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Since the mid-1970s, efforts to sustain and revitalise Gaelic in Scotland have gained new momentum and prominence, even as the language has continued to decline in demographic terms. Public and institutional provision for Gaelic, especially in the fields of education and broadcasting, has grown substantially in recent years, and Gaelic has increasingly been perceived as an essential aspect of Scottish cultural distinctiveness, and as such connected (indirectly rather than directly) to the movement for Scottish self-government Since 2005 this recognition of Gaelic has been formalised in legislation, the Gaelic Language Act (Scotland) 2005, which establishes a Gaelic language board, Bord na Gàidhlig, with powers to undertake strategic language planning for Gaelic at a national level. The continuing decline in speaker numbers and language use suggests that the policies put in place up to now to sustain and promote Gaelic have been inadequate; better integrated and more forceful strategies are urgently needed if the language shift in favour of English is to be reversed.
Historical and demographic background
Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), a member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages that is closely related to Irish and Manx, is generally believed to have been brought to southwest Scotland by settlers from Ireland in the early centuries of the common era, although a minority view questions the Irish origin and suggests that Gaelic may have reached Scotland many centuries earlier (McLeod 2004a: 15).
Linguists have disagreed as to how and when Scottish Gaelic came to diverge from Irish. The once widely accepted theory of 'Common Gaelic' asserted that significant divergence did not begin until c. 1300 (Jackson 1951); more recently, some scholars have challenged this model, arguing that differentiation probably began as soon as Gaelic speakers began to settle in Scotland (Ó Buachalla 2002; cf. Ó Maolalaigh 2008). Certainly by the early seventeenth century Irish speakers perceived Scottish Gaelic as a distinct, though perhaps still mutually intelligible, variety.
By the eleventh century CE, Gaelic had spread throughout almost all of what is now mainland Scotland and had become established as the language of the Scottish monarchy, but language shift in the south and east of the country duringthe late Middle Ages, driven by a range of economic and political factors, meant that from the fourteenth century...