“Seachd: The Inacessible Pinnacle”, the first-ever theatrically-released feature-length film in the world’s most beautiful language, Scottish Gaelic, is to premiere at the Cannes film festival later this month.
The film tells the story of a young boy whose parents die in a climbing accident on Skye who is sent to live with his Gaelic-speaking grandfather who tells him a number of fantastical and heavily symbolic stories. The film was shot entirely on Skye on a shoestring budget (less than 1 million pounds) and with a mostly local amateur cast, but judging from the pics on the website, it looks like it will be quite impressive. The film stars Gaelic poet/novelist Aonghas Padraig Caimbeul and 9-year-old Padruig Moireasdan. Unlike other stories about Irish or Scottish traditional culture, this movie looks like it stands a decent chance of not being unbearably kitschy…Hooray!
It also features some excellent music. Jim Sutherland (The Easy Club) composed the score and the soundtrack features performances by Mary Smith, Christine Primrose, Alasdair Codona, Allan MacDonald and several other top-notch singers & musicians.
I must watch this. I’ve read a few articles lately about the Scottish independence movement, which apparently is gaining ground under Tony Blair and is fueld in no small part by native Scottish Gaelic speakers. It seems fitting that now would be the time a Scottish Gaelic movie comes out.
Well, let’s be realistic here: Gaelic speakers make up only 1.2% of the Scottish population (58,000 out of more than 5 million), so they’re numerically not a significant percentage of any Scottish independence movement. By contrast, Welsh is spoken by more than 10% of people in Wales and is arguably in a much healthier state as a community language than either Scottish Gaelic or Irish, but demand for independence in Wales–though definitely present–is certainly not as popular as it is in Scotland.
It has been suggested that in the late-19th century, Scottish home rule and independence organizations deliberately avoided making Gaelic a significant independence symbol (as Irish was in Ireland and still is in N. Ireland) as it was felt it would alienate too many people. That being said, most of the Gaelic speakers I know or have met these days seem to support the SNP (in part because the SNP seems to be the most pro-active in making provisions for Gaelic). Ex-Runrig singer Donnie Munro made a run for Parliament as a Labour candidate a number of years back, but given what’s happened in the past few years, I wonder if his allegiances have shifted at all…
It’s spoken natively by 500-1,000 people on Cape Breton Island, NS. To put that in perspective, at the turn of the 20th century, there were between 80-100,000 native Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton. Most (but not all) of the ones that are left are quite old now. It’s taught in a few schools on the island and there’s a high school on Prince Edward Island that teaches it. There’s a school district in British Columbia that’s going to begin offering it as a heritage language next year.
The provincial government in Nova Scotia recently added an “office of Gaelic affairs” and has completed a language revitalization plan whereby young Scottish Gaels will come to NS on 6-month to 1-year stints to teach immersion classes and workshops in schools and community settings. The plan sets a goal of creating 25,000 “fluent” Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia by 2027. Frankly, that’s just not going to happen. If they even get half that many reasonably proficient in that amount of time, it would be nice, though.
All the links I’m aware of are in English (my first language), but I’m under the impression that among native Scottish Gaelic speakers there are a lot more resources, which makes sense. I’ved watched a few YouTube videos about working towards a free Scotland, too, but I can’t find the URLs offhand…
I’ve never been to Scotland, but from what I’m aware, Scotland is historically separated from England in terms of religion, economy, and (in the north and west) language. One of the main arguments I’ve heard against Scotland’s independence is that it would mess up the economy because they’d have to “start all over” in terms of being part of the EU.
Norway seems to get along just fine without being a EU member, however…in the end it’s up to the Scottish voting public. We may see in 2010 what the fate of Scotland is. I see a lot of parallels between the sentiments of “free Scotland” people and the “free Quebec” folks–and in each case it seems language is one of the driving factors pushing for freedom.
I’m guessing it’ll probably be a lot further away than 2010 before any kind of complete independence is achieved… I haven’t seen any pages on the web in Scottish Gaelic explicitly advocating independence, but then again, I’ve never looked. I wouldn’t doubt that there are a few, though.
Language is certainly an issue in the Scottish independence movement, but not necessarily Gaelic. The sad truth of the matter is that while I doubt many Scots would consider themselves openly hostile towards Gaelic, for many, the idea of speaking Gaelic would strike them as utterly daft. A while back, when there was some suggestion of increasing the amount of Gaelic signage in Edinburgh, a newspaper columnist responded by writing that given the number of lawyers and doctors in the city, it would be more practical to erect signs in Latin. A great deal of scaremongering seems to have arisen among columnists like these who fear the machinations of the scheming, whisky-addled “Gaelic Mafia”, seem to think that government plans for Gaelic will lead to it becoming compulsory in schools (not gonna happen), and that funding Gaelic is sucking up money that could better be spent on health services, the arts, or promoting education in “practical” languages. It’s pretty pathetic stuff, really, and I think it may stem in part from a deep, near subconscious sense of guilt for letting such an important aspect of Scotland’s culture be so callously treated over the centuries…Some people might rather that it die than be reminded of its precarious fate all the time.
