Gaelic Nova Scotia and Cape Breton: Scotland's Language Across the Atlantic

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Census figures for Gaelic speakers were collected inconsistently, and historical estimates of the peak number of speakers vary widely, so this card avoids a single figure. The claim that Cape Breton music preserves older Scottish styles is widely held but debated.

Two dates differ between sources. The Gaelic College gives 1938 for its founding; Vance's chapter gives 1939, which may reflect the first classes rather than the decision to found it. Canada's Register of Historic Places dates the Lone Shieling to 1942, while Vance says Donald S. MacIntosh "had" it built in 1947. Both versions are given here. Vance's and Dembling's critical readings of tartan Nova Scotia are their arguments and are labelled shared.

Settlement

established From the 1770s onward, Highlanders emigrated to Nova Scotia in large numbers, pushed by rising rents, clearances, overpopulation and the collapse of the kelp industry, and pulled by cheap land. Families from the same districts often settled together, so that Gaelic remained the everyday language of whole communities in Cape Breton, Antigonish and Pictou counties. Many settlers were Catholic and many Presbyterian, and settlements often followed those lines.

established Chain migration kept the flow going. The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), notes that the agent John Bowie told a parliamentary committee in 1841 that 1,250 of the 1,850 Skye emigrants he had shipped since 1837 chose Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton "in consequence of many of their countrymen having previously settled there". Cape Breton's landscape also reminded many Hebrideans of home. When the Harris factor Duncan Shaw offered the tenants of Borve free passage in 1839, he offered Cape Breton, "where their friends and countrymen were already settled", or Canada.

established The numbers were large but never dominant. The historian Michael Vance, in his chapter "Powerful Pathos" in Transatlantic Scots (2005), cites J. S. Martell's 1942 survey of Nova Scotia's immigration records: Scots made up 21,833 of the 39,243 known arrivals between 1815 and 1838, landing mainly at Sydney, Pictou and Halifax. Records for the outports of Cape Breton and the Northumberland Strait are missing, so the true figure was probably higher. Even so, Scots were outnumbered by other groups for the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1921 they were 148,000 of 523,837 Nova Scotians, just over 28 per cent, while those of English origin were nearly 39 per cent. Nor were all Scottish arrivals Gaels: Lowland doctors, lawyers, teachers, merchants, colliers and stevedores came too.

Frontland and backland

established Timing mattered. Harper notes that the first wave of settlers, many with some capital, secured Crown land freehold on generous terms and built productive "frontland" farms, with a far higher standard of living than in Scotland. Poorer arrivals in the 1830s and 1840s found the good land taken and stricter rules against acquiring it. Many squatted without title on inferior backlands, combining a little farming with part-time work in mining and fishing, and the potato blight followed them across the Atlantic. In the 1840s Captain Donald McNeil of Mira River, a half-pay officer with a 500-acre grant, wrote to his brother in North Uist that he would move to Canada if he could only sell. Many backland families later moved on, often to Boston. Vance, drawing on the geographer Stephen Hornsby, notes that by 1837 more than half of Cape Breton's population was squatting on infertile Crown backland.

Farms, mines and steel

established The image of the self-sufficient Gaelic crofter leaves out much of what happened. Vance, drawing on the historians Rusty Bittermann and David Frank, points out that many Highland settlers were drawn into commercial farming from the start, selling food to the West Indies trade and the Newfoundland fishery. Poorer backland families mixed farming with seasonal wage work as far away as the "Boston States", and their cheap labour helped the Cape Breton coal and steel industries grow. By the early twentieth century most of the island's people lived in industrial Cape Breton. Most of these workers were descended from Highland settlers, joined by African Americans and by immigrants from Newfoundland, the British Isles and Europe. Lowland culture arrived too, in Burns societies, the music-hall Scottishness of Harry Lauder and the socialism of the Lowland-born miners' leader J. B. McLachlan.

A Gaelic society

established For much of the nineteenth century, Gaelic was the language of home, church and community across much of eastern Nova Scotia. Gaelic poets composed songs about their new homeland, and a Gaelic newspaper, Mac-Talla, was published weekly in Sydney from 1892 to 1904.

established The churches did much to hold these communities together. In 1817 Norman McLeod, a separatist preacher thwarted in his attempt to become parish schoolmaster at Ullapool, led some 400 followers from Assynt and Ullapool to Pictou. In 1820 he and his "Normanites" settled at St Ann's in Cape Breton, where he was minister, magistrate and schoolmaster, ruling with an iron hand. Between 1851 and 1860 about 900 of them sailed on, in ships they built themselves, by way of Australia to Waipu in New Zealand. The Edinburgh Ladies' Association, led by Isabella Gordon Mackay, sent Gaelic-speaking ministers, catechists and teachers to Cape Breton, and by the early 1850s, Harper writes, it had provided "the scaffolding and framework" of Presbyterianism on the island.

