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Gaelic in Canada: New Evidence from an Old Census

Jonathan Dembling Department of Anthropology University of Massachusetts

There are now more Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia than in Scotland. The Earl of Lindsay, Under Secretary of State, Scottish Office, in a speech to the Empire

Club of Canada, 19951 Currently there are more Gaelic speakers in Strathclyde than in the Western Isles, more in Glasgow than on Skye, and more in Nova Scotia than in either.

The New Penguin History of Scotland2 In 1901 250,000 Scots spoke Gaelic. In Nova Scotia, Canada, there were that year counted a million Gaelic speakers.

John Macleod, Highlanders: A History of the Gaels3

As these quotations demonstrate, the myth that more Gaelic is spoken in Nova

Scotia than in Scotland is an enduring one. As with all enduring myths, it is impervious to

even the most elementary evidence: one million Gaelic speaking Nova Scotians in 1901,

for example, would have been quite a feat given that the total population of the province

was less than half that number. While the belief remains popular (as an internet search

will easily demonstrate), its origins are uncertain. Ironically, one possible source is a

report by the Canadian Bureau of Statistics on Gaelic in the 1931 census. One paragraph

used selective data to suggest a Canadian Gàidhealtachd more vibrant than its European

counterpart:

Comparing the county of Inverness, Nova Scotia with the county of Inverness, Scotland, we find that in the former, out of 13,299 persons of Scottish origin, (all ages), 9,546 or 72 per cent spoke Gaelic as mother tongue, while in the latter, of the 82,108 (3 years of age and over), there were 34,455 or 42 per cent Gaelic speakers. Inverness county, Canada has 30 per cent of the total Gaelic speakers living

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in Canada while Inverness county, Scotland has 25 per cent of the total Gaelic speakers living in Scotland. (Dominion Bureau of Statistics n.d.)

The report is of even greater significance in that it was the first publication of an

official count for Gaelic speakers in North America. It stated that the language was the

mother tongue of 32,008 Canadians, of whom 31,012 were of Scottish descent.

Unsurprisingly, Nova Scotia claimed the greater part of this population with 24,303

speakers (the Northwest Territories brought up the rear with one speaker).

Since this report, tabulations for Gaelic speakers have been available for every

census, though from 1941 Irish and Scottish Gaelic have been grouped together. While

no hard data was available prior to 1931, there were a few attempts to estimate the extent

of Gaelic in Nova Scotia and Canada as a whole. In 1890 Senator Thomas Robert

MacInnes, in a speech introducing a bill to make Gaelic the third official language of

Canada, claimed that three-quarters of Cape Breton’s population of 100,000 could speak

the language (Stephens 1976: 52).4 In an 1899 report to The Transactions of the Gaelic

Society of Inverness, A. Fraser claimed:

A census lately taken by Clerks of Presbyteries and others computes the number of Gaelic-speaking people in the Dominion of Canada at more than a quarter of a million; 250 congregations require the services of Gaelic-speaking priests and ministers for preaching Gaelic each Sabbath, and seventy more for visiting and pastoral purposes. (Fraser 1899: 218)

In the absence of government interest in counting Gaelic speakers, churches were

a useful source for gathering estimates. During his visit to Nova Scotia in 1932, John

Lorne Campbell distributed a survey among clergy in Gaelic-speaking parishes of the

Maritimes. The incomplete results gave a total of 15,425 speakers, a figure Campbell

reckoned should be doubled (Campbell 1990: 33). On another visit five years later,

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Campbell reported an estimate by Jonathan G. MacKinnon (publisher of the newspaper

Mac-Talla) of 40,000 to 50,000 in all of the Maritimes (Campbell 1990: 41).

Although there are no published census figures for Gaelic before 1931 (or for any

language before 1921), a question on mother tongue has in fact been asked in the

Canadian census since 1901. For whatever reason, the data were not tabulated either for

that year or for the following census in 1911. Fortunately, the original 1901 schedules are

available on microfilm (subsequent census schedules are prevented from public release

by law). The author undertook a manual compilation of mother tongue statistics for the

Maritimes and select counties in other provinces with large Gaelic settlements.

Concurrently, the Canadian Families Project produced an integrated database of the 1901

schedules, comprising 5% of all households. 5 While the complete count is useful for its

detail in rural areas with small populations, the database allows for a rich analysis of

interrelated demographic, economic and cultural factors. Both of these resources were

used for the following discussion.

The 1901 Census

At the beginning of the 20th century, Canadian society was rapidly transforming.

