SCOTLAND’s new Makar has said he wants to show Gaelic is a “living language of national importance” as he warned it could be lost in Hebridean communities “in the next couple of decades”.
The appointment of Dr Peter Mackay, an English lecturer at St Andrews University, as the replacement for Kathleen Jamie marks a historic moment as he is the first Makar to primarily write in Gaelic.
The Makar is tasked with promoting poetry nationally and producing work related to significant events in Scotland.
The term originates from Scottish literature and was historically used to describe poets or bards in the 15th and 16th centuries. Revived in 2002, it now refers to the National Poet for Scotland, a role imbued with the creative act of “making”.
Speaking to the Sunday National, Dr Mackay – who is originally from the Isle of Lewis – said he wants to use the role to “normalise” Gaelic as he predicted it could die out as a “lived community language” in a generation.
Asked about the state of the language in Scotland, he said: “There’s huge optimism and pessimism at the same time. It’s quite a complex situation.
“The latest census did show an uptick in the number of Gaelic speakers across the country and it's fantastic that we have lots of Gaelic learners and we’ve got lots of people who are Gaelic learners who write, who work in media and education.
“But also the communities that were largely Gaelic-speaking in the Western Isles – the Outer and Inner Hebrides in particular – the numbers there are really worrying, and so the sense of Gaelic as a lived community language risks being lost in the next couple of decades where you see the numbers dip below 50%, where there is no expectation that you’ll hear Gaelic on a day-to-day basis.”
Mackay said one of the reasons Gaelic is disappearing in Hebridean communities is because the pandemic saw people from all over Scotland move to rural places, sparking huge cultural change in traditionally Gaelic-speaking areas.
“The main thing is trying to normalise it as something that is spoken and that it’s acceptable for someone to be turning up to events in Edinburgh and speaking in Gaelic and English or Scots as well.
“I’m not going to pull anyone to the Gaelic language who hasn’t been pulled there already by Runrig or Niteworks or Outlander, but I’m going to be part of that conversation.”
One of Mackay’s main aims is to ensure Gaelic does not exist in a vacuum and that he uses his role to experiment with ways it can interact with other languages and form part of the “national conversation”.
With the Commonwealth Games coming up in Glasgow in 2026, Mackay said he hopes that could be an opportunity to use his role to celebrate different languages coming together and how they can interact with each other.
“I think one of the great things about being in the role is just being able to speak in Gaelic in a high-profile position as part of the Scottish national conversation,” said Mackay.
“One of the things I really enjoy doing anyway is just placing Gaelic literature and culture and the language as part of a conversation with other languages – whether it be English, Spanish, French – and just seeing what kinds of similarities or games you can have with them.
“I’m really interested in how different languages and cultures interact and how they can build bridges between each other and not just exist in silos. Every culture is porous and open and should have bridges going in as many different directions as possible.
“I’d be really interested in seeing, with the Commonwealth Games coming up, what we can do with all of the different languages that might be represented there and finding ways of having some meaningful play, linguistic games that can go alongside them. We’ll see what’s possible.”
Authorised by the Scottish Parliament, the first poet to be appointed to the role of Makar was Edwin Morgan, followed by Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and then Kathleen Jamie.
Last week, Dr Mackay told the BBC he wanted to “bring as many groups together as possible and talk to each other in as many languages as we can about the things that matter like climate change and the refugee crisis".
Asked how he planned to do this, he paid tribute to Jamie who put together multi-voiced poems with lines written by people from all over Scotland.
He said there are a variety of ways of setting up conversations between people to celebrate the multi-lingual nature of modern Scotland that he wants to explore.
“This is week one so I’m going to be speaking to the Scottish Poetry Library about what might be possible,” he told the Sunday National.
“Kathleen Jamie was great at having multi-voiced poems so she would put together poems that had lines written by people all over Scotland and I think that’s one type of vehicle [to bring different languages together].
“Another is setting up conversations I don’t need to be part of, I can just put people in contact with one another. So there is the possibility that someone who writes in Urdu and someone who writes in Scots can find out what they can do in terms of translating each other or writing alongside each other.
“Part of my role, I think, is to get other people to make things as well as make them myself.
“I’ve already had invitations to schools with 20 languages in the classroom and for me, that’s something to celebrate. Each one of those languages is part of the fabric of modern Scotland and it’s trying to see what each of these can tell us about what it means to live in Scotland at the moment.”
