A wrod on errors

Since I started learning languages, I've had lots of discussions, both online and face-to-face, about the nature of errors. What always surprised me was how blasé many people were about errors -- including teachers.

There are two particular philosophies that I find quite worrying.

First:

"Errors take care of themselves."

The belief expressed by many is that there's no need for any systematic correction of errors, as the learner will work them out given enough time and contact with the language.

In the extreme case, this means no correction whatsoever, leaving the student to pick it up from input.
In the more moderate case, the teacher is expected only to give minimal correction, relating to the very specific error.

But isn't it self-evident that this is not the case? Hasn't everyone met at least one immigrant who still speaks with errors that are systematic and predictable? It's easy to dismiss this as an immigrant "language bubble", with the immigrant living and socialising within his minority community, but that only works in a major urban area, where there is enough of a concentrated population for clique community to form. But when you get to a rural community, and there's only one or two minority families in the area, why is it that a pensioner who has lived in the country for half his life still sounds decidedly foreign? And not just in accent, but in language patterns too?

Errors do not take care of themselves.

So on to the second:

"Errors don't matter - native speakers make mistakes too"

This one I've heard in many situations, but the most potentially damaging of these is in the learning of minority languages, because in those instances, it is argued that a learner who has failed to learn correctly is somehow equal to a native speaker.

This is a pretty insidious leap of logic, and confuses two issues.

First up, you have the distinction between two classes of errors: systemic errors where the speaker doesn't know the correct structure or word; and performance errors, or "slips", where the speaker stumbles during speech, despite being perfectly comfortable with the correct form.

Then we've got that hoary old chestnut of "bad grammar". Apparently, when we split our infinitives, or end a sentence with a preposition, or use "who" for a grammatical object, we're natives making errors. Well, no. People "break" these rules all the time, so they are in fact not errors. At worst, they are variant forms and therefore a correct form; at best they are the most common forms, hence the correct form.

In truth, the only type of error a native can make is a slip, a performance error, because a native has a full internal model of their language (in a particular dialect), assuming we are talking about someone without a mental or learning disability.

As many linguists say: there is no such thing as a common native error.

Non-native errors are real, and informative

But common non-native errors do exist, and we do a disservice to ourselves and/or our students by ignoring them, as errors provide a very useful insight into what's wrong with a learner's internal model of the language.

The main inspiration for this post was an error I noticed recently in my own French.

It was something along the lines of *ça ne me rien dit, which should've been ça ne me dit rien. I noticed the mistake immediately, and what I said was the corrected version, but my brain had initially formed the sentence incorrectly.

Why? What was the underlying cause of the error?

For those of you who aren't familiar with French, basic negatives traditionally consist of two parts: the particle ne before the verb and any clitic pronouns, and a second particle (pas=not, rien=nothing, jamais=never etc) after the verb. Or rather, I should say "after the first verb", which is more correct, even if some teachers don't bother to go that far.

You see, in French, there is very often only one verb -- where we add "do" in the negative (I do not know), the French don't (je ne sais pas -- compare with the archaic English I know not).

As high school had drummed this into me in simple (one word) tenses, I initially had great difficulty in correctly forming compound verb structures -- I would erroneously place the "pas" after the final verb:
*je ne peux voir pas instead of je ne peux pas voir
and
*je n'ai vu pas instead of je n'ai pas vu

That was a diagnosable error, and having diagnosed it, I consciously worked to eliminate it, and now I have no problems with ne... pas.

And yet I made this mistake with the placing of jamais, even though it's the exact same structure... and when I made this mistake, I recognised that it was something I struggle with frequently. Furthermore, I make that mistake with every negative word except "pas".

So I have a diagnosis for this error: my internal model has incorrectly built two structures where it should have created one, because a native speaker has only one. It is clearly, therefore, a non-native error.

(Actually, there's a longer story about a series of errors and corrections, but let's keep it short, shall we?)

Taking action...

What can we do as teachers?

Well, it's not easy, but we have to monitor our students constantly to identify consistent errors. Moreover, we have to look out for apparently inconsistent errors -- I say "apparently" inconsistent, because there really is no such thing as an inconsistent error. If it appears inconsistent, it means that the learner has done what I did with French negatives: used two rules where one should be used. It is then the teachers job not to correct the broken rule, but to guide the student to use the correct rule.