Cities and industrial towns in the east and rich farmland in the west sparked large-scale

internal migration in addition to successive waves of immigration from all parts of

Europe. Languages such as Italian, Chinese, Yiddish, Arabic and Ukrainian took their

place alongside the already well-established English, French, Gaelic, German and

aboriginal languages. The impetus for including a census question on mother tongue

grew directly out of Anglo-hegemonic concerns over immigration and assimilation:

In a country peopled by so many foreign elements as Canada, it is desirable to know if they are being absorbed

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and unified, as may appear by their acquirement of one or other of the official languages. And as English is now in a very large degree the language of commerce throughout the world, it is also desirable to ascertain to what extent citizens of French origin are able to speak it in addition to their own. (Canada 1901: viii)

The 1901 census actually included three questions on language: ability to speak

English, ability to speak French, and mother tongue. The mother tongue question was

explained to the census enumerators as follows:

Mother tongue is one’s native language, the language of his race; but not necessarily the language in which he thinks, or which he speaks most fluently, or uses chiefly in conversation. Whatever it may be, whether English, French, Gaelic, Irish, German, Swedish, Russian or any other, it should be entered by name in column 33 if the person speaks the language, but not otherwise. (Canada 1901: xx)

These instructions reveal the contradictory views about language and ethnicity in force at

the time. In the current understanding of the terms, both “mother tongue” and “native

language” refer to the language first learned in childhood, but “the language of [one’s]

race” implies a language historically associated with one’s ethnic origins. In the parlance

of the time, however, “mother tongue” and “native language” also referred to

membership in a genealogically determined language community (Gaffield 2000: 256).

On the other hand, the possibility of detachment from one’s ancestral language is

recognized in the instructions, and enumerators were advised to record the language only

if the person still spoke it.

Even before the census took place, the presence of Gaelic speakers (Scottish and

Irish) was apparently significant enough to deserve explicit mention in the instructions.

And both varieties of Gaelic were indeed among the most common responses to the new

question. The ten most commonly reported languages are given in the table below:6

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Language Number in Sample Percent of Total

English 143,427 62.0

French 68,332 29.5

German 6,307 2.7

Gaelic 3,873 1.7

Aboriginal languages 3,452 1.5

Slavic languages 1,192 0.5

Scandinavian languages 1,163 0.5

Asian languages 1,071 0.5

Irish 612 0.3

Other 2,016 0.9

Total 231,445

Table 1: Major languages and language groups, 1901 census sample

English and French unsurprisingly accounted for the vast majority of responses,

but among the remaining languages Gaelic was surpassed only by German; no other

single language came close to rivaling its numbers, accounting for one out of every five

people with a non-official mother tongue. In addition to the 3,873 “Gaelic” and “Scotch

Gaelic” responses, there were 412 listed simply as “Scotch”. How many of these were

actually Gaelic speakers is uncertain. Some individuals returned as “Scotch” speakers

clearly were Gaels, such as Annie MacEachern, 70, who lived in the thoroughly Gaelic-

speaking Maryvale subdistrict of Antigonish County, Nova Scotia. A Catholic, she was

born in rural Nova Scotia. And as if to remove all doubt, she was returned as unable to

speak English.

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Other “Scotch”-speaking individuals make highly unlikely candidates for

Gaeldom, such as 16 year-old Ezra M. Becksted of Williamsburg Township in Dundas

County, Ontario, a subdistrict in which fewer than one one-hundredth of one percent of

the residents were Gaelic-speakers. Most of the people in this category, however, are

much more difficult to pin down. Thus while the term “Scotch” clearly could refer to

Gaelic, it equally could refer to something entirely other than Gaelic. In some cases the

term may have been volunteered by the respondent, in others it may have been the

decision of the enumerator, perhaps simply equating mother tongue with the response for

“racial origin” (for which Scotch was a legitimate response). Whatever the reason, the

“Scotch” responses fit into a more general pattern of erroneous and ambiguous language

names, among which were Canadian, Austrian, Belgian, African, and Mennonite.

