What makes us different is what makes us human..
Language, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
A sculpture at the Kildonan Café and Museum, South Uist incorporating two verses of an emigrant song about Uist by Allan MacPhee: “O mo dhùthaich, ’s tu th’air m’aire/Uibhist chubhraidh ùr nan gallan …” [Oh my land, you are on my mind/fresh fragrant Uist of the saplings …].
Although efforts to promote a minoritized language might seem to run counter to the homogenizing, globalizing effects of the free market, the neoliberal regime has also made new sources (or conduits) of public funding available to Gaelic-language planners: the European Union Structural Funds, the UK National Lottery, and public-private partnerships with the [local enterprise companies] and local authorities... In the process, however, language planners have become subject to the same set of constraints as other areas of Scottish civil society and public policy. One might say that at the price of their participation in the system, they have been co-opted into the neoliberal structure of development in Scotland.
McEwan-Fujita, Emily2006 Neoliberalism and Minority Language Planning in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 171:155–171
On 1 July 1999, the new Scottish Parliament officially opened in Edinburgh. Although the official and working language of the Parliament is English, the physical environs of the Parliament buildings are “accented” with Gaelic-English bilingual signs.
The constant repetition of [census] statistics in… news stories about Gaelic, together with the descriptors… (‘a seemingly terminal decline’, ‘falling’, ‘bleak’, and ‘pessimistic’), constitutes a poetics of statistics that actually intensifies the message [of decline] in the name of neutral reportage. The overall effect of the constant recycling of these discourses is to give the impression to anyone who pays attention to the media in Scotland that Gaelic is moribund. This erases, among many other things, the important fact that there are still more than 50,000 living people ‘out there’ speaking Gaelic to one another on a more or less regular basis.
McEwan-Fujita, Emily2006 Gaelic Doomed as Speakers Die Out’?: The Public Discourse of Gaelic Language Death in Scotland. In Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland: Policy, Planning and Public Discourse Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press
A major challenge for professional Gaels who are language workers is to create and negotiate in practice a “9 to 5” or professional white-collar Gaelic office environment. A “Gaelic office” is a hybrid space: on the one hand, it is an office of the bureaucratically rationalized Western (and more specifically British) type, a form of social, economic, and spatial organization where full-time, middle-class work is performed. As such it is embedded in a social and cultural infrastructure dominated by English… On the other hand, a Gaelic office is also a site where the business of the office is deliberately conducted as much as possible through the medium of spoken and written Gaelic, and Gaelic linguistic activities are prioritized over English ones… The dual nature of a Gaelic office as both “Gaelic-oriented” and “white-collar professional”… necessitates ongoing lexical and pragmatic innovations in Gaelic, to extend it into the business domain. This means that on a daily basis the CNAG workers must negotiate between the practice of professional Gaelic and their own understandings of Gaelic developed mostly in the island-based domains of family and village-level community.
McEwan-Fujita, EmilyForthcoming. ‘9 to 5’ Gaelic: Speakers, Context, and Ideology of an Emerging Minority Language Register” Forthcoming in Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2006 Proceedings
Emily McEwan-Fujita
Emily McEwan-Fujita received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2003. She is a linguistic anthropologist who studies minority language revitalization efforts in Scotland.
Her geographical area of specialization is Scotland, particularly the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides). She has conducted fieldwork in the Uists, Stornoway, Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow on Scottish Gaelic language revitalization efforts.
Her research focuses on several aspects of Gaelic revitalization: economic development and “project culture” in the Highlands and islands, adult minority language learning and ethnic boundary marking, Gaelic in the new Scottish Parliament, and public “discourses of death” about Gaelic in the British media.
McEwan-Fujita’s next research project will be a long-ranging consideration of the impact of ideologies of standard language on Gaelic-English bilinguals, particularly in relation to Gaelic literacy practices.
She is teaching courses on language and culture; language, ethnicity, and nationalism; and endangered languages.
Selected Publications
2006 “‘Gaelic Doomed as Speakers Die Out’?: The Public Discourse of Gaelic Language Death in Scotland.” In W. McLeod, ed. Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland: Policy, Planning and Public Discourse. Pp. 279-293. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press.
2005 “Neoliberalism and Minority Language Planning in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 171: 155-171.
1997 “Scottish Gaelic and Social Identity in Contemporary Scotland.” In Ambiguous Identities in the New Europe, Replika Special Issue. Miklos Vörös and Miklos Hadas, eds. Pp. 135-156. Budapest: Replika Kor.