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Abstract
Focusing on the verbal rather than the visual elements of early and more modern headstones in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, this essay will comment on a selection of Gaelic headstone inscriptions, highlighting such elements as word choice (whether secular or religious), cemetery location, time period, and the deceased’s background. Despite the striking paucity of Gaelic examples, it is our objective to discuss why Gaelic had a limited presence in Nova Scotia’s pioneer Scottish immigrant cemeteries and to demonstrate how these cemeteries were contested sites, which mirrored ongoing tensions between assimilation and cultural retention. In sum, this article will assess the importance of cemeteries as material articulations of language use and language maintenance among Nova Scotia’s diasporic Scots, set against the wider background of their struggles, aspirations, and shared values.
Highlights
The political, religious, economic, and cultural contours of Nova Scotia, Canada were profoundly shaped by the successive waves of Scottish immigrants who came to the colony during the 18th and19th centuries
Our research in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton demonstrates that the headstones of Scottish immigrants and their descendants tell collective, as well as individual stories, offering scholars the means to track through time via inscription samples the trajectories of Gaelic language maintenance, language loss, and language renewal
We have sketched in broad strokes our preliminary findings about Gaelic language use in the cemeteries of eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton
Summary
The political, religious, economic, and cultural contours of Nova Scotia, Canada were profoundly shaped by the successive waves of Scottish immigrants who came to the colony during the 18th and. Perhaps more than any other ethnic group in eastern Canada, the Scots have received a prodigious amount of historical attention, both scholarly and popular Their impact on such facets of Nova Scotia’s past as politics, economics, education, religion, literature, publishing, demography, and folk culture. Genealogy 2018, 2, 29 have been amply documented Despite their central importance in documenting and perpetuating ethnic identity, cemeteries have been an underutilised artefact for scholars researching the socio-historical context of Scottish immigration to Nova Scotia. One of the most durable and ubiquitous examples of the Scottish immigration and settlement experience, have been largely overlooked by historians This deficiency may well explain the lingering misconception that the headstones of Nova Scotia’s immigrant Scots and their descendants are devoid of Gaelic inscriptions and that this group looked to other attributes, outside of the cemetery, to fortify their group identity. The following article is meant to serve as a corrective to this misreading of evidence by demonstrating to historians, linguists, folklorists, and genealogists that among Nova Scotia’s Scots, there existed a small cohort who defied linguistic homogenisation and through inscriptional language preference (i.e., using Gaelic), found a way to give material expression to their culture through death
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