Seòmar agus comataidhean

I have a question for Lydia Rohmer, based on what Dr Munro has just said. Lydia, you say in your submission:

“it would be better to have two separate Bills—one for Scots and one for Gaelic. Having both together ... risks muddying the waters and causing confusion.”

You have heard how passionately Dr Munro has just spoken about the Gaelic side of the bill. Will you elaborate on what you would like to happen in terms of splitting the bill and whether it would be good for the committee to take that idea on board?

Good morning. Douglas Ansdell, I want to pick up on what you said in your conclusion about people looking forward to good progress being delivered on the ambitions. If the bill is enacted, how will that progress be measured for Gaelic and Scots, and when does that measurement take place?

I see. Thank you.

To be absolutely clear, once those teachers are trained and deployed in schools, they will develop, in their own time and off their own bat, the resources that they will then teach, and they will translate the textbooks and the like. Will there be a cost to that?

We have heard representations that if the Government will not pause the bill—as you have suggested it should, Dr Ó Giollagáin—it might be better to have two separate bills: one relating to Gaelic and one to Scots. Is that a useful suggestion, and should the Government consider it?

Professor Millar, you said some interesting things about dialects and vernacular. The bill talks about the Scots language, but people will be confused by that. The Scots language appears to refer to one particular dialect. The bill team suggested this morning that the bill incorporates Doric, Orkney Norn and Lallans, but those dialects, perhaps, use fundamentally different words to the Scots language that Dr Dempster has been using this morning. Is it right to call this a Scots language bill? Is that clear enough, in your view? What are the implications, if not?

Perhaps, but I am still slightly struggling to decide or to isolate how the bill’s success will be measured. From looking through the bill, it seems to me that a large amount of the substance of any future language policy and, indeed, the targets that you have just talked about will be left to strategies, guidance and regulations. Perhaps that is where the answer to the question lies. Indeed, it sounds as though those are for the individual bodies to define. Why is there not more detail in the bill about the types of duties and the targets that the public bodies will have?

I am grateful for that, but that is not quite what I was getting at. Measurement has to measure something. You have also talked about significant spend, and my friend will come back to that later. What are the key performance indicators that show positive returns on the sums invested? What does success look like in terms of what is being measured?

Claire Cullen, you mentioned Wales. I was interested in my friend Ben Macpherson’s questions about official status, and in Willie Rennie’s question about what difference designating an area of significance would make. The Welsh language was given official status in 2011. What research was done about what difference that made to the Welsh language, such that we could learn lessons when drawing up this bill?

To be clear, you researched that, but it was not possible to say whether the designation of the Welsh language in 2011 as an official language made a measurable difference.