A recent report by UNESCO placed Scots Gaelic on a list of 2500 endangered languages highlighting the perilous state of a key cornerstone of Scottish culture. Scottish Gaelic song, poems and stories have been carried through oral transmission for many centuries reflecting the power of indigenous peoples to preserve cultural heritage from generation to generation without recourse to a written code. Against this background, this article highlights the growing support and development of the language in the last 30 years and the first findings of a research project into ‘Scottish Gaelic Song and Oral Transmission’. It also highlights aspects of the historical background to Scottish Gaelic songs and poetry to set the context of the revival of interest in Gaelic traditional music and some of the measures and strategies developed to sustain the language and its cultural heritage within Scotland. It further discusses the nature of community and family discourse and oral transmission and delivers some early findings and insights into the research project, which is based on a series of interviews with Gaelic singers. The findings illuminate aspects of the oral tradition that could have an impact on the way in which traditional music is perceived and the nature of provision for this music in higher education in the UK. A number of institutions such as the University of Strathclyde, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Sabhal Mor Ostaig provide undergraduate courses that teach traditional music, including Gaelic singing, as one of the areas of study. This article potentially raises issues relating to Gaelic singing and the values, traits and practices inherent in oral transmission and how these could be promoted alongside and not be swamped by the accepted practices in teaching and learning in classical music.
Inquiry into the quality of family life in seventeenth century Dublin is an attempt to understand conditions in the second largest city in the British Isles; further, the era was one of convulsions in the body politic, social, and religious. The Scottish James I and VI (1556 1625) determined that...
The sometimes conflicting responsibilities of endangered language fieldworkers to at least three distinct constituencies are considered: to other scholars, to native speaker sources, and to the ethnic community the sources represent. In the case of the author's Scottish Gaelic fieldwork, an origi...
The intertwined role of language ideologies and affect in language shift and revitalization can be understood by taking a language socialization perspective on local micro-level interaction between adult Gaelic learners and fluent Gaelic-English bilinguals. Seven adults living in the Western Isle...
The thigh adductor squeeze test is commonly used in the diagnosis of groin injuries. Currently no reports exist in the published literature which, detail the level of activation of the adductor musculature during the test as well as concomitant pressure values. Thus the aim of the present study w...
Darwin saw similarities between the evolution of species and the evolution of languages, and it is now widely accepted that similarities between related languages can often be interpreted in terms of a bifurcating descent history ('phylogenesis'). Such interpretations are supported when the distr...
This article deals with interviewing reluctant respondents. The analysis is used to construct a process-oriented model of respondent rapport and empathy. By assessing respondent rapport in a reflective way, the article contributes to the sociology of knowledge generation and the construction of r...
To deepen our understanding of early medieval exile, the present study characterizes ways in which scholars have studied cave use in Britain and Ireland. As key figures in the history of archaeology, Sir Daniel Wilson and Sir James Young Simpson were crucial for establishing Scotland s cave sites...
Previous studies have reported a conflicting relationship between the effect of live and televised sporting events on attendance rates to emergency departments (ED). The objectives of this study were to investigate the relationship of major sporting events on emergency department attendance rates...
N. The A3-B14 haplotype may well be the original and A3-B7 the result of centromeric recombinations. The haplotype diversity and recombination events were not different from a Celtic series. These findings do not support the hypothesis of the C282Y mutation being of an Irish celtic origin. The C2...
Lsquo;Language shift’ is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied ex...
