

At the time that they were allowed to become white, the Ulster Scots and the Scottish Gaels were probably relieved, because it meant that, from then on, they could theoretically avoid being exploited by the newly-declared white race (formerly the English upper classes), and start exploiting non-white people themselves. In hindsight, we can see that this attitude is ethically reprehensible, not to mention logically fallacious; and that, had the Ulster Scots and Scottish Gaels rejected whiteness, and stood in solidarity with other non-white peoples to resist Anglo-Saxon imperialism and English-language hegemony, the world would probably be a different and better place than it is today. Sadly, as it happened, the two peoples instead made the proverbial bed in which modern Americans are forced to lie. The Ulster Scots people who emigrated to what would become the Southern United States in the eighteenth century did espouse whiteness, and did the same thing to Indigenous Americans in the New World that their ancestors had done to the Irish Gaels in Ulster in the previous century – violently evicting the local people and occupying their lands, some of which they converted into farmsteads worked by forced labour – and, in the process, provided the origin story around which the self-identifying Scotch Irish of the early-to-mid-1800s would structure their ethnic identity. As for the Gaels, even though some of them had been colonized themselves, many of those evicted in the Highland Clearances would also end up pursuing careers as soldiers and settlers – doing to others in British North America what the Lowland Scots and English had done to them in Scotland.

Ultimately, through their assimilation to whiteness, Ulster Scots and Scottish Gaels were significantly responsible for the colonial settlement of the Southern United States, including that of what is today Kentucky, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By giving up their ancestral Scottish Gaelic language and allowing themselves to become culturally white, and thereby agreeing to ally themselves with English-descended colonists in advancing and benefiting from the processes of American Indian genocide and Black slavery, they helped lay the foundations of the United States as it exists today – a country defined by centuries-old unjust hierarchies of race, class, and region, in which linguistic and cultural diversity are continually suppressed in favor of assimilation to the Anglophone mainstream; and which, through its military and economic might, has exported the project of Anglo-American cultural and linguistic assimilation throughout much of the world.

Even so, It is my sincere hope that, because the Ulster Scots and Scottish Gaels of Kentucky helped bring about American racism and cultural assimilationism by abandoning Gaelic, we modern Kentuckians – including and perhaps especially those who, by self-identifying as Scots Irish, lay claim to the cultural legacy of the Ulster Scots, and, by extension, the Scottish Gaels whom they could have remained had they not assimilated to Anglophone cultural norms in becoming Lowlanders and then Ultonian mercenaries – can promote racial harmony and cultural diversity by reviving the Scottish Gaelic language; and that, because they cast off the Gaelic language to don the mantle of whiteness, we, by taking up that language, can help do away with whiteness altogether. If Kentuckians now thought of as white forsake solidarity with other white people, aided in undergoing that paradigm shift by their emotional and intellectual investment in the effort to revive a minoritized language that would stand in opposition to the cultural dominion of American standard English (the language of whiteness in the United States and its empire) then they will have succeeded in striking an at least symbolic and perhaps pragmatic blow against the global forces of white hegemony in America and beyond.  

Kentucky Gaelic Revival in solidarity with the promotion of racial diversity

Even though I envision the work of Gaelic revival in Kentucky as existing to combat the racism brought about by the assumption of white identity by Gaelic and Ulster Scots (and, by extension, Scots Irish) immigrants to Kentucky, the work of disrupting the white identity of white Kentuckians through the restoration of a Gaelic identity in Kentucky must not be undertaken by white Kentuckians alone.  Although the assumption of whiteness by the Gaels, Ulster Scots, and Scots Irish has most benefited those of their descendants who are now considered white, the process of re-establishing Gaelic in Kentucky will require the active participation of a racially-diverse cohort of language learners. If the Kentuckian learners of Gaelic claim to challenge the construct of whiteness, but appear to be mostly or exclusively phenotypically white, then the revival of Gaelic in Kentucky will run the risk of seeming – or even becoming – an affirmation of the construct of whiteness rather than an attack on that construct, with the new Kentucky Gaelic-speakers viewed as merely a peculiar sub-type of white American; and their culture, likewise, a quaint variation on the theme of white culture rather than a new and vital force inimical to whiteness. If the project is to succeed, then that eventuality – the co-option of the Kentucky Gaelic Revival by whiteness – must be avoided at all costs. Thus, I seek to enlist the aid of Kentuckians of all races – as well as all genders, sexual orientations, and religious affiliations – in undertaking the project of Kentucky’s re-Gaelicization.