Lament and celebration

shared Gaelic song did not speak with one voice. Two Lochaber cousins who both settled at Mabou Ridge illustrate the range. John MacDonald (Iain Sealgair), arriving in 1835, wrote a lament for the country and kin he had left. His cousin Allan MacDonald (Ailean an Ridse), who had come twenty years earlier, answered that he had put "lies and boasts" in his song and that the land he left was "without kindness" to its tenants, as quoted by Harper. Following Michael Kennedy, Harper argues that English-language writers selected and translated only the laments, fixing an image of Highland settlers in permanent mourning. The famous "Canadian Boat Song" ("we are exiles from our fathers' land"), published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1829 and supposedly sung by Highland boatmen, has no known Gaelic original; Kennedy calls it a work of English, not Gaelic, literature.

Decline

established In the twentieth century, English-only schooling, economic out-migration to industrial towns and the United States, and the stigma attached to Gaelic as old-fashioned led to a sharp decline. Children were often punished for speaking Gaelic at school. By the late twentieth century, native speakers were mostly elderly.

shared Urban Scottish societies did little to slow this. Vance, in his chapter on organised Scottishness in Canada in the same book, notes that Alexander Fraser founded the Gaelic Society of Canada in Toronto in 1897, far from the rural districts where most Gaelic speakers lived. In his view the language survived in Cape Breton mainly because its communities were isolated, not because city groups promoted it, and in recent years its revival has been presented as an asset for the tourism industry of the whole province.

established At Confederation in 1867, Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in the new country, according to Michael Kennedy, cited by the anthropologist Jonathan Dembling. Dembling, writing from fieldwork in 2003, called Cape Breton the last living Gàidhealtachd, or Gaelic-speaking area, in North America, with speakers in the low hundreds by the 2001 census.

Music and dance

shared Cape Breton became famous for its fiddle music and step-dancing. Many musicians and scholars believe Cape Breton players preserved older Highland styles of fiddling and dancing that changed or faded in Scotland, and Cape Breton musicians have influenced the revival of traditional music in Scotland. Some scholars caution that Cape Breton traditions also developed in their own ways.

established The anthropologist Jonathan Dembling, in his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), describes those changes: piano accompaniment became almost universal, square dances arrived from New England and jigs grew popular. Gaels fitted them to their own style, step-dancing through the square sets while pianists echoed the ornaments of fiddle and feet. By the 1960s the style seemed to be dying. In 1971 the CBC broadcast a documentary called The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, and the response was the Cape Breton Fiddlers' Association, new concerts and dances, and a wave of teaching for young players. Within twenty years the revival was so strong that newcomers found it hard to believe the music had ever been in danger. A modest revival of Gaelic-style piping followed.

shared Older Gaelic-speaking fiddlers learned tunes by "jigging" them, singing the Gaelic words, and would not try to play a tune until they could sing it. Dembling found the phrase "you play it as you would sing it" repeated throughout his fieldwork. The Gaelic link is now fragile, since few younger players or listeners speak the language. Opinion in Scotland is divided: some Hebridean musicians hear Gaelic in the Cape Breton style, others hear none. The story of how Cape Breton music returned to Scotland is told on the Scottish Fiddle Tradition card.

Tartan and tourism

shared Nova Scotia's Scottish image was also cultivated for commercial reasons. Harper argues that in the 1930s depression the province began, in a phrase she quotes from the historian Edward J. Cowan, "parading its Scottishness" to attract tourists. Premier Angus L. Macdonald combined real enthusiasm for Scotland with promotion of the Gaelic heritage of poor districts, sometimes at the expense of other ethnic groups. The Cabot Trail and Cape Breton Highlands National Park belong to this period, and the Lone Shieling, a stone-and-thatch "settler's hut" in the park, was a replica of a Highland building type rather than of the wooden homes emigrants actually built.

shared Michael Vance, in "Powerful Pathos: The Triumph of Scottishness in Nova Scotia", his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), presses the argument further. Following the historian Ian McKay's essay "Tartanism Triumphant" (1992), he argues that Angus L. Macdonald's Scottish Arcadia had a political use: a calm, pre-industrial past was attractive to a premier facing demands from the left during the crises of the 1930s. The Cabot Trail ran from Baddeck past the Gaelic College and the government-owned Keltic Lodge at Ingonish into the "Highlands" park. Only on leaving the park at Chéticamp, an Acadian village, did a traveller see that anyone but Highland Scots had a claim to the region. The romance was older than Macdonald. In 1886 the American writer Charles Farnham, in "Cape Breton Folk" for Harper's, toured the island's mountains in search of a people who still ground grain by hand, and chose to ignore the coal docks of Sydney.

established The Lone Shieling takes its name from a stanza of the "Canadian Boat Song". Vance writes that it was built in deference to that poem for Donald S. MacIntosh, a geology professor and grandson of a Highland immigrant, and that with so much timber in Cape Breton no settler ever built a shieling of stone and thatch. Canada's Register of Historic Places dates the building to 1942 and records that Professor MacIntosh bequeathed 100 acres for the park and asked for a small cabin modelled on a shieling on Skye; Vance gives 1947.

