Canadian Gaelic
Canadian Gaelic or Cape Breton Gaelic, often known in Canadian English simply as Gaelic, is the form of Scottish Gaelic spoken in Atlantic Canada.
Scottish Gaels were settled in Nova Scotia from 1773, with the arrival of the ship Hector and continuing until the 1850s. Gaelic has been spoken since then in Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island and on the northeastern mainland of the province. Scottish Gaelic is a member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages and the Canadian dialects have their origins in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The parent language developed out of Middle Irish and is closely related to modern Irish. The Canadian branch is a close cousin of the Irish language in Newfoundland. At its peak in the mid-19th century, there were as many as 200,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic and Newfoundland Irish together, making it the third-most-spoken European language in Canada after English and French.
In Atlantic Canada today, there are approximately 2,000 speakers, mainly in Nova Scotia. In terms of the total number of speakers in the 2011 census, there were 7,195 total speakers of "Gaelic languages" in Canada, with 1,365 in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island where the responses mainly refer to Scottish Gaelic. The 2016 Canadian census also reported that 240 residents of Nova Scotia and 15 on Prince Edward Island considered Scottish Gaelic to be their "mother tongue". The 2021 Canadian census reported 2,170 Scottish Gaelic speakers in Canada, 635 of them living in Nova Scotia.
While there have been many distinctive Canadian dialects of Scottish Gaelic that have been spoken in other Gàidhealtachd communities, particularly in Glengarry County, Ontario and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Atlantic Canada is the only area in North America where Scottish Gaelic continues to be spoken as a community language, especially in Cape Breton. Even there the use of the language is precarious and its survival is being fought for. Even so, the Canadian Gàidhealtachd communities have contributed many great figures to the history of Scottish Gaelic literature, including Ailean a' Ridse MacDhòmhnaill and John MacLean during the days of early settlement and Lewis MacKinnon, whose Canadian Gaelic poetry was awarded the Bardic Crown by An Comunn Gàidhealach at the 2011 Royal National Mòd at Stornoway, Isle of Lewis.
Distribution
The Gaelic cultural identity community is a part of Nova Scotia's diverse peoples and communities. Thousands of Nova Scotians attend Gaelic-related activities and events annually including: language workshops and immersions, milling frolics, square dances, fiddle and piping sessions, concerts and festivals. Up until about the turn of the 20th century, Gaelic was widely spoken on eastern Prince Edward Island. In the 2011 Canadian Census, 10 individuals in PEI cited that their mother tongue was a Gaelic language, with over 90 claiming to speak a Gaelic language.Gaels, and their language and culture, have influenced the heritage of Glengarry County and other regions in present-day Ontario, where many Highland Scots settled commencing in the 18th century, and to a much lesser extent the provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba and Alberta. Gaelic-speaking poets in communities across Canada have produced a large and significant branch of Scottish Gaelic literature comparable to that of Scotland itself.
History
Arrival of earliest Gaels
In 1621, King James VI of Scotland allowed privateer William Alexander to establish the first Scottish colony overseas. The group of Highlanders – all of whom were Gaelic-speaking – were settled at what is presently known as Port Royal, on the western shore of Nova Scotia.Within a year the colony had failed. Subsequent attempts to relaunch it were cancelled when in 1631 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returned Nova Scotia to French rule.
Almost a half-century later, in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was given exclusive trading rights to all North American lands draining into Hudson Bay – about 3.9 million km2. Many of the traders who came in the later 18th and 19th centuries were Gaelic speakers from the Scottish Highlands who brought their language to the interior.
Those who intermarried with the local First Nations people passed on their language, with the effect that by the mid-18th century there existed a sizeable population of Métis traders with Scottish and aboriginal ancestry, and command of spoken Gaelic.
Gaels in 18th- and 19th-century settlements
Cape Breton remained the property of France until 1758 when Fortress Louisbourg fell to the British, followed by the rest of New France in the ensuing Battle at the Plaines d'Abraham. As a result of the conflict Highland regiments who fought for the British secured a reputation for tenacity and combat prowess. In turn the countryside itself secured a reputation among the Highlanders for its size, beauty, and wealth of natural resources.File:Helmsdale village with 'The Emigrants'. - geograph.org.uk - 2496903.jpg|thumb|The Highland Emigrants' Monument at Helmsdale, Scotland
They would remember Canada when the earliest of the Highland Clearances by the increasingly Anglicized Scottish nobility began to evict Gaelic-speaking tenants en masse from their ancestral lands in order to replace them with private deer-stalking estates and herds of sheep.
