An Investigation of Formal Register and Gender Differences in Modern Scottish Gaelic Conn Mac Aogain May 15, 2019

Topic Language: Scottish Gaelic Status: Minority Language in Scotland and Nova Scotia where massive language shift to English is occurring. Outlook: Language is likely to enter into a “semi-living” phase with a speech community primarily composed of L2 speakers who do not like in traditional rural communities. Challenges: Audio corpora difficult to analyze due to lenition of initial consonants on many words. Possible Benefits of Corpus Analysis: Development of a Data Referent for Language Maintenance, Pedagogy, Language Planning.

Changes in Formal Register in SG Texts 1952-2002 Target: examination of the frequency of emphatic forms, terms of inclusivity and intensifiers. Data Points: the emphatic forms of four of the more common prepositional pronouns in the first and second persons, both singular and plural forms, the unique (only exists in the plural form) prepositional pronouns of eadar (“between”), the adjectives snog (“nice”) and sgoinell (‘great”), and three intensifier words/particles that precede adjectives and adverbs. Corpus: the Quarterly magazine Gairm at five-year intervals between 1952 and 2002. Results: No clear trends or patterns except for an apparent increase the frequency of the three intensifier word between 1992 and 2002.

Gender Differences in SG Texts Target: examination of the frequency of emphatic forms, terms of inclusivity and intensifiers. Data Points: the emphatic forms of four of the more common prepositional pronouns in the first and second persons, both singular and plural forms, the unique (only exists in the plural form) prepositional pronouns of eadar (“between”), is docha (“probably, possibly”) signifying conditionality/tentativeness, the adjectives snog (“nice”) and sgoinell (‘great”), and three intensifier words/particles that precede adjectives and adverbs. Corpus: magazine Gairm at five-year intervals between 1952 & 2002. six novels (three male and three female authors) 1982-2006 Results: No clear trends/ patterns for sex-specific authors in Gairm corpus. Inconclusive results in novel corpus which requires some further review.

Possible Next Steps Build a larger corpora of: The entire editions of the magazine Gairm (200 editions) A more comprehensive group of novels/short stories/plays Collect transcripts of recorded language. Explore other possible metrics for measuring change in register over time and gender differences of authors and/or speakers.