"This Could Have Been Mine": Scottish Gaelic Learners in North
America Michael Newton, University of Richmond The Scottish
Gaelic learners' movement is a recent development in North
America that parallels the mainstream Scottish heritage movement
in some ways, but is strongly oppositional to it in others. This
essay describes characteristics of this phenomenon by analyzing
the range of people involved, their motivations for learning,
their goals, the creation of community among learners, the
interaction between language learning and discourses of
ethnicity, and the interface between Gaelic learners in North
America and native Gaelic communities in Scotland and Cape
Breton Island. Scottish Gaelic, Celtic, Scottish-Americans,
ethnic revival, minority languages, heritage languages. View
Entire Article Table of Contents |3.||A Profile of Gaelic
Learners| |4.||Motivations and Goals| |5.||A Continental
Community with Regional Variations| |8.||Constructing Ethnicity
and Identity| |9.||Belonging: People, Language, an