In seeking this phenotypical diversity among Gaels, the project will in no way deviate from the historical construction of Gaelic identity. Both the idea that Gaels are universally phenotypically pale; and that Gaelic identity can be heritable only genetically, are nothing more than modern misconceptions. Gaelic heritage has always been less about who one’s biological relatives are or what one looks like than about what community one comes from and by whom one was raised. A person who is genetically or phenotypically Black or American Indian, but who was raised by Gaels in a Gaelic-speaking community, is no less a Gael than their adoptive siblings and cousins, as numerous examples from the Nova Scotian context demonstrate. Conversely, a person who is white, but who was not raised by Gaels in a Gaelic speaking community, could not be a Gael unless adopted into a Gaelic community and acculturated to Gaelic traditions in adulthood – and, even in that instance, Gaelic identity would be a thing bestowed upon the incomer at the discretion of the Gaelic community of which they had become part, rather than proclaimed by the incomer, who would have no cultural authority to make such a declaration.

The question of cultural appropriation – Gaels versus Gall-Gaels

Establishing that last parameter of Gaelic identity – the essential non-Gaelicness of people neither raised nor adopted by Gaels – raises the question of how the Kentucky Gaelic Revival can avoid the unjust appropriation of Gaelic culture. In social-justice parlance, cultural appropriation denotes the unsanctioned use of the cultural artifacts of a minoritized culture by individuals from outwith the culture in question. Because the Scottish Gaels are a minoritized ethnic group; and because the Kentuckian descendants of the Scots Irish and the Scottish Gaels ceased to use Gaelic centuries ago, and are no longer conversant with the norms of Gaelic culture; and, finally, because the participants in the Revival who come from other ancestral backgrounds might have no historical connection to Gaelic whatsoever, the revivalists of Gaelic in Kentucky would indeed be guilty of the appropriation of Gaelic culture if they declared themselves Gaels. Therefore, in order to avoid the commission of cultural appropriation, the Kentucky Gaelic Revivalists must refrain from the full assumption of Gaelic identity – acknowledging that, no matter how many Gaelic cultural traits they come to embody, or how well they speak the Scottish Gaelic language – they will not be Gaels.

So, to recognize the distinction between actual Gaels and those we hope to propagate in Kentucky, I second the use of the term proposed by the non-ethnically-Gaelic Scottish Gaelic language revitalists, Fañch Bihan Gallig and Viktor MacÀrdghall: ‘Gall-Gael’ – or in its original Gaelic, Gall-Ghàidheal (Foreigner-Gael) – in lieu of the ethnonym ‘Gael’. The historical Gall-Gaels were a hybrid Norse-Gaelic ethnic group that lived in the Scottish Hebrides and Scottish West Coast during the cultural re-Gaelicization of these regions at the close of the Viking Age (which spanned, roughly, 700 AD to 900 AD). The Lordship of the Isles (in Gaelic, Rìgheachd nan Eilean) – a semi-independent kingdom centered in the Scottish Hebrides and mostly peopled by Gall-Gaels – served as the last political bastion of Gaelic culture in Scotland after the rejection of Gaelic by the Scottish monarchy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Eventually, the Gall-Gaels of the Lordship of the Isles fully re-Gaelicized, and served as arguably the most important tradition bearers of Gaelic culture in Scotland until the invasion and destruction of their kingdom by the Scottish monarchy in 1493. By taking on the ethnonym of the Gall-Gaels, the Kentucky Gaelic Revivalists will be able to advertise their admiration for Gaelic culture while respecting their own cultural distance from it; and simultaneously signal their intent to fully self-re-Gaelicize (to the extent possible without neglecting or endangering their cultural heritage as Kentuckians) in the course of the generations to come.

What does the process of re-Gaelicization entail?