Even with a conservative distribution of the “Scotch” responses, the numbers

from the sample suggest a total Gaelic-speaking population in Canada of about 90,000

out of a total population of 5.37 million.7 Extrapolating by province, the majority—about

50,000—lived in Nova Scotia, Ontario had roughly 25,000, there were 7,000 in Prince

Edward Island, and 5,000 in Quebec. The rest were spread throughout Western Canada

apart from a few hundred in New Brunswick.8 A comparison of the 1901 and 1931

figures illustrates the extent to which Gaelic was truly a Canadian language at the turn of

the century, with robust communities across the country. Conversely, it also shows how

rapidly the language went into decline in the intervening three decades. Whereas Nova

Scotia lost about half of its Gaelic speaking population, Ontario’s Gàidhealtachd fell by

almost 90%. Quebec and PEI fared little better, losing 80% and 85% of their speakers

respectively.9

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Figure 1: Gaelic mother tongue by province/region, 1901 and 1931

It is worth noting at this point that census data are anything but infallible, and

these numbers are not meant to be definitive or beyond critique. Human error,

misdirection, misunderstanding, and social pressures to give acceptable answers all may

influence any particular statistic. Census data on language is often criticized for

undercounting linguistic minorities; the assimilationist pressures of a modern nation-state

that initiates the enumeration of its citizenry may engender reluctance to “stand up and be

counted”. MacKinnon’s survey of the Cape Breton Gàidhealtachd (1996: 366) led him to

suspect that the actual number of Gaelic speakers was a good deal higher than the official

reported count.

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Despite these caveats, the mother tongue figures for 1901 are extremely valuable.

The sample data allows for the comparison of the language responses with a host of other

demographic categories such as sex, age, occupation, ethnic origin, religion, and so on.

Only elementary research has been completed to this point, but a full analysis will paint a

rich picture of the state of Gaelic in Canada at the turn of the last century. As regards

gender, there was a slight imbalance, with females accounting for only 48% of the Gaelic

speakers counted. It is possible that women were proportionally less likely to speak

Gaelic, or at least to report being a native speaker. MacKinnon (1977: 160-1) gives

evidence of younger single women being at the leading edge of language shift in Gaelic

communities. It is also possible that there were simply fewer women than men in these

communities. The large-scale out-migration that decimated so many rural areas was

already underway by 1901, and the general pattern of this out-migration was a greater

proportion of young women leaving for the cities (Beattie 2000: 9-10). As the bulk of the

exodus was to major cities in the United States such as Boston and Detroit, few of these

migrants would have been captured by the Canadian census.

A correlation of Gaelic speakers with age shows a population already affected by

language shift, with a smaller proportion of Gaels in the younger age groups and a higher

proportion in the older years as compared with the general population.

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Additionally, the breakdown of Gaelic speakers as a percentage of all Canadians of

Scottish origin shows a decline by age group, with over a quarter of the oldest ethnic

Scots returned as Gaelic speakers, but fewer than 10% of the youngest Scots in that

category:

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The 1901 sample also gives us the possibility of backward approximation, i.e.,

estimating the number of speakers of a particular language at some point in the past. This

is achieved by removing everyone from the sample who was born or immigrated to

Canada after a particular date, thus retaining only those people who were in the country at

the time. This is of course a crude measurement, as it cannot account for those who were

present at the earlier date but either died or left Canada in the interim.10 Nevertheless, this

technique can give a rough idea of the linguistic composition of Canada in the 19th

century.

For example, we might take 1867, the year of Confederation, as our target date.

By removing from the database all those under the age of 34, and those who entered

Canada after 1867, a somewhat different picture of Canadian linguistic diversity emerges.

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While English and French dominated to the same extent as in 1901 (with 63% and 29%

of the total population, respectively), about 2.5% of the country spoke Gaelic, making it

the largest non-official language at the time of Confederation. German passed Gaelic

sometime in the intervening 34 years as a result of immigration. Other immigrant

languages were present in much smaller numbers, while aboriginal languages accounted

for a much higher proportion of the total.

With the sample data, it is possible to isolate distinct Gaelic areas of the country,

though the sample size prevents recognition of some smaller communities. Moving from

west to east, these are: 1) the Prairies, a few scattered settlements in southern Manitoba

and southeastern Saskatchewan; 2) Southwest Ontario, a patchwork of settlements with

its nexus in Bruce County, extending southward to Lake Erie and eastward to Lake

Simcoe; 3) Glengarry County, Ontario; 4) the Eastern Townships of Quebec, specifically

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Compton and Frontenac counties; and 5) the Eastern Maritimes, including Cape Breton

Island, Pictou and Antigonish counties on the Nova Scotian mainland, and Queens and

Kings counties in Prince Edward Island.

Each area, reflecting its unique history, had different demographic characteristics.

