Received: 6 May 2021 Accepted: 17 May 2021 DOI: 10.1111/josl.12508 REVIEW ESSAY Scottish Gaelic revitalisation: Progress and aspiration Claire Nance Department of Linguisitcs and English Language, Lancaster University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster, Lancashire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Correspondence Claire Nance, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lanchire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Email: c.nance@lancaster.ac.uk Gaelic Language Revitalization Concepts and Challenges: Collected Essays McEwan-Fujita, Emily Halifax, NS: Bradan Press, 2020 Gaelic in Scotland: Policies, movements and ideologies McLeod, Wilson Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020 1 INTRODUCTION This review considers the revitalisation programme for Scottish Gaelic (referred to simply as ‘Gaelic’ [ɡalik] by its speakers) which has gathered pace since the 1980s. Gaelic is a minority Celtic language with approximately 58,000 speakers in Scotland (Scottish Government, 2015) and 1,500 speakers in Canada (Statistique Canada, 2016). Gaelic in Scotland developed from the Old Irish spoken by people moving back and forth between Ireland and Scotland in the 4th–5th centuries and eventually became the language spoken across almost all of Scotland in the high medieval era (11th–12th centuries). Since this time, language shift has been taking place in Scotland and locations where the majority of the population speak Gaelic are now confined to north and west Highland areas such as the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides). Frequent waves of migration from Scotland have led to diasporic populations of Gaelic speakers including the substantial settlements in Nova Scotia, Canada, where many Gaelic speakers emigrated in the late18th and early 19th centuries. The texts reviewed here document the process of language shift but especially focus on revitalisa- tion efforts undertaken in order to increase speaker numbers and also increase the contexts and usage of Gaelic. As both works demonstrate, the revitalisation programme has its origins in the 18th and 19th centuries but really gained momentum in the 1980s with the advent of increased Gaelic broad- casting, education in Gaelic, and the subsequent Gaelic Language Act in 2005, which gave Gaelic in Scotland equal legal status to English. Each work takes quite a different approach to considering these issues: McLeod (2020) is a historical and legal analysis of language policy from 1872 to 2020 and Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2021;25:617–627. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 617 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/josl