The process of becoming, at least partially, culturally and linguistically Gaelic in the coming decades – not only as individuals, but as a people – is the ultimate goal of the Kentucky Gaelic Revival. This process will entail not only some Kentuckians’ acquisition of the Gaelic language, and their transmission of that language from generation to generation in the domains of family and neighborhood, but, ideally, their absorption and transmission – or at least their access to resources  that would facilitate their acquisition – of other Gaelic cultural traditions not necessarily fully encoded in the language itself. These traditions will hopefully include the learning and re-sharing of Gaelic songs, stories, and dances; the exploration of historical Gaelic literature, such as the texts that compose the Finn Cycle and Ulster Cycle; and engagement with Scottish Gaelic spiritual and cosmological traditions, such as the continuation of Gaelic psalm singing, the observation of the quarter-day festivals, the orientation of maps toward the east rather than the north, and the recognition of the sanctity of Southerly or clockwise motion. It is important to note that the learning of the cultural traditions mentioned above should be undertaken to the exclusion of hegemonic white culture, but while embracing – never replacing! – the extant artistic and folkloric traditions that already make Kentucky unique.

Obviously, some traditions historically observed by Scottish Gaels won’t translate well to the Kentuckian context. The fact that Kentucky is landlocked, for instance, greatly reduces the opportunity to authentically engage in Gaelic maritime traditions. This is no great difficulty, however, as our object as Gall-Gaels is not the complete transplantation of Gaelic traditions into Kentucky and Gaelic identity onto Kentuckians, but the restoration of Kentuckian’s forgotten Gaelicness, and its synthesis with traditions that Kentuckians have originated themselves – the syncretism and mutual glorification of Kentuckians’ regional and ancestral streams of heritage at the expense of those traditions foisted upon Kentuckians to our detriment by the white Anglophone mainstream. Essentially, re-Gaelicization entails the creation of Gall-Gaels as a new ethnic group in Kentucky, one which hybridizes the arts, beliefs, and folkways of Kentuckians and Gaels in opposition to the cultural traditions of the white and English-language dominance which have tried for the last three centuries to destroy them by assimilation. Whereas the ‘Gall’ in the original Gall-Ghàidheal ethnonym signified the Norse, in its Kentuckian formulation, it will stand in for ‘Kentuckian’; thus, the Gall-Gaels of Kentucky will be Kentuckian Gaels – distinct from the Scottish Gaels, and unique to Kentucky, but nonetheless recognizable tradition bearers of both Scottish Gaelic and Kentuckian culture.  

How to become Gall-Gaels

As many in my audience will already have surmised, it will not be possible to create the Gall-Gael identity overnight. The process of identity formation will be an incremental one, forged through shared experience over the course of decades. Language shift – and, by extension, cultural shift – tends to take three generations to reach its full fruition; so it likely was with the erasure of the Gaelic language and culture from Kentuckian life, and so it will likely be with its restoration. The pre-requisite to the successful re-Gaelicization of Kentuckians – and, therefore, the benchmark for the initial success of the Kentucky Gaelic Revival – will be the creation of a community of Kentuckians and other interested people willing to study and disavow the cultural attributes of whiteness, and  equally willing to study and embody the cultural attributes of Kentuckians and Scottish Gaels. As earlier stated, it is essential that some of these participants be Kentuckians of color.

The process of re-Gaelicization will entail learning and abiding by the principles of social justice activism, including feminism, anti-racism, anti-classism, anti-homophobia, and anti-regionalism; researching the history of both Kentucky and Scotland, particularly the Scottish Highlands and Islands; and actively participating in cultural traditions unique to Kentucky and the Scottish Gàidhealtachd – that is, the traditionally Gaelic speaking-region of Scotland (often translated as the Highlands, but also often thought of as including the Scottish Hebrides).

In order to further these aims, I intend to launch a number of Gaelic cultural promotion activities in Kentucky, such as Gaelic-language classes, Gaelic-language conversation circles, cèilidh dances (that is, social Scottish dance evenings of a style originating in Gaelic culture but now popular throughout Scotland); traditional cèilidhs (that is, intimate gatherings with Gaelic singing, music, and storytelling); a Comann nam Fèilltean (that is, ‘Feast Society’) for the celebration of traditional observances of the Gaelic quarter-days of Oidhche Shamhna (Samhain/Halloween), Latha Fèille Brìghde (Imbolc/Candlemas), Latha Buidhe Bealltainne (Beltane/May Day), and Aonach Thaillteann or Lùnastal (Lughnasadh/Lamas); and Gaelic psalm-singing workshops.