A comparison of age distributions, using the total Canadian population as a benchmark,

shows that language shift was well underway in several Gaelic communities, while in

others there was a healthy distribution of speakers across all age groups. In the latter

category are the Prairies, Quebec, and the core area of the Maritimes (i.e. Cape Breton

Island and Antigonish County).

The Prairie Gaels were for the most part recent arrivals from Scotland, enticed by

immigration schemes to settle townships such as Saltcoats, Wapella and Benbecula in the

last decades of the 19th century. This fact explains not only the lack of language shift but

also the relatively low number of Gaelic-speaking children compared with other

linguistically healthy areas. These settlements were on the whole short-lived, as poor

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conditions forced the people to disperse for better opportunities elsewhere. It should also

be noted that the sample found no Gaelic speakers in Kildonan, the settlement of

Highlanders organized by Lord Selkirk in 1811.

The Eastern Township Gaels were demographically the healthiest of the Gaelic

communities, most closely resembling the age distribution of the Canadian population as

a whole. These settlements, centered around the townships of Lingwick, Marsden,

Whitton and Winslow, date from the 1830s (Bennett 1998: 2), yet there appeared to be

little if any erosion of Gaelic. Many of Margaret Bennett’s informants in her seminal

study of this community would have been born around this time, and the census data

confirms that these Gaels were born into a vibrant Canadian Gàidhealtachd.

Even more impressive is the strength of Gaelic throughout Cape Breton and even

into Antigonish County. Many of these communities were a hundred years old by this

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time, and yet only in some areas were there early signs of decline. Given how quickly

Gaelic subsequently disappeared from Antigonish, this census must have caught the

county just before the “tip” toward English. Apart from Antigonish town and the Acadian

community of Pomquet in the eastern part of the county, Gaelic was holding its own quite

well.

In Cape Breton, Gaelic was at full strength over most of the island, the only

erosion appearing in places bordering on English-speaking areas. One apparent exception

was the subdistrict of Hillsboro in Inverness County, an area including Brook Village,

Black River, and part of Mabou. According to the enumerator, William Murray, every

single person in the subdistrict spoke English as their mother tongue. This seems

especially odd given that there are Gaelic speakers living there today. Whatever

possessed Mr. Murray to report to Ottawa that only English speakers lived amongst him,

it serves as a warning that any census data is subject to human frailties and cannot be

taken as gospel.11

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In the rest of the Maritimes, it is striking to see that as early as 1901 the Pictou

County Gàidhealtachd was almost gone. Apart from isolated Pictou Island in the

Northumberland Strait and Bailey’s Brook (a spillover community from Antigonish

County), Gaelic survived only vestigally in a few rural districts. There were no Gaelic

speakers under 50 years old in these areas, indicating that the last stage of language shift

occurred around 1850. Prince Edward Island is more difficult to characterize, with

pockets of strong Gaelic use and other areas severely weakened. Most of the stronger

areas appear to be places that received the latest immigration; the concentrations of

Gaelic speakers in western and southeastern Queens County, for example, were receiving

immigrants from Skye and Raasay up into the early 1860s (Mike Kennedy, personal

communication)

Retention of Gaelic was weakest in Ontario. In Glengarry County, only half of the

Scottish population was returned as Gaelic mother tongue. However, considering the age

and history of this community (an 18th century settlement in Upstate New York that

resettled in Ontario after the American Revolution), its retention of Gaelic is quite

impressive. Glengarry County borders on Quebec, and the 1901 census indicates a

growing French-speaking presence there. Although the 12,000 Scots outnumbered the

Quebecquois, there were more French speakers than Gaelic speakers.

Gaelic was in much worse shape in Southwestern Ontario, where for the most part

Gaels did not settle as thickly and exclusively as they did in other areas. Even in the

strongest parts of the region, such as Bruce County, fewer than one third of the ethnic

Scots claimed Gaelic as their mother tongue. This may partly be due to the inmixture of

sizeable numbers of Lowland Scots immigrants, but the age distribution of the Gaels in

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this part of Canada leaves little doubt as to the state of the language. The proportion of

Gaelic speakers under 20 was half the national average, and the proportion of over-50’s

was similarly twice the overall Canadian rate.

Final Thoughts

It is hoped that the brief analysis above will lead to further scholarship on the

state of Gaelic in Canada a century ago. The Canadian Families Project database contains

almost limitless research possibilities. Because it is a sample of households rather than

individuals, one can conduct an in-depth analysis of Gaelic-speaking families,

pinpointing average family size and composition, household income, and the source and

timing of language shift in the home. One can identify economic and occupational

stratification, or find Gaelic speakers of non-Scottish origin. The data can also be used to

identify particular areas for which it would be worth consulting the original schedules for

a fuller accounting.