The more you spot these errors, the more you'll see them recurring in different students, and you'll find that they're actually pretty common errors. The fixes you implement for your students will feed into your initial teaching as a way to avoid the errors in the first place, and everyone wins in the long-term.

Sustainability - the missing word in language revitalisation?

Since the start of the century, a new watchword has been on the rise in the world of development: sustainability.

The word started its life associated with ecology, with ideas such as "sustainable forestry", meaning only logging as many trees as a forest can grow back and "sustainable fisheries" – only taking as many fish from the sea, lake or river as can be replaced at a natural rate.

Sustainability moved away from the idea of ecology, to an idea of economics – sustainable explotation of natural resources isn't just a matter of caring about nature for its own sake, but rather the basic common sense of not undermining future supplies in the quest for short-term profit.

But economic sustainability is about the availability of all resources, not merely natural ones.  An economically sustainable system requires no ongoing subsidy, even if it needs some initial investment.  You will rarely hear the word "sustainable" used to describe renewable energy, as while it may use natural resources in a sustainable way, it is not an economically self-sustaining system.

Charities the world over are taking on this idea of sustainability within economic development in poorer areas, and rather than providing indiscriminate aid, they are starting to target their aid on providing startup funding for economically and ecologically sustainable businesses, serving local needs and generating local employment while leaving the local environment intact and friendly to continued human habitation.

And here's where we get to language revitalisation, because language revitalisation is increasingly being recognised as being inextricably linked to community development, and yet sustainability is something of a missing element in a lot of decisions surrounding public funding of language development.

This is not to say that sustainability has been excluded – a few years ago Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the Scottish Gaelic development agency, granted a large sum to a private company in order to fund the development of proprietary teaching method, and there was a large bonus written into the contract contingent on reaching a certain number of learners, and crucially completing the course.  But this was limited funding, and the company was expected to make its own profits directly through student fees and sales of supplementary products.  That is sustainable spending, but while it's there at that level, it's missing elsewhere.

The word that Bòrd na Gàidhlig and many other language development agencies worldwide seem to be missing isn't actually "sustainability", but rather "ecosystem", because every project is viewed in isolation, which is a particular problem when you're dealing with projects to produce learner materials.  If we look at many of the materials projects out there, it is very difficult to see how they can be plugged in to wider teaching, and most of this is down to the problems around rights of use arising from copyright.

As an example, I'd point to some of the resources available at learngaelic.net.

First of all, there's a database of excerpts from the daily news programme An Là, from BBC Alba.  The site has various news stories in video format with an interactive transcript, but they are expected to be viewed on the website only.  You are not expected to download the to watch offline and (maddeningly) there is nothing there to clarify to teachers what rights they have (if any) to use this as a classroom resource.  And heck, even if I was permitted to use it in class, I still couldn't, because my policy as a teacher is never ever use streaming in class.  It breaks far too often.  In this case, the problem is compounded by the fact that the video is encoded in high-quality, and the player doesn't maintain a large video cache, meaning that on a slow connection, you just cannot watch it... which is obviously also a problem for the self-teacher at home.

The other video series at learngaelic.net is entitled Look@LearnGaelic, and consists of specially commissioned videos including interviews and short documentary style videos spoken slowly and clearly, with accompanying transcripts and/or subtitling.  These are good quality resources, but they're hemmed into the site, and kept away from teachers.

I mean, the video player doesn't even have a full-screen button, so even if you put it up on a projector, you'd still have a horribly small image – not what you want in a classroom.  (From a technical perspective, it gets worse.  The BBC Alba videos are in standard TV definition, as you'd expect, as BBC Alba isn't an HD channel.  The media player on the website has SD dimensions.  The same player is used for the Look videos, but the ones I examined were in high def, thus meaning I was streaming almost 4x as much data as could be shown on the screen anyway.)

What a waste!  These are materials paid for almost entirely with public money, and they're of value to the public, but the public won't use them, because without a course or a teacher behind them, they're stumbling in the dark looking for something that's appropriate to them.