The first ship loaded with Hebridean colonists arrived at Île-St.-Jean in 1770, with later ships following in 1772, and 1774. In September 1773 a ship named The Hector landed in Pictou, Nova Scotia, with 189 settlers who departed from Loch Broom. In 1784 the last barrier to Scottish settlement – a law restricting land-ownership on Cape Breton Island – was repealed, and soon both PEI and Nova Scotia were predominantly Gaelic-speaking. Between 1815 and 1870, it is estimated that more than 50,000 Gaelic settlers immigrated to Nova Scotia alone. Many of them left behind poetry and other works of Scottish Gaelic literature.
File:MacAlister.png|thumb|upright|A romanticised early Victorian depiction of a member of Clan MacAlister leaving Scotland for Canada, by R. R. McIan
The poet Mìcheal Mór MacDhòmhnaill emigrated from South Uist to Cape Breton around 1775 and a poem describing his first winter there survives. Anna NicGillìosa emigrated from Morar to Glengarry County, Ontario, in 1786 and a Gaelic poem in praise of her new home also survives. Lord Selkirk's settler Calum Bàn MacMhannain, alias Malcolm Buchanan, left behind the song-poem Òran an Imrich, which describes his 1803 voyage from the Isle of Skye to Belfast, Prince Edward Island and his impressions of his new home as Eilean an Àigh. Ailean a' Ridse MacDhòmhnaill emigrated with his family from Ach nan Comhaichean, Glen Spean, Lochaber to Mabou, Nova Scotia in 1816 and composed many works of Gaelic poetry as a homesteader in Cape Breton and in Antigonish County. The most prolific emigre poet was John MacLean of Caolas, Tiree, the former Chief Bard to the 15th Chief of Clan MacLean of Coll, who emigrated with his family to Nova Scotia in 1819.
MacLean, whom Robert Dunbar once dubbed, "perhaps the most important of all the poets who emigrated during the main period of Gaelic overseas emigration", composed one of his most famous song-poems, Òran do dh' Aimearaga, which is also known as A Choille Ghruamach, after emigrating from Scotland to Canada. The poem has since been collected and recorded from seanchaithe in both Scotland and the New World.
According to Michael Newton, however, A' Choille Ghruamach, which is, "an expression of disappointment and regret", ended upon becoming, "so well established in the emigrant repertoire that it easily eclipses his later songs taking delight in the Gaelic communities in Nova Scotia and their prosperity."
In the Highlands and Islands, MacLean is commonly known as "The Poet to the Laird of Coll" or as "John, son of Allan". In Nova Scotia, he is known colloquially today as, "The Bard MacLean" or as "The Barney's River Poet", after MacLean's original family homestead in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.
With the end of the American War of Independence, immigrants newly arrived from Scotland were joined in Canada by so-called "United Empire Loyalist" refugees fleeing persecution and the seizure of their land claims by American Patriots. These settlers arrived on a mass scale at the arable lands of British North America, with large numbers settling in Glengarry County in present-day Ontario, and in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
Following an 1814 visit from Scotland to the settlement in Glengarry County, Ontario, Dr. D. MacPherson wrote, "You might travel over the whole of the County and by far the greater part of Stormont, without hearing anything spoken except the good Gaelic. Every family, even of the lowest order, has a landed property of 200 acres... However poor the family they kill a bullock for the winter consumption; the farm or estate supplies them with abundance of butter, cheese, etc., etc. Their houses are small but comfortable, having a ground floor and garret, with regular chimney and glass windows. The appearance of the people is at all times respectable, but I was delighted at seeing them at church on a Sunday; the men clothed in good English cloth, and many of the women wore the Highland plaid."
Unlike in the Gaelic-speaking settlements along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, there was no Gaelic printing press in Canada. For this reason, in 1819, Rev. Seumas MacGriogar, the first Gaelic-speaking Presbyterian minister appointed to Nova Scotia, had to publish his collection of Christian poetry in Glasgow.
Printing presses soon followed, though, and the first Gaelic-language books printed in Canada, all of which were Presbyterian religious books, were published at Pictou, Nova Scotia, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in 1832. The first Gaelic language books published in Toronto and Montreal, which were also Presbyterian religious books, appeared between 1835 and 1836. The first Catholic religious books published in the Gaelic-language were printed at Pictou in 1836.