Looking through the sample database and original schedules is also a reminder

that the “data” in census research are people’s lives. Everyone who supplies a variable for

social or economic concerns also has a name and a history. While the former are well

accounted for, the latter can only be glimpsed in their responses to the questions on the

paper. It is startling to see familiar names appear in a dry old Ottawa-directed document;

for example, Archibald J. MacKenzie, bard and author of The History of Christmas

Island Parish, appears as the enumerator for the Grand Narrows subdistrict of Cape

Breton County. Recognitions such as these serve as a reminder that the familiar call for

studying history “from the bottom up” has real meaning. Every Annie MacEachern and

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Ezra Becksted contribute to a grander narrative of Gaelic life in Canada, and for that we

as scholars owe them a debt of gratitude.

1 Cited in Edmison and Badovinac 1996 2 Houston and Knox 2001: xix 3 Macleod 1996: 206 4 In 1890 the population of Cape Breton Island was closer to 85,000, according to both the 1881 and 1891 censuses. Stephens does not make it clear whether MacInnes specifically cited the 100,000 figure in his speech, but Kennedy (2002) notes that MacInnes used the 1881 census. I suspect the number was added retrospectively by a later chronicler, perhaps inadvertently using the 1901 population count (which was indeed around 100,000). 5 See the Canadian Families Project website for more information: http://www.uvic.ca/hrd/cfp/index.htm 6 The total number does not include people for whom a mother tongue was not recorded. The census instructions were to only record a mother tongue for people five years of age and older. The numbers for language groups are not easily disaggregated into individual languages, as generic answers such as “Indian” and “Scandinavian” were common. 7 Although only those over age five were enumerated for mother tongue, these estimates are for all ages, in order to make the numbers comparable with later counts which assigned a mother tongue to all citizens. 8 As Newfoundland was not a part of Canada in 1901, there are unfortunately no language statistics for the Codroy Valley Gàidhealtachd. 9 The similar numbers for Western Canada for both census years is a function of the overall boom in population rather than any stability of the Gaelic-speaking communities there. 10 The importance of accounting for the departed (in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word) is obvious in the case of Gaelic, where language shift and disproportionate out-migration both contributed to a shrinking demographic. 11 Other enumerators appear to have erred in the opposite direction, equating ethnic origin with mother tongue and returning every German as German-speaking, every Scot as “Scotch”-speaking, etc. It is of course impossible to determine how the numbers for any language were affected by these forms of over- and under-counting. WORKS CITED Beattie, Betsy. 2000. Obligation and Opportunity: Sinble Maritime Women in Boston,

1870-1930. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. Bennett, Margaret. 1998. Oatmeal and the Catechism: Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec.

Montreal & Kinston: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Campbell, John L. 1990. Songs Remembered in Exile. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

Press. Canada. 1901. Fourth Census of Canada: Instructions to officers. Ottawa: Department of

Agriculture. Dominion Bureau of Statistics. n.d. Bulletin XLII: Gaelic Mother Tongue. Copy in

Beaton Institute Archives. Edmison, David and Edward P. Badovinac, eds. 1996. The Empire Club of Canada

Speeches 1995-1996. Toronto: The Empire Club Foundation. Fraser, A. 1899. ‘The Gael in Canada’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness

23, pp. 209-13. Gaffield, Chad. 2000. ‘Linearity, nonlinearity, and the Competing Constructions of

Social Hierarchy in Early Twentieth-Century Canada: The Question of Language in 1901’, Historical Methods 33:4, pp. 255-60.

Houston, R.A. and W.W.J. Knox. 2001. The New Penguin History of Scotland from the

Earliest Times to the Present Day. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Kennedy, Michael. 2002. Gaelic Nova Scotia: An Economic, Cultural and Social Impact

Study. Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum. MacKinnon, Kenneth. 1996. ‘Cape Breton-Western Isles: transatlantic resonance of

language and culture’, Language Contact Across the North Atlantic, ed. P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

———. 1977. Language, Education and Social Processes in a Gaelic Community. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Macleod, John. 1996. Highlanders: A History of the Gaels. London: Sceptre. Stephens, Meic. 1976. Linguistic Minorities in Western Europe. Llandysul: Gomer Press.