As I said, it's not only in Scottish Gaelic that this problem arises.  A month or two ago I learned of an Irish "phrase of the week" series free on the net, funded by the Irish language agency (whether fully or in part, I can't be sure).  But it was copyrighted to the people that made it, all rights reserved, so it was only available to the independent learner.  The thing that really irked me was that this was basic beginners' phrases – the sort of thing that everyone would be learning in their lessons or from their books anyway.  It added nothing to the "ecosystem".  When I started writing this post, I went searching for it... and I can't find it, because there are dozens of "beginners' phrases" video serieses on YouTube (not subsidised) so this series adds no value whatsoever.

So what is the sustainable solution?  How do we get the material into the hands of the teachers without disadvantaging the creators?

The way I see it, there are two sides to this, and a distinction has to be made between "individually sustainable" activity and "ecosystem" activity, with distinct models of ownership of intellectual property for each.

Individually sustainable activity

A full language course could and should be individually sustainable in that it makes enough money to fund itself.  In such a system, the ownership should remain with producer of the material, because it is only through control of the material that the course can generate revenue.

Ecosystem activity

When a production house creates an educational resource, they retain full rights to the material.  A great amount of this material is free of charge to the end user, and generates no profits, so is in no way sustainable.  So we should think of it as analogous to an environmental issue.

When an environmental group gets a grant to repair human damage to a local stream, this does not result in them gaining ownership of the stream.  The stream is not a business and cannot be seen as "individually sustainable" divorced from the wider ecosystem of natural and human use.  The end-goal of the environmental work is to the wider public benefit.  Crucially, though, you wouldn't pay for a river cleanup if you knew that the next day, some factory upstream was just going to pollute it all again.

So any activity that cannot be individually financially self-sustaining can only be sustainable if it feeds into and nourishes a wider productive ecosystem, and individual resources should not be under individual control.

Instead, development agencies should be commissioning the materials and taking ownership of them.  These materials can then be made available for exploitation within commercial activity.

In this model, the resources are an indirect subsidy, and crucially a shared subsidy – the agency pays once for something that is used in a dozen courses.  Not only is this cheaper for the development agency, but it would allow much more experimentation and innovation.

I could recut the videos, reorder the videos, recombine the videos; I could optimise their applicability to my students.  This is stuff I cannot afford to do as an individual teacher if I'm starting from zero.  As the material is freely available anyway, I can't pretend it's mine and "sell" it – the only "product" I would be selling is the teaching, and my teaching would be improved.  I would work just as hard, I would charge the same as I would otherwise, and in the end it would be the students that benefited most from it.

A final thought...

People who want to make their materials free often add a condition of "non-commercial" to their license.  But the major publishing houses are not the only commercial entities in language teaching.  Evening class teachers and private tutors are usually self-employed and therefore commercial actors, and in some parts of the world even schools and universities are private sector institutions.  Non-commercial licenses are rarely appropriate to education materials....

Minority Languages aren't tied to Political Parties

It's all too often that you'll see people decrying Scottish Gaelic as some kind of tartan-wrapped plot by the Scottish Nationalist Party to trick people into independence.

Well, sorry, but it's not.

A) Gaelic has had cross-party support, and cross-party opposition in both Westminster and Holyrood.

B) Scottish Gaelic is more of a weapon against Scottish nationalism than a tool for it.  After all, people see it as a tartan-wrapped plot by the Scottish Nationalist Party to trick people into indepedence.  People don't trust it.  People don't like it.  Which is a bit mean of them, but that's beside the point.  Gaelic doesn't win elections.  No party claims it as their own.

Anyhow, back to A: cross-party support.

An early-day motion has been presented to parliament by Tom Harris MP, Labour member for Glasgow South.  This motion calls for Westminster to give the same status to Gaelic as it has already done for Welsh.  The motion is sponsored by Malcolm Bruce, Liberal Democrat MP for Gordon constituency (Aberdeenshire); Tom Clarke, Labour, Coatbridge Chryston and Bellshill; Jim Cunningham, Labour, Coventry South (yes, England); Graeme Morrice, Labour, Livingston; Jim Sheridan, Labour, Paisley and Renfrewshire North.

To date, 25 MPs have signed.  Yes, all 5 SNP MPs have signed, but then they would, wouldn't they?  You might also expect Plaid Cymru and the SDLP to sign, and 2 of Plaid Cymru's 3 have signed and all 3 SDLP MPs have signed. But the motion has been backed by 3 LibDems and 12 Labour MPs, so over half the support is from mainstream parties.  7 of the MPs represent English constituencies, and in addition to the 2 Plaid signatories, there are 2 Welsh Labour MPs.

