Gaelic Alive in N. America

Keep Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia predominately Gaelic speaking. Your POD will be somewhere after 1800. GO!
 
Keep Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia predominately Gaelic speaking. Your POD will be somewhere after 1800. GO!

Having both provinces majority-Gaelic speaking is close to impossible. There will be too many English-speaking settlers to keep Gaelic on top.

Now, parts of Nova Scotia still have Gaelic speakers, mostly in Cape Breton Island. So you could have a more drastic Highland Clearances in the first half of the 19th Century in Scotland that sends over a much greater number of Gaels. A savvy colonial government on the Island would attract as many as they could, and the greater amount of economic output as a result of the higher population keeps Cape Breton from being folded into Nova Scotia.

Fast forward two hundred years and Canada has a Gaelic-speaking province.

I suppose the scenario above could be applied to PEI as well, but Gaelic speakers will number too few no matter what you do to have more than one small province majority-Gael.
 
Last time I was in Cape Breton I stopped at the Gaelic College and was talking with one of the Gaelic teachers. She said that one of the problems is that all of the native speakers are all still speaking the rather devergent dialects that they brought over for Scotland.
So what would be needed would be a standard Gaelic and a Gaelic revival, such as Welsh had in the late 1800s
 
Senator Thomas Robert McInnes introduced a bill in 1890 that would have made Gaelic an official language of Canada, but it was defeated 42 to 7. If you can make Gaelic stronger in the early 19th century, when a similar initiative comes forward, perhaps it could pass narrowly instead. With Gaelic an official language and already stronger, it could perhaps survive as a viable language in parts of Atlantic Canada.
 
Have the Maritime provinces united

How would that help in the slightest?

Anyway, with a standardized Gaelic language and a lot more highlander immigrants to Cape Breton, you could probably manage a Gaelic speaking Cape Breton province. Nova Scotia proper is too big and Halifax too nice a port to not become English speaking eventually IMO (well, post Deportation anyway)
 
A more regionally focused, executive government would have realized that, in the mid 1800s half of Nova Scotia spoke Gaelic. Either as a second language, or principally at home. The idea of publicly funded education comes to mind, but I guess governemnt education is a of only a slight help in the standarization of languages.

Shoot, by 1838, Cape breton itself had over 30,000 gaelic speakers. Ceilidh Days are a mark of that today. My fathers family (immediate/extended) spoke it at home until the the 1970's when most of that generation went either west, or Halifax ways. My Mothers family still do.

Also during this period, the Saint John river valley was experiancing a boom of both Irish and Scottish populations, who also spoke Gaelic. Granted a fair amount of these were Lowlander Scots, but there were half as many Highlander.

A good read would be "Highland Settler : A Portrait of the Scottish Gaelic in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia" by Charles Dunn

Hit up the CBU website to boot.

I dig the premise, it's a question I've asked myself. It would deffinately have made travelling the Acadien Coast interesting to hear the accents.
 
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