North American Gaels: Speech, Story, and Song in the Diaspora

A mere 150 years ago Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in Canada, and Irish was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. A new awareness of the large North American Gaelic diaspora, long overlooked by historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, has emerged in recent decades.

North American Gaels, representing the first tandem exploration of these related migrant ethnic groups, examines the myriad ways Gaelic-speaking immigrants from marginal...