shared Vance reads the Gaelic College in the same light. Its founder, Angus William Rugg Mackenzie, a Presbyterian minister originally from Skye, held that Gaelic would thrive with "a loom in operation in every rural home and more sheep on [the] Cape Breton hills". Vance, following Dembling, argues that this ignored the Gaels' place in the island's mines and labour disputes, and that the college taught piping, the Highland Fling and handloom tartan weaving instead. Dembling lists the college with pipe bands and Highland games as neo-traditions brought in by English-speaking Scots.

shared Vance's sharpest point concerns who is left out. Sylvia Hamilton's 1993 National Film Board documentary Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia opens with a teenager, Shingai, walking past a kilted piper in Halifax and saying that "you don't have to be from Scotland to have a history". Vance records African Nova Scotians' point that the first Black settlers in Pictou arrived six years before the Hector, and notes that some early Scots in the colony held slaves, and that Highland soldiers were used from at least 1760 to keep the Mi'kmaq away from new settlements. He argues that calling the Scots a "diaspora" equates their experience with the far harsher one of Black Nova Scotians. Not everyone in the clan societies disagreed: in 1988 A. Wayne MacKay warned fellow members that the clans had sometimes treated being Scottish as the norm in Nova Scotia.

established The Hector itself became a foundation myth, much like the Mayflower in New England. Vance notes the 1923 celebration of its 150th anniversary, largely aimed at tourists, and the launch of a replica at Pictou in September 2000, when re-enactors waded ashore in kilts. In the 1770s the kilt was worn mainly by the elite and soldiers, so the scene was probably an anachronism.

Beyond Nova Scotia: the Quebec Hebrideans

established Nova Scotia was not the only Gaelic Canada. The folklorist Margaret Bennett, in her chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), traces the Gaels of Quebec's Eastern Townships, south-east of Montreal. Most came from Lewis, a few from Harris and fewer still from North Uist, mainly in the 1840s and 1850s, and nearly all were Presbyterian and Gaelic-speaking. Gaelic stayed strong into the twentieth century: a 1970 article in the Clansman News put the number of Gaels in Marsboro alone at about 2,500 around the time of the First World War. When Bennett began fieldwork at Scotstown in 1976, she heard elderly shoppers talking Gaelic in the supermarket but found no speaker under thirty. One family's story, she writes, sums up the change: monoglot Gaelic grandparents, bilingual parents, English-speaking children, children's children bilingual in English and French, and some grandchildren with only French. Here French, not English, finally replaced Gaelic, as farms were sold to French Canadian families from the Beauce. The full story is on the Outer Hebrides: Lewis and Harris card.

Revival

established The Gaelic College at St Ann's, founded in 1938 by its own account, teaches language, music and dance. In 2006 Nova Scotia created an Office of Gaelic Affairs to support the language. Gaelic is taught in some schools, immersion programmes help adults learn, and the Celtic Colours International Festival, founded in 1997, celebrates Cape Breton's Celtic music each autumn.

• Nova Scotia means "New Scotland" in Latin.
• A Gaelic newspaper was published weekly in Cape Breton from 1892.
• The Gaelic College at St Ann's dates its founding to 1938.
• Cape Breton fiddling has influenced Scottish traditional music.
• Nova Scotia has a government office for Gaelic.
• The "Canadian Boat Song", with its line "we are exiles from our fathers' land", has no known Gaelic original.
• Some of Norman McLeod's Cape Breton congregation ended up in Waipu, New Zealand, after building their own ships.
• In 1921 more Nova Scotians were of English origin than of Scottish origin.
• A 1971 CBC documentary, The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, helped spark the revival it predicted would never come.
• With so much timber in Cape Breton, no settler is known to have built a stone-and-thatch shieling like the Lone Shieling.
• Lewis Gaels also settled in Quebec, where their great-grandchildren mostly speak French.

• Disputed: how many people spoke Gaelic at the peak. Census figures for Gaelic speakers were collected inconsistently and estimates vary widely, so no single figure can be given.
• Disputed: whether Cape Breton music is an unchanged survival of old Highland styles. Many musicians and scholars believe it preserved older styles that faded in Scotland, but it also absorbed piano accompaniment, New England square sets and jigs, and developed in its own ways.
• Myth: the "Canadian Boat Song" is a translation of a Gaelic emigrant song. It has no known Gaelic original. Michael Kennedy calls it a work of English, not Gaelic, literature.
• Myth: the Lone Shieling is a replica of a settler's home. It is a replica of a Highland building type. With so much timber in Cape Breton, no settler is known to have built a shieling of stone and thatch.
• Myth: Scots were a majority of Nova Scotians. In 1921 just over 28 per cent were of Scottish origin, against nearly 39 per cent of English origin. Scots were a majority only in the eastern counties.
• Myth: Cape Breton Gaels were isolated crofters. Many were drawn into commercial farming from the start, and their labour helped the coal and steel industries grow.
• Disputed: when the Gaelic College and the Lone Shieling were founded. The college gives 1938 and Michael Vance 1939. Canada's Register of Historic Places dates the Lone Shieling to 1942 and Vance to 1947.
• Myth: the Hector passengers wore kilts. In the 1770s the kilt was worn mainly by the elite and soldiers, so the kilted re-enactors at the 2000 replica launch were probably an anachronism.