It is clearly not a partisan issue, and the majority (14 out of 25) are not in Scottish constituencies.  It was proposed by Labour.

A language is not a political party, and people would do well to remember that....

Start small, or start big?

So, you're moving to a bilingual area, are you?  So which language do you want to learn first?  Well, in most cases, one of the languages will be clearly dominant. In the regions of Spain, that means Spanish. In France, French. In Italy, Italian. So it would make sense to learn the dominant one first, right?

...maybe, but just think about it for a moment.  The other day, I was talking about the dangers of falling into the "good enough" trap.  When it comes to bilingual areas, the same trap exists, because the dominant language will always be "good enough", making the effort required to learn the minority language seem not worth the bother.  And if you're having to live, you're always going to end up falling back on the dominant language in order to make yourself understood, meaning you're not going to get the opportunities to practice the minority language if you already know the majority one.

So if you're genuine about learning the local language, it's probably best not to learn the dominant language beforehand.  You'll succeed better if your minority language is stronger, so that you only resort to the dominant language when the minority language is unavailable.

Counterintuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it's easier to start with the harder material...

In general, whenever we teach or learn something new, we start with the easy stuff then build on to the more difficult stuff.  But this isn't always a good idea, because sometimes the easy stuff causes us to be stuck in a "good enough" situation.

When I started learning the harmonica, I learned to play with a "pucker technique", ie I covered the wholes with my lips.  The alternative technique of "tongue blocking" (self descriptive, really), was just "too" difficult for me as a learner.  So for a long, long time, the pucker was "good enough" and tongue blocking was too difficult for not enough reward.  It limited my technique for a good number of years, and now that I can do it, I wish I'd learnt it years ago.

The same block of effort vs reward happens in all spheres of learning.  If you learn something easy, but of limited utility, it's far too easy to just continue along doing the same old thing, and it's far too difficult to learn something new, so you stagnate.  Harmonicas, singing, swimming, skiing, mathematics, computer programming; there's always the temptation to just hack about with what you've got rather than learn a new and appropriate technique.

This problem, unsurprisingly, rears its ugly head all too often in language learning, but with language it has an altogether insidious form: the "like your native language" form.  If you've got a choice of forms, one is going to be more like your native language than the other, and this is therefore easier to learn.  Obviously, this form is going to be "good enough", and the immediate reward to the learner for learning the more difficult form (ie different from the native language) isn't enough to justify the effort.  However, in the long term, the learner who seeks mastery is going to need that form in order to understand language encountered in the real world.

The problem gets worse, though, when you're talking about dialectal forms.

Here's an example.  Continuous tenses in the Celtic languages traditionally use a noun as the head verbal element (known as the verbal noun or verb-noun).  I am at creation [of] blog post, as it were.  Because it's a noun, the concept of a "direct object" is quite alien, and instead genitives are used to tie the "object" to the verbal noun.  In the case of object pronouns, they use possessives.  I am at its creation instead of *I am at creation [of] it.  Note that the object therefore switches sides from after to before the verbal noun.

Now in Welsh, the verbal noun has become identical to the verb root, and is losing its identity as a noun.  This has led to a duplication of the object pronoun, once as a possessive, once as a plain pronoun -- effectively I am in its creation [of] it.  This really isn't a stable state, as very few languages would tolerate this sort of redundancy, and the likely end-state is that the possessive gets lost, and the more English-like form (I am in creation [of] it) will win out.  In fact, there are many speakers who already talk this way.

But for the learner, learning this newer form at the beginning is a false efficiency.  There are plenty of places where the old form is still current, so unless the learner knows for certain that they'll be spending their time in an area with the newer form, they're going to need the conservative form anyway.  To a learner who knows the conservative form, adapting to the newer form is trivially easy, but for someone who knows only the newer form, the conservative form is really quite difficult to grasp.

So teaching simple forms early risks restricting the learner's long-term potential.  So while you want to make life simple for yourself or you students, make sure you're not doing them or yourself a disservice.

