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

Scottish Gaelic dialectology A preliminary assessment of the Survey of the GaelicDialects of ScotlandBetween 1994 and 1997, the get down questionnaires of the Survey of theGaelic Dialects of Scotland were create as a five-volume series (O Dochartaigh 1994-97), presenting narrow phonetic transcriptions of over 200 speakers responding to a fortypagequestionnaire. This publication marks the culmination of a project of nearly fiftyyears duration the main body of the interviews took place between 1950 and 1970across much of the Scottish mainland as well as the Western Isles. In many cases, someof the very last Gaelic speakers in a particular region were interviewed, and we thus havetranscribed physicaland some audio recordingsof dialects that are now practicallyextinct. Naturally, the historic quality of these transcribed and audio records rendersthem all the more valuable for close study.This paper willing assess the current state of Scottish Gaelic dialect study, with aparticular fo cus on the Surveys current and future contributions. designed in 1950 byKenneth Jackson to elicit data informing phonetic and phonological questions of bothregional and historical interest, the original Survey focused on pronunciation variation,providing limited information on morphology (although see especially OMaolalaigh1999), and virtually none on syntactic variation or lexical choice. With thepublication of the Surveys raw data in the form of unanalyzed narrow transcriptions, itis appropriate now to ascertain what we can learn from the published material.However, in the approximately 50 years since the fieldwork for the Survey wasbegun, methods, goals, and principles of dialect study have changed dramatically (cf.Kretzschmar 1996) furthermore, advances in media technologies have enabled linguiststo analyze and to present data in compelling new ways (cf. Kretzschmar & Konopka1996). In recent years there has been an important move towards a discipline-wideagreement on best practi ces for dialect study, nomenclature data management, and thepresentation of data and analysis (cf. Methods XI Conference on Methods inDialectology, August 2002, Joensuu, Finland the E-MELD website and affiliated workthe Linguistic Data Archiving Project at CNRS, etc). The presentation will concludewith a discussion of desiderata for Scottish Gaelic dialect study, and for the presentationand analysis of Gaelic dialect data.