Social Science Research Council

"The Semiotics of Socialization: Gaelic-Medium Education and Language Revival in Scotland"

In the past two decades, Gaelic-medium education (GME) in primary school has come to bear the brunt of the language revitalization project in Scotland and has produced scores of new Gaelic speakers. Yet, older speakers of Gaelic often claim not to understand Gaelic-medium educated children and actually refuse to speak Gaelic with them. The fundamental problem facing language revitalization efforts then is to recreate ways of interacting through a language rather than simply increasing the number of its speakers. My research seeks to explain this issue by investigating the communicative development of Gaelic-medium educated children in a Gaelic-English bilingual community on the Isle of Lewis, where GME has significantly transformed the ways Gaelic is learned by children. I posit that one of the results of these transformations is the socio-political marking of the kind of Gaelic children learn in GME, turning it into an inappropriate form of interaction for other members of the speech community. To become legitimate speakers of Gaelic accepted by the speech community, children need to acquire not only lexical and grammatical knowledge, but must also develop pragmatic awareness of the social power of these marked linguistic forms and the ability to use it appropriately in order to be recognized social actors (Ochs 2000, Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). In my research, I will investigate how children do or do not develop this semiotic knowledge as part of their socio-linguistic repertoire. In particular, I want to examine the ways in which socialization activities may or may not allow novices to become legitimate members of the speech community and social actors. My research will reveal the currently underexplored semiotic aspects of socialization and identify their role in language maintenance and shift as instances of larger processes of cultural reproduction and change in communities of (linguistic) practice.