An unfunny joke

An Englishman, a German, an American and a guy from Barra walk into a bar.  "Tha Gàidhlig cho cudromach," says the Englishman [Gaelic is so important].  "Tha Gàidhlig cho sònraichte," says the German [special]. "Tha Gàidhlig cho breagha," says the American.  "I'm going for a slash," says the Barrach.

Not funny at all, I'm sure you'll agree, but you might not fully appreciate just how unfunny it truly is.  In order to understand it, though, you need to know that the Barrach is a native-speaking Gael.  So why did he speak in English?

It's something linguists like to call "divergence".  We use language to indicate social distance from, and proximity to, others.  When we speak like someone, we show variously agreement, respect or even affection.  I find my accent when speaking any foreign language varies depending on who I'm talking to, as I try to match them (particularly if it's someone I fancy).

The Barrach in the "joke" isn't rejecting Gaelic, then, but is indicating that he doesn't associate himself with the three foreigners.

What we have here is the core paradox of the current Gaelic revival.  While everyone says that the goal is for Gaelic to be considered normal in all contexts, the act of attempting to achieve this is actually making Gaelic into a far more self-conscious choice.  Gaelic is at risk of developing a sort of "personality" based on the feelings of the loudest advocates of the language, and therefore people who do not identify with this personality will therefore find themselves subconsciously pushing away from the language.

Well, I say "at risk", but I actually think that this is already the case in many parts of Scotland.  While not a statistically significant portion of the population, there is a reasonable number of native Gaels in Edinburgh.  Yet when there is a Gaelic-related event put on, it's often mostly the learners that turn up.  The natives will happily sit and talk to each other in their own language, but Gaelic in a public setting seems to be overly politicised for most to identify with.  (The association of Gaelic with nationalism has no real basis in fact - Gaelic is a language and is spoken by people of every political allegiance.)

The problem is that the domain of the well-meaning learner is stretching further and encroaching into the few remaining Gaelic heartlands.  Adult learners are gaining ever-increasing air-time on television and radio, as well as positions at all levels of Gaelic education.  Even several prominant members of the Scottish Government's Gaelic language agency are adult learners.  People are even being encouraged to learn Gaelic in order to teach in Gaelic medium schools, despite it being self-evident that the education available is insufficient to bring anyone close to a near-native model.

It is now often said that Gaelic's future is in the hands of the learners.  This is true, but it does not mean what it is supposed to mean.  We as learners cannot save Gaelic, but we do have the power to kill it within a generation.

If we want Gaelic to continue, then we must be humble.  We must accept that:

1. we are not "Gaelic speakers", and we never will be;
2. the books we study do not, in fact, contain "correct" Gaelic, but someone else's guess about what Gaelic is - the natives are the only real model worth following;
3. Gaelic is not "ours" or "our heritage" - it belongs to the Gaels;
4. and the most difficult of all: we shouldn't put ourselves forward as representatives of the language, either in a professional or amateur capacity.

In fact, I think it would be far more healthy if no-one even defined themselves as a "Gaelic learner", but instead as a "language learner".  Gaelic is a language, just like any other.  Learning another language or two will not only help you see this, but it will also actually improve your Gaelic.

United we stand, divided we fall: Multiple minorities

Anyone living in Scotland will be familiar with the big noise made in the media over Gaelic.  Mostly it's just about how a minority is getting money (incidentally, the figures aren't really that high), bolstered by the claim that it was "never spoken here".  Every now and then we see that argument reinforced with "what about Scots"?

The claim "never spoken here" is untrue in most places, as most parts of Scotland had Gaelic at some point in history, and a lot of it still had some even only 200 years ago.  But this is an irrelevancy, and people get there blood up picking over the semantics of never.  In the final analysis, history is less important than the present: if people don't identify with a language now, then it simply isn't their language.  Sadly a core minority of Gaelic activists do not accept this and get people's backs up by effectively telling their fellow countrymen that they aren't true Scots.

Some people who support Scots call Gaelic an incomer language from Ireland.  Some people who support Gaelic call Scots an incomer language from England.  Well so what?  Every language came from somewhere else to start off with.  (And incidentally, Scots came from overseas, not from England.  Common thought still says Gaelic came via Ireland, but it came from Iberia before that, and somewhere else before that.)  The simple fact of the matter is that both are present in Scotland today, and both are part of lineages that have been spoken in parts of what is now Scotland for well over a millennium.  In my book, that makes them both "Scottish languages".

