Towards a reparative geography of the mother tongue. Multiculturalism, migration and minoritised languages in the Outer Hebrides

Chapman, Eleanor (2024) Towards a reparative geography of the mother tongue. Multiculturalism, migration and minoritised languages in the Outer Hebrides. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The central question carrying this PhD thesis towards a reparative geography of the mother tongue is how, to what extent and with what implications the relationship between language and place might be detached from the colonial structures of nation and race and articulated instead through forms of multicultural, translational, translocal relation.

To this end, the thesis analyses geographies of multiculturalism, migration and minoritised languages in the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago of 15 inhabited (and over 50 uninhabited) islands off the northwest coast of Scotland. Typically thought of as the ‘heartlands’ of Scots Gaelic – a minoritised Celtic language with 57,000 speakers in Scotland as of the 2021 census – the islands also babble with the dialects, idioms and registers of many other tongues. Not only a landscape of leaving, clearance, even evacuation, the Hebrides’ ripples of machair, expanses of knolled moorland and fractured coastline of sea lochs, lochans and inlets have long been a complex site of arrival, with the more recent (and highly mediatised) resettlement of Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees across the archipelago complementing longer, diverse but often hidden or unseen histories and geographies of rural migration, multilingualism and multiculturalism.

In analysing these language geographies through the intersecting thematic lenses of (i) language and relation, (ii) language and territory and (iii) language and embodiment, the thesis makes several original theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions. Complementing a broader interdisciplinary integration of human geography and sociolinguistics, the thesis advances interdisciplinary scholarship on ‘new ethnicities’, rural multicultures and emerging geographies of translation and multilingualism. It additionally intervenes in perennially relevant political debates that are nonetheless particularly salient in the current context of hardening nationalism and hostility towards racialised cultural otherness, regarding the reproduction of ‘translational’ forms of political identity and community formed with and through, not in spite of, difference.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography; P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Geographical and Earth Sciences
• Funder's Name: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
• Supervisor's Name: Botterill, Dr. Katherine and Featherstone, Professor David
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84788
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 08 Jan 2025 15:02
• Last Modified: 08 Jan 2025 15:02
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84788
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84788