WP358 Corpus planning in Scottish Gaelic: A case study

A detailed example is presented of an aspect of Scottish Gaelic corpus planning, focussing on the use of community-based authentic speech recordings to inform the production of guidance on a range of grammatical issues. Attention is drawn to a salient distinction between dialectal and idiolectal variation in relation to this task, and there is discussion of particular syntactic and semantic forms selected from the project’s stated terms of reference. Concluding remarks suggest and discuss issues for further research. Deeper linguistic analysis of the “phrasal verb” in use should throw light on some of the complexities of bilingual competences that may not currently be fully acknowledged in the Scottish Gaelic context. These complexities also have significance for the broader consideration of key practical planning processes entailing community participation and empowerment, as well as the construction of effective linguistic “authority”. These issues highlight the complex nature and significant scale of the challenges involved in effectively conducting this kind of work in a way that will gain real traction at community level in a context of ongoing language shift away from bilingualism towards increasingly monolingual use of English.