In arguments such as these, people often reach back and invoke the names of legendary historic Scots.  A recent blog post claims Wallace and Robert the Bruce as Gaelic speakers.  "Wallace" is an Anglo-Saxon name for a speaker of Brythonic (related to the modern "Welsh").  So maybe he spoke Gaelic, but he mostly likely was at least bilingual.

Robert de Brus was from the Norman nobility, and though to have been brought up in the Scots-speaking southeast, or in the northeast of England where even now the everday speech is more like Scots than Standard English.  His mother was a Gael.  Why did a Norman lord marry a Gaelic countess?  This romanticised in legend as some great romance, but in truth the most likely explanation is that the de Brus line had been claiming the throne since the death of Alexander, and Bruce's grandfather (after being denied the crown in favour of Baliol) realised that he needed to get the Gaelic clan chieftains on-side if one of his descendants was ever to be crowned king.  So he married his son to a Gael.  When the young Robert the Bruce courted the chiefs and lairds, he would have been able to address each and every one of them in their own language, and as one of them.

In his blog post at Tocasaid, Mac an t-Srònaich seems to suggest Scots is a massive conspiracy to divide the people of Scotland by separating them from their true language.  This couldn't be further from the truth.  Scotland has always been divided and has always resisted the imposition of a shared identity from one of its groups.  Scotland was at its best when a few visionary leaders were willing to stand up and bridge that divide and develop a common purpose that still respected individual identity.  This is the model we should be following.

Come on now people let's get on the ball and work together.

Good news for Gaels - BBC Alba coming to Freeview!

The BBC Trust has just announced their approval of the plan to make space for BBC Alba on Freeview by giving them the bandwidth used by the BBC digital radio stations of Freeview.  Unsurprisingly, MG Alba are pleased as punch.

Now this will be a right bugger for all those Scots who supported the "save 6music" campaign, because I know that some of them relied on their Freeview boxes.  Expect to see 1001 vitriolic rants on the comments sections of the news websites in the morning.

The big question mark hanging over this is how it will affect plans for FM switchoff.  Current figures used to support the introduction of all-DAB radio use the figures for all digital listening as justification for DAB, while most listeners prefer Freeview for digital radio because it's of a higher quality, even if it does offer less choice.  Does this move help or hinder the campaign to keep FM broadcasts on the air?

So that Susan Boyle has been back in the press, promoting her new album just in time for the Christmas rush.

I hear she's being quite inspirational too, telling people how all they need to do is work hard and turn up to lots of auditions.  The trouble is, for SuBo it's not just about how good she is.  She's a very talented singer, but she really isn't the "best".  There's a few rough edges and she pronounces some words very oddly.

SuBo's success is down to being... well, not the prettiest picture in the gallery, and standing up and singing well despite getting laughed at by an audience and judging panel who seemed to believe that anyone who isn't naturally gorgeous can't sing.  She is, basically, a novelty act - a one-off.  There are people who have worked harder than her and have as much or more talent than her that remain as unknown as she was only 2 years ago.  This is not through lack of effort, it's just a lack of lucky timing.

This is a pervasive trope in our modern world: "try hard enough and you can be the best!"  It's like the American parent in the old black-and-white films telling the kid that one day he can be president.

But there are over 300 million people in the USA, and there's a presidential election once in every 5 years.  That means in a average lifetime, you'd expect to see about 15 presidents.   So about 0.000005% of the US population will ever be president.  1 in 20,000,000.

The odds for popular singers are a bit better, but you're still relying on a whole lot of luck.

OK, so what's this got to do with language?

Well, have a look at this article from the BBC's From our own Correspondent.  French bands are increasingly singing in English.  His article focuses on the angle of choice, freedom and cool, and skips past the question of success, but I find it hard to imagine that an ambitious young French singer doesn't have at least half an eye on the international success of Daft Punk.  But this is new only because we're talking about France.  If we step slowly backwards in time, we can see the Latin American stars (Shakira and Ricky Martin), Dutch electronic dance music (remember the Vengaboys anyone?) and on back through to Sweden where acts like Roxette followed on from cheesetastic Abba.

