''Shall Gaelic die! What that means is: shall we die?''

Iain Crichton Smith

''EVERYBODY who speaks Gaelic is a poet,'' said Rob MacilleChiar, writer-in-residence at the Gaelic College in Skye and a poet himself. Brought up by English-speaking parents in Argyll, he turned to poetry as soon as he started learning Gaelic, and I thought I could understand why.

How could one not be a poet speaking the tongue, with consonants often ''aspirated'', so that the words are not pronounced, but actually breathed out? How could one's soul not be poeticised by words like ''corra-ghritheach'', denoting grey heron, but literally meaning pointed shriek? Or ''fork of wind'' - for swallow; ''God's fire'' - for butterfly; ''curtain of water'' - for rain, and so on?

How could one stay unmoved by the fact that each of the 18 letters in the Gaelic alphabet is associated with a tree name: Ailm (elm) stood for A, Beith (birch) - for B, Coll or Calltuinn (hazel) - for C, etc?

As Rob himself wrote in one of his poems:

''Were I to send a love letter to you,

I would send every tree in the wood . . . ''

Rob's Portakabin on the college's old campus served not only as his writing den, but also as a literary hub of this unique educational establishment, where every other teacher, irrespective of what subject he or she taught, was a published Gaelic poet.

The college's residential quarters, equipped - among other gadgets - with the world's only Gaelic-speaking lift, became my home for three nights during my search for the Gaelic language, officially recognised as Scotland's national tongue.

It took me more than eight hours by trains and ferry to reach this ''protected Gaelic enclave'' (in the words of Roy Wentworth, a college lecturer) on Sleat peninsula in south Skye, although my first exposure to Gaelic occurred while still in Glasgow: it was a ''Welcome to Queen Street'' Gaelic sign at the station, where I boarded a train to Mallaig.

I was tempted to assume that the train conductor asked for my tickets in Gaelic (I couldn't understand a word of what he was saying), but it turned out that he spoke Glaswegian. Disappointingly, a group of Fort William-bound Scottish labourers, sitting opposite me, kept communicating among themselves with the help of one short English word (and its derivatives) alone. One could be forgiven for thinking that, if Gaelic was indeed Scottish national tongue, then Glasgow and even the Highlands, to say nothing of Edinburgh, were miles away from Scotland itself.

''He who loses his language loses his land,'' runs an old Cornish proverb. If so, Scotland must be in real danger of shrinking to the size of Monaco or San Marino in the near future. According to the recent census, the number of Gaelic speakers fell by 7000 during the past 10 years and has reached the critical mark of 58,652.

Why critical? Because all Scottish newspapers in their coverage of the census quoted (with no source revealed) the figure of 50,000 language speakers, below which, allegedly, the tongue was considered ''officially dead''. As a multi-linguist, who wrote a lot about so-called minority