A preliminary assessment of the Survey of the Gaelic :: Scottish Gaelic dialectology

Scottish Gaelic dialectology: A preliminary assessment of the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland Between 1994 and 1997, the transcribed questionnaires of the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland were published as a five-volume series (O Dochartaigh 1994- 97), presenting narrow phonetic transcriptions of over 200 speakers responding to a fortypage questionnaire. This publication marks the culmination of a project of nearly fifty years’ duration; the main body of the interviews took place between 1950 and 1970 across much of the Scottish mainland as well as the Western Isles. In many cases, some of the very last Gaelic speakers in a particular region were interviewed, and we thus have transcribed material—and some audio recordings—of dialects that are now practically extinct. Naturally, the historic quality of these transcribed and audio records renders them all the more valuable for close study. This paper will assess the current state of Scottish Gaelic dialect study, with a particular focus on the Survey’s current and future contributions. Designed in 1950 by Kenneth Jackson to elicit data informing phonetic and phonological questions of both regional and historical interest, the original Survey focused on pronunciation variation, providing limited information on morphology (although see especially O Maolalaigh1999), and virtually none on syntactic variation or lexical choice. With the publication of the Survey’s â€Å"raw data† in the form of unanalyzed narrow transcriptions, it is appropriate now to ascertain what we can learn from the published material. However, in the approximately 50 years since the fieldwork for the Survey was begun, methods, goals, and principles of dialect study have changed dramatically (cf. Kretzschmar 1996); furthermore, advances in media technologies have enabled linguists to analyze and to present data in compelling new ways (cf. Kretzschmar & Konopka 1996). In recent years there has been an important move towards a discipline-wide agreement on â€Å"best practices† for dialect study, language data management, and the presentation of data and analysis (cf. â€Å"Methods XI† Conference on Methods in Dialectology, August 2002, Joensuu, Finland; the E-MELD website and affiliated work; the Linguistic Data Archiving Project at CNRS, etc). The presentation will conclude with a discussion of desiderata for Scottish Gaelic dialect study, and for the presentation and analysis of Gaelic dialect data.