BOOK REVIEW

William Lamb: Scottish Gaelic Speech and Writing:Register Variation in an Endangered Language(Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics 16)

Clo Ollscoil na Banrıona, Belfast, 2008, 332 pp, Pb £19.50,ISBN 978 0 85389 895 5

Margaret Harrison Æ Matthieu Boyd

Received: 2 March 2009 / Accepted: 6 March 2009 / Published online: 26 March 2009

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

This book, based on the author’s 2002 doctoral dissertation, is the first serious

linguistic analysis of register variation in Scottish Gaelic. It includes, as Appendix 1,

a revised version of Lamb’s descriptive grammar of Gaelic which was published

separately in 2002. Lamb transcribed a corpus of over 81,000 words, distributed

fairly evenly across eight registers, four spoken and four written: traditional

narrative, conversation, radio interview, and sports commentary, as well as news

scripts, fiction, formal prose, and popular writing. He marked the words in his

database with 96 tags (indicating various grammatical properties), and used the most

frequently-occurring tags to isolate defining characteristics of the various registers

and map the distinctions between them. A rigorous analysis of the findings leads him

to the conclusion that Gaelic largely follows the patterns recognized by scholars

working on register variation in other languages—the registers of spoken and written

Gaelic are robustly different from one another, in terms of morphology and syntax as

well as lexis. The registers are studied from several dichotomous perspectives—

narrative/non-narrative, informational/interactive, reportage-based/non-reportage-

based, formal/informal, and so on—and with respect to five contextual factors that

Lamb saw as having strong effects on the character of an utterance: production

constraints, discourse freedom, informationality, level of interaction, and producer

characteristics.

This is unquestionably a ground-breaking study, and a tremendously exciting

one. Nothing like it had been done for Gaelic, and only rarely (if at all) for other

minority languages. The proof of the basic point (originally made by Nancy Dorian

in response to Wolfgang Dressler) that endangered languages like Gaelic continue

to exhibit the same degree of register variation as dominant languages like English

is, of course, crucial, and should interest linguists everywhere; the specifics Lamb

provides about what distinguishes these registers will be extremely valuable to

M. Harrison (&) � M. Boyd

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

e-mail: maharris@fas.harvard.edu

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Lang Policy (2009) 8:415–417

DOI 10.1007/s10993-009-9134-y

anyone interested in Gaelic. (Unfortunately, Lamb’s writing is not really accessible

to a Gaelic-speaking reader who does not have some formal training in linguistics.)

The volume of material that Lamb has used in his study is extraordinarily

impressive, as is the clarity of his exposition and the rigorous way he draws upon,

and involves himself in, wider debates within the field of linguistics. One hopes that

others will respond vigorously to Lamb’s work, and that this quickening of scholarly

interest will benefit Gaelic.

That said, it is upsetting to see Lamb repeatedly refer to Gaelic as a ‘‘dying’’

language (e.g., pp. 190, 195). There is a world of difference between an endangered

language, even one observably in decline, and a language destined to become

‘‘irretrievably lost or unstable […] extinct’’ (p. 196). After describing it this way, to

suggest that further research (establishing ‘‘a large corpus of spontaneous, spoken

Gaelic’’, p. 196) will have ‘‘broad and lasting benefits for Scottish Gaelic teachers,

students, and users in general’’ (p. 196) is counterintuitive at best. Lamb must think

that he is merely being realistic, but Gaelic is not yet a lost cause, and such

pessimistic assumptions will only harm speakers’ confidence in the worth of their

language. Lamb’s findings imply that the funding for Gaelic media is doing

worthwhile work in supporting this rich register variation; it seems a shame to

undermine that conclusion with fatalistic assumptions about the language’s future.

The descriptive grammar of Gaelic (Appendix 1) is an important work in its own

right, and serious students of the language stand to gain a great deal from it. The

treatment of the verbal system is especially noteworthy, as Lamb adopts the innovative

concepts of tensed ‘‘definite’’ and untensed ‘‘indefinite’’ modality proposed by Donald

Macaulay. The grammar does, however, suffer from some inaccuracies and omissions.

Importantly, the example sentences (presumably from Lamb’s own corpus) lack

source citations, which is especially problematic when anomalous forms or usages are

given.

The phonology section does not describe a few important features of the language:

for example, it does not list all contexts in which lenition—one of Gaelic’s most

distinctive phonological features—occurs, nor is nasalization discussed until the

morphology section.

Lamb’s example of a suppletive noun (p. 204) is poorly chosen. Bean ‘woman’

(dat. sg. mnaoi, gen. sg. mna, nom. pl. mnathan, gen. pl. ban) is not truly suppletive,

since in mna, etc., mn-\Proto-Celtic *bn- (cf. Gaulish bnanom, gen. pl.). A better

example of a suppletive noun in modern Sc.G. might be bo ‘cow’; either beothaichean‘animals’ or crodh ‘cattle’ is normally used for the nominative plural.

Lamb’s discussion of ownership (p. 213) ran counter to our own experience of

the language. The fact that we would prefer an taigh agam ‘the house at me’ to

mo thaigh ‘my house’ does not mean that we would prefer an taigh aig Tearlach‘the house at Charles’ to taigh Thearlaich ‘Charles’ house’; we would not. The

connection between the two is less clear than presented.

Lamb’s analysis of the definite article following the prepositions ann an ‘in’, le‘with’, and ri ‘to’ (p. 225) is also problematic. Lamb states that the forms anns an,

leis an, and ris an ‘‘incorporate the definite article’’ (the s) which is then ‘‘obligatorily

reduplicated’’. Diachronically, this is inaccurate; the forms derive from preposition-

plus-article compounds in Old Irish (isin, lasin, frisin). Synchronically, Lamb’s

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reading (‘‘in the the house’’ for anns an taigh ‘in the house’) is far-fetched; the most

sensible synchronic analysis of the data would be Colin Mark’s view: ‘‘when

followed by a def[inite] noun [with the article] the form [of ann an ‘in’] is anns’’

(2004: 38).

Despite these and other less significant inaccuracies, Lamb’s work is exception-

ally thorough and scholarly. Scottish Gaelic Speech and Writing is, as a whole, a

great leap forward for the rigorous analysis of the language, and deserves high

praise, not to mention attentive reading and a lively response. Further publications

by Lamb, particularly in connection with his plan to establish a corpus of

spontaneous speech, will be of the highest importance for the study of Gaelic, and

for the study of minority language policy in general.

Author Biographies

Margaret Harrison is a first-year PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of Celtic Lan-

guages and Literatures. She focuses primarily on Scottish Gaelic studies, and has a particular interest in

modern folklore. She spent 2 years at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, where she learned Gaelic and conducted

fieldwork for her undergraduate thesis on waulking songs.

Matthieu Boyd a graduate of Princeton University and University College Dublin, is a fourth-year PhD

candidate in Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, focusing on the interplay of

medieval Celtic and Francophone literature, and on modern Breton and the other modern Celtic

languages.

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