Chamber and committees

It is helpful to start with the data. I do not like reducing people or language to data, but the census figures show that, in the past 10 years, the number of people who have skills in Gaelic has increased by just over 43,000. That is tremendously good news. If those figures were going in the opposite direction, I would be giving you a very different response. If there had been a reduction of 43,000, we would be in crisis territory. That increase is incredible.

The challenge has always been around the areas in which Gaelic is a language of everyday use in the community—clearly, it is a language of everyday use in Glasgow and in Edinburgh in many families. From my perspective, that is part of the much broader issue of depopulation of our rural, coastal and island communities, of which we need to be conscious.

Secondly, a lot of action is being taken to reverse that. For example, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar has a Gaelic-first policy. That is already having an impact when it comes to the number of people starting Gaelic in P1, as I said. It has made a big difference.

I do not like the word “crisis”, but I do like the word “urgency”. The issue requires focus; it requires urgency; and it requires us all to decide whether we represent all of Scotland’s communities, including those that have minority languages.

I mean for Scots and Gaelic. The principle applies to Scots, too, does it not? One can demonstrate academic and functional ability to read, write and speak a language, but for it to be a living language, it has to come into use across life. Therefore, the responsibility on us—indeed, on all of us—is to bring languages to life beyond the classroom. There are a lot of great initiatives for Gaelic that could be replicated in Scots—if they do not already exist in Scots—with regard to youth work and ensuring that a young person does not have to switch to English to access services, leisure facilities and so on. That is what brings fluency.

I will quantify that. If you take the Western Isles and their depopulation as a result of a lot of different drivers—

Such things are very difficult to quantify. It has been done for Gaelic through the work of Highland and Islands Enterprise on quantifying the impact of Gaelic on the economy. It could be done for Scots. I do not know whether the impact has been quantified for Scots—I am not aware that it has been. I think that the impact would be substantial in relation to the industries that I have referenced but, with respect, I am suggesting that, although it is a laudable question, it is not really the main point when it comes to pledging support and offering legal rights to communities with minority languages.

They could do a lot of that just now, but we are reflecting on the fact that more needs to be done and that work needs to be accelerated and given much greater focus. In the past year, there has been a lot more focus on the community work that Bòrd na Gàidhlig and other community groups do, and the areas of linguistic significance will allow us to think through where those key Gaelic communities are and what a network looks like. How can we support the community work more than we do right now, and what is Bòrd na Gàidhlig’s role in supporting it? Bòrd na Gàidhlig has been extremely good at doing a lot of the education work; I think that the community work should be of equal standing, but to do community work, you need to recognise the community. There needs to be an identifiable community.

Yes, because it needs to go all the way through and we need to see education as a whole. It is not sufficient to have large numbers going through primary school and then dropping off in secondary 4 and 5. We want people to go right through primary, secondary and higher or further education and to take up the opportunities to continue to study the language. However, I am also of the view that we should not get so hung up on higher and further education that we forget the other opportunities for work and apprenticeships through the language. Otherwise, the danger is that Gaelic becomes an academic language of people who have studied it to a high degree; whereas, for a living and modern language, it needs to be used in whatever capacity people find themselves.

I am very supportive of what Comhairle nan Eilean Siar has done, which has led to tangible results in terms of young people opting for Gaelic. I think that parents are voting with their feet, and that is why there is such demand across different local authority areas. Local authorities have a duty to reflect on and recognise that.

When it comes to the responsibilities on local authorities, there will be a lot of parents who want English-medium education, but they also have the right to choose an education in their language of choice. It is about getting a balance, but there are some local authority areas in which there are communities of large numbers of speakers, such as the Western Isles, the Highlands and Argyll and Bute, for which I generally favour a more Gaelic first approach.

Thank you.

I will ask Claire Cullen to talk about the development of the bill. What I would say is that, at the beginning of the meeting, Pam Duncan-Glancy asked about outcomes and outputs, and I am a lot more interested in those and in distributing the funding directly among communities than I am in establishing structures and organisations.

There is extensive academic research that confirms that, for a community to feel that its Government has its best interests at heart, recognising its language really matters. It is not just about the past and recognising the literature, the heritage and the culture that encapsulate the language, but about the present and the future, and feeling that you do not have to switch to English in your nation of birth in order to access public services.

The bottom line is that if Scotland cannot recognise its own languages it is unlikely that anyone else will. We have a moral duty to recognise them legally, but more than that, we have a moral duty to support, recognise and protect the speakers. As I have said, if people cannot depend on the Scottish Government to do that, who can they depend on?