But anyway…Back to the film! It’s being released theatrically in the UK in the autumn of 2007 and will be out on DVD sometime in 2008. I e-mailed the website to inquire about whether the movie has a North American distributor yet, so I’ll let you know if I hear anything.
I shall have to alert my brother. Anyone ever see the board books for toddlers by Eric Hill about Spot the dog? He had a copy of Spot (among other things,) in Scottish Gaelic to read to his children when they were small.
Are you putting me on? Aren’t you a collector/connoisseur? Only Scotch whiskey has the ‘e’ while all the rest are ‘whisky.’
Some of the pics look like the Quiraing but the website suggests that much of it was filmed near Sleat which is well south of the Quiraing… which doesn’t mean that it isn’t the Quiraing.
If Hebrew, once a dead language, can go unspoken as a day-to-day language for centuries, then be revived and reinvented into its current existance, there is every reason in the world to hope that Scottish Gaelic, which still has hoards of native speakers, may one day be spoken across all of Scotland. All that is required is the persistance of the speakers. I mean, Scottish Gaelic is not Eyak by any means.
It’s interesting (to me, at least) how the discussion of a movie in Scottish Gaelic brings about discussion of the future of the language and the area where it’s spoken, but Scottish Gaelic music does not necessarily (in my experience, at least).
Had Hebrew fallen that far out of quotidien use before the Israeli state? Obviously it plays a much greater civic role because of the state.
As for some of TSP’s comments, part of the dynamic is that the language and culture were, for the most part, only significant in the Highlands and Islands. In the rest of Scotland they have been speaking English about as long as England. So for many Scots the connection to Gaelic is merely sentimental.
There’s a forum on the Seachd website where it appears the writer/director has posted that theatrical relese will begin in August and DVD release sometime next year.
As for whisk(e)y, you’re right. I had it backwards… it’s past my bedtime.
…they spell it “whisky,” the scotch spelling, because they and their forebears are Scottish and that’s the way the Scots do it- just have a look at any bottle of Scotch if you don’t believe me. http://www.alcoholreviews.com/SPIRITS/makersmark.html
No, Scottish Gaelic is most certainly not Eyak or Kiksht, or any of the numerous Native American languages that will be gone forever within the next few years. Gaelic is not doomed to the same fate that befell its cousins Manx and Cornish (although there are a few small groups of people trying quixotically to revive those). There aren’t going to be teams of anthropologists scouring Lewis in 100 years searching for the last Gaelic speaker alive. Provided that there continue to be people with an interest in Scottish music, history, and culture, there will continue to be people who take an interest in Gaelic. The question is whether in 100 years you will be able to walk into a school in Portree or a pub in Lochboisdale and hear people speaking Gaelic because it’s a community language and it’s natural for them to be speaking it in a community setting. That is a question that remains up in the air, but the answer will probably become pretty clear within the next 30-40 years. To suggest that Gaelic can achieve a phoenix-like rebirth across the whole of Scotland is nothing but fantasy talk. Go to http://www.bord-na-gaidhlig.org.uk and check out Bòrd Na Gàidhlig’s recommended plans to the Scottish Executive regarding the future of Gaelic. There’s some very impressive and doable stuff there for reversing Gaelic’s continued decline and creating a viable network of Gaelic-medium schools in the Highlands & Islands and in urban centers. However, the goals are modest: the best that can be hoped for is that the numbers can be regrown up to around the 100,000 mark over the next 50 years and that from there, the language will be able to continue under its own dynamism.
Last month, I attended a lecture at Portland State University by Dr. Bernard Spolsky, a minority language specialist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Dr. Spolsky gave five examples of contemporary attempts at language revival, only one of which, Hebrew, could be deemed successful. Irish and Maori, a language often trumpeted as currently experiencing a “renaissance”, were cited as glaring failures. Dr. Spolsky cautioned the audience that although there are often groups of dedicated people with the best of intentions that try to revive languages, it doesn’t often work simply because human beings generally lack the patience and perseverance to stick with the tremendous effort involved. Reviving a language means making a conscious choice to speak it exclusively every day for the rest of your life and most people aren’t willing to do that–even if they are native speakers of that language. Getting an hour or two of the language at school every day for 12 years doesn’t cut it, as the situation with Irish clearly illustrates. Hebrew worked because of a variety of social factors, a need for a single unifying language, and a steady decline in the social favorability of Yiddish. The situation in most other countries with minority languages is very, very different.
I do have a genuine love for Scottish Gaelic (and Irish as well) and since I first was exposed to it about 10 years ago, I have been trying to learn it off and on and use it as much as I can (which, sadly, isn’t all that much when you live in Portland, Oregon). I have been fortunate to meet people in Scotland that have dedicated their lives to working to create a viable future for Gaelic and I believe that such a thing can happen–on a limited scale for about 2% of the population. That is the best that can be hoped for in the forseeable future.
Tha mi’n dòchas a’ Ghàidhlig agus cultar nan Gaidheal a’ fàs anns an teachdail, gu-h airidh le na Gaidheil Òga na-h Alba. Bidh toilicht’ a’ fhaicinn am film seo agus proiseactan eile anns na bliadhnaichean a’ teannadh.
Seachd should be worth seeing for the music alone.