The number of international success stories is low, and it's a fair assumption that for every break out artist there's a hundred or more that didn't make it, and who're doing the same thing -- which means singing in English.

The desire to be the best, the biggest, the worldwide hit is discouraging people from being happy with being good locally, and it's taking people away from their own languages.

Take a look at the show Rapal on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal and BBC Alba.  Over the years they've supported various bands from within the Gaelic community, but for the most part these bands sing exclusively in English.  They're chasing the bigger audiences, but sadly the odds are stacked against them.  It's a shame to see talented young people waste their time chasing the unobtainable rather than making a genuine impact in their own small part of the world.

I'm a bit behind the times, as this was announced over a fortnight ago, but...

"A new draft resolution for endangered languages was launched on July 8th in the European Parliament at the meeting of the Intergroup for Traditional Minorities, National Communities and Languages by the Corsican MEP François Alfonsi (EFA/Greens)."
[http://www.gipuzkoaeuskara.net/albisteak/1286180399 also available in Basque, Spanish and French.]

The historic problem according to the article is that while their have been European funds available to support minority languages, truly endangered languages have been shut out from applying for funds because they don't have the infrastructure in place that allows them to apply for these funds.

Shifting the goal-posts or levelling the playing field -- whichever way you look at it, this will give more languages a fair go at preparing themselves for the future.

Minority language television needs careful handling.

BBC Alba, the new Scottish Gaelic channel, went on the air a few short weeks ago, receiving an unsurprisingly mixed reaction.

Setting aside the tiresome and predictable -- too much money, dying language, shortbread tin, etc etc ad nauseum -- there were a few areas of comment that perhaps justify more examination: too many repeats, the same old faces, too much music.  OK, the number of repeats is to be expected as new programs cost money which any minority channel is going to be short of.  The same old faces?  Well who else has been trained to do the job?  But too much music?  That brings us to the heart of the one of the greatest problems in Gaelic broadcasting, and perhaps also the Gaelic public image.

Why so much music?

Well, put simply, music is cheap.  There's loads of people who rehearse in their own time and all you've got to do is bring them into a suitably kitted out studio or hall and record them.  Secondly, a music program is far more accessible to the non-speaker and/or outsider than a sitcom (something's always lost in the translation) or a debate on the impact of crofting reforms on the Western Isles.  Furthermore, traditional music is woefully underexposed by mainstream programming.  Combining music programming with Gaelic programming may not kill two birds with one stone -- many of the traditional music fans decry the lack of Scots, and many Gaels are seachd searbh sgìth of the whole harp-and-bagpipe scene -- but where statisticians are concerned, two half-dead birds are the same as one parrot that has ceased to be.

The use of music programming in the great ratings chase has done inestimable damage to Gaelic's public image: it reinforces the notion that Gaelic is primarily the plaything of anachronistic Celtic twilightists, and obscures the fact that Gaelic is a living community language, flexible to myriad situations, and spoken mostly by normal people with no particular cultural axe to grind.

But this music-heavy tradition still is of great importance to BBC Alba.

The BBC Trust have declared that for BBC Alba to be considered viable and receive the funding required to move to Freeview in 2010, they must have an audience of a quarter of a million.  This is more than four times the number of speakers of Gaelic in Scotland, so the channel has to reach out quite far to people with little or no interest in the language.

How is BBC Alba to compete?  Even if they bought the rights to a hit series on the scale of Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who would tune in to see a Gaelic dubbed version with English subtitles when they can watch the original on another channel?  Creating a new series of that magnitude is pretty difficult given the budget they've had to settle for.  So what can they do?  Same old faces and too much music.  For now... but it's still not enough.

So the channel came on-line with two different active audience groups -- the supposed core market of Gaelic speakers and the supporting market of traditional music fans -- but these hardly go any way to providing the ratings needed, so the channel will either have to focus much of its expenditure in the forthcoming round of commissions on a non-Gaelic speaking audience or simply put it's head down, rely on integrity and produce a Gaelic channel.

Because in essence, what the BBC Trust has said is not that the Scottish Gaelic community can have a channel, but that they can make a channel.  Yes, make a channel, but for someone else.  Who?  The BBC doesn't care.  Just anyone other than Gaels.