Working paper on Gaelic corpus planning

Gaelic recordings on the Island Voices YouTube channel provide the empirical data to inform the Leacan 2 corpus planning project on how the language is spoken in real life.

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“Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies†is an online open access series with a mission to develop “sociolinguistic, applied and educational frameworks adequate for the analysis of language, literacies, interaction and learning; [and] modes of intervention in language policy and practice that are productively tuned to the realities of contemporary lifeâ€.

Island Voices Archive Manager and Researcher Gordon Wells's paper "" is the first contribution on Gaelic in the quickly growing and highly diverse WPULL series.

Here's the abstract:

"A detailed example is presented of an aspect of Scottish Gaelic corpus planning, focussing on the use of community-based authentic speech recordings to inform the production of guidance on a range of grammatical issues. Attention is drawn to a salient distinction between dialectal and idiolectal variation in relation to this task, and there is discussion of particular syntactic and semantic forms selected from the project’s stated terms of reference. Concluding remarks suggest and discuss issues for further research. Deeper linguistic analysis of the “phrasal verb” in use should throw light on some of the complexities of bilingual competences that may not currently be fully acknowledged in the Scottish Gaelic context. These complexities also have significance for the broader consideration of key practical planning processes entailing community participation and empowerment, as well as the construction of effective linguistic “authority”. These issues highlight the complex nature and significant scale of the challenges involved in effectively conducting this kind of work in a way that will gain real traction at community level in a context of ongoing language shift away from bilingualism towards increasingly monolingual use of English."