Unmuting the Subaltern through Linguistic Hybridisation: Gaelicisations and their Functionality in Trauma-Related Novels by Fionn Mac Colla and Neil M. Gunn

Abstract

One of the essential objectives of the modernist Scottish Renaissance movement was to re-develop a strong national Scottish identity by emphasising the Celtic-Gaelic heritage. Authors such as Neil M. Gunn or Fionn Mac Colla pursued this aim by functionalising Gaelicised English in their texts, which relate to trauma events of the nineteenth century. Gaelicised English is defined as the usage of Gaelic vocabulary and Gaelic grammatical patterns within the framework of English as a superstrate text tissue. In this article, many examples of Gaelicised English taken from Mac Colla's novel And the Cock Crew (1945) and from Gunn's Butcher's Broom (1934) will be presented and contextualised. These Gaelicisations can be considered as key components of a linguistic hybridity which challenges the master metanarrative of the nineteenth-century Highland Clearances and the discourse of the Improvements. The question to be answered in the last part of this text will be if these novels and their linguistic hybridity can help to process the trauma of the Clearances by giving a voice to a muted Highland subalternity.