ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the nature and emergence of accounts such as Duncan's. This entails consideration not just of the Gaelic renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, and the broader Scottish nationalism and ethnonationalism with which the flourishing of interest in Gaelic was linked, but also involves attention to earlier periods, particularly late eighteenth-century romantic nationalism which provides many of the categories on which the Gaelic renaissance and ethnonationalism draw. In the case of Gaelic, at various times and to various ends, it has been argued to be the same as, or continuous with, languages including Irish Gaelic, Pictish, and Hebrew. In the fifteenth century, the name generally used by Lowland commentators to designate Gaelic and its speakers shifted from 'Scottish' to 'Erse' or 'Irish'. The new importance of linguistic specificity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can also be seen in the growth of academic interest in vernacular languages.