Additionally, I would like to inaugurate a series of periodic lectures or conferences on the subjects of anti-racism, Kentucky heritage, and Scottish Gaelic studies, at which experts in each of these disciplines would share their knowledge with the aspiring Gall-Gael community; as well as, eventually, an annual retreat, at which members of the community would bond through the sharing and melding of the Gaelic and Kentuckian cultural traditions learned throughout the year. It is hoped that by attending these events, aspiring Gall-Gaels will become more confident in their cultural knowledge of both Kentucky and Scottish Gaeldom, and develop a distinct collective cultural identity.

Domestic intergenerational transmission, and Kentucky’s Baile nan Gàidheal

It is my hope that, by as early as 2030 and by no later than 2060, the Kentucky Gaelic Revival will have produced fluent native speakers of Gaelic who learned the language on ghlùin – that is, from the knee – in the Commonwealth. This process of language learning from birth in the home – domestic intergenerational transmission – works best when reinforced by target-language use in the local neighborhood. To that end, I would like at some point before 2050 to have created a Gàidheal-Phoball or Baile nan Gàidheal– that is, a Gaelic village or Town of the Gaels – in Kentucky: a commune, neighborhood or even grander community of at least a dozen people, and ideally many more, populated entirely by Gaelic-speaking families, wherein Gaelic would be the main language of communication within and between all households. I recognize that this is a lofty goal, and time will tell whether it will ultimately be achievable. Even if not, it is an aim well worth espousing: as the old and somewhat astronomically dubious saying goes, ‘if you shoot for the moon, you may land among the stars’. By striving to create a Gaelic-speaking village of some description in Kentucky by 2050, the Revival is sure to accomplish great things, even if it should fall short of this ultimate goal.

The role of the Scots language in the Gaelic Revival

Some of members of the audience, in light of my earlier mention of the Ulster Scots as claimed forebears of those modern Kentuckians who identify as Scotch Irish or Scots Irish, may wonder what role their heritage language – the Scots language – might play in the Kentucky Gaelic Revival. For various reasons, which I will enumerate below, while I don’t advocate the exclusion of the Scots language, I think that the main linguistic focus of the Revival should definitely be the Scottish Gaelic language.

Scots already finds a great deal of representation in the traditional English dialects of Appalachian and Trans-Appalachian Kentucky. In most regional Kentucky dialects outwith the more German-influenced Northern Kentucky (essentially a cultural province of Cincinnati, Ohio) and the assimilationist urban centers of Louisville and Lexington, words like ‘rarin’ (‘fussing’ or ‘yelling’; or, alternatively, ‘expressing eagerness or pent-up energy’ – derived from the Scots word for either ‘roaring’ or ‘rearing’) and ‘wee’ (the word in Scots and Northern English dialects of English for ‘little’) are not uncommon; and neither are arguably Scots-derived grammatical constructions, such as the use of what in English would be the singular conjugation of verbs for agreement with plural nouns, or the use of the particle ‘a-’ to precede verbal nouns in forms of the continuous tense: compare, for instance, the Kentuckian sentence ‘them colts was a-runnin’ and the Scots sentence ‘ma een wis a-shuttin’ to the standard English sentences ‘those colts were running’ and ‘my eyes were shutting’. As far as Anglic (that is, English-connected) languages go, I would sooner promote the arguably Scots-influenced Kentuckian dialects of English (which, if not in Kentucky, would exist nowhere else on Earth) than the Scots language itself – which already has official recognition in Northern Ireland, and which is on the verge of being similarly recognized in Scotland (where it boasts more than one-million speakers compared to Gaelic’s fewer than 60,000).

Even so, I see no reason to discourage Kentucky Gaelic Revivalists from the study of Scots, and I welcome the involvement of Scots speakers in the movement.

What is meant by Kentuckian culture?

Having linguistically delineated the Revival so as to deemphasize – but not exclude – the Scots language, it might be prudent at this stage to similarly lay out what I see as the parameters of Kentuckian culture such as it should be celebrated within the Gaelic Revival movement. In answer to this question, I feel that Kentuckian culture, as promoted by the Revival, should consist of all those cultural traditions which both 1) are practiced within communities that exist wholly within or which are centered in the geographical bounds of Kentucky; and 2) originate in communities that have been marginalized by the Anglo-American cultural mainstream and have not been instrumental in expanding its hegemony. Thus, the cultural commodities of Northern Kentucky, which region belongs to a prosperous and largely self-contained cultural complex centered in Cincinnati, Ohio rather than in Kentucky itself, which has a much heavier German-American influence than pervades the rest of the Commonwealth, and which exists largely in a state of cultural disconnection from other Kentuckian regions; and the cultural commodities of Kentucky’s major urban centers (that is, Louisville and Lexington) which have often exhibited similar cultural disconnection from the rest of the Commonwealth to that of Northern Kentucky, and whose inhabitants have often minoritized the cultural traditions of other parts of Kentuckian regions, ought to have a secondary status in the Revival movement by comparison to cultural commodities from Eastern Kentucky, South-Central Kentucky, Western Kentucky, and the Bluegrass region outwith the Lexington city-limits. That having been said, any distinctly Kentuckian cultural commodities of minoritized communities, even from within Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky – such as the cultural assets of Louisville’s historically Black West End – ought to be highly valorized, in order to compensate for their historical marginalization within the Kentuckian gestalt. To summarize, the least-appreciated aspects of Kentuckian culture in the eyes of the white Anglophone mainstream are to be found – as Leftist Kentucky politician, Charles Booker, might say – ‘from the hood to the holler’. It is these cultural elements – those of Appalachia, Trans-Appalachia, and Kentucky’s urban poor, rather than those associated with Kentucky’s urban elite – which, as a matter of social justice, ought to take precedence within the Kentuckian cultural aspect of Kentucky’s Gaelic Revival.

The relationship between the Kentucky Gaelic Revival and Indigenous language revitalization

At this point, some readers might wonder how an avowedly anti-racist movement can unironically promote an Indo-European language in North America, asking themselves whether the promotion of one European language can really be more ethical than the promotion of another in the aftermath of the genocide and mass displacement of America’s first nations by European settler-colonists. Indeed, the Gall-Gaels would run the risk of a terrible hypocrisy if they claimed to be anti-racist while promoting an autochthonous language at the expense of local indigenous languages – but, fortunately, that is not the intended modus operandi of the Kentucky Gaelic Revival.

The main historical indigenous languages of what is today Kentucky are Cherokee, as was once spoken on the Eastern slope of the Appalachian mountain range of Eastern Kentucky; Yuchi, as once spoken on the Western slope of that mountain range; Shawnee, as once spoken from the Appalachian foothills to the area North beyond the Ohio River and West to the Land-Between-The-Lakes; and Chickasaw, which was spoken in the flood plain of the Mississippi River. At present, none of these languages are yet extinct, although all of them are highly endangered. As part of their investigations into Kentucky’s history, and their efforts to further social justice, Kentucky Gaelic Revivalists will be encouraged to be in contact with the modern cultural heirs to the Shawnees, Cherokees, Yuchis, and Chickasaws who once lived in what is now Kentucky; and all participants in the Revival will be expected, as part of the movement, to at least occasionally contribute to the support of these communities in whatever way their members deem acceptable and desirable.  

The role of Scottish Gaels and Gaelic learners from Scotland and Nova Scotia

As a final point, I wish to make it known that the Kentucky Gaelic Revival will fully embrace input from Scottish Gaels and Gaelic learners from existing Gaelic-speaking communities throughout the world. Their help will be invaluable in guiding aspiring Gaelic speakers to fluency, and helping provide the Revivalists insight into Gaelic cultural traditions. Of particular value to the movement will be those Gaels and Gaelic speakers already residing in Kentucky, and whose life experiences might mean that their identities already represent a cultural synthesis of Kentuckian and Scottish Gaelic elements, as is ultimately hoped for all Kentucky Gall-Gaels. It is hoped that Gaels already in Kentucky will become members of the Revivalist community, in which they can expect – if they freely contribute their cultural knowledge and linguistic skill to the Revival, while comporting themselves in accord with its ideals – to be looked up to as revered elders. By helping to educate the next generation of Kentucky Gaelic speakers, they will confer a cultural legitimacy and authenticity on the emerging movement and its linguistic practices which it would otherwise wholly lack.

How to Get in Touch

If, after having considered the contents of this document, you would like to learn Gaelic, or otherwise participate in the Kentucky Gaelic Revival, please contact me at kentuckygaelic@gmail.com. I would be happy to supply you with further information, answer any of your questions, and keep you updated concerning the progress of the Revival. I thank you for the time you devoted to reading this document, and I hope to interact with you in the near future. Mo bheannachd leibh, ann an dòchas gum faic mi a dh’aithghearr sibh! (I give you my blessing, in the hope that I’ll see you soon!)