15 April 2026: Manifesto commitments to Gaelic and Scots I: I have been scrutinising the main political parties’ manifestos for the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May for what they say about the Gaelic and Scots languages.  Four manifestos have now been published.  Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no mention in the Reform manifesto of Gaelic or Scots and just one in the Conservative manifesto, a complaint about Scottish Enterprise having to produce a Gaelic Language Plan being an ‘unnecessary reporting requirement’.  Rather more surprisingly, there is also only one mention in the Labour manifesto which was published on Monday: ‘If we want to reverse depopulation and protect Gaelic as a living language, we need to sustain rural livelihoods’.  This passage comes in a section on the Highlands and Islands and does at least recognise this as the heartland of Gaelic and the importance of a healthy economy to the maintenance of the language.  In contrast, the manifesto of the Scottish Green Party (SGP), published yesterday, contains a number of commitments to Gaelic and Scots: the importance of increasing the number of Gaelic speaking teachers for the provision of Gaelic medium education; support of Gaelic speaking communities through the development of Areas of Linguistic Significance; ensuring that Scots has equal status in law to Gaelic; support of the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig College on Skye as the national centre for Gaelic language, education, and culture; and development of a national Gaelic and Scots youth development strategy.  It is perhaps churlish to suggest that the SGP, which has at least taken support of Scotland’s two indigenous languages seriously, could have gone further still but that discussion is for another day.

31 December 2025: my final blog of the year is published today, on the last day of the year; a large number of community languages are spoken in Scotland; however, apart from Gaelic and BSL, only Urdu and Cantonese are widely taught in Scottish schools; much more responsive to the wishes of minority language communities to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage are complementary schools, organised by communities themselves, and, to a lesser extent, adult education classes; read my blog here 

27 October 2025: my latest blog, on modern languages in Scottish schools and universities, is published today; there has been a sharp fall in the number of students studying languages in Scottish schools, particularly French and German, partly offset by an increase in the number studying Spanish.  The numbers studying other languages are often very small.  The number of students studying modern languages has also fallen at Scottish universities but, surprisingly, in Spanish as well as in French and German.  Brexit has been a factor but, in many ways, it has simply reinforced trends that have been at work for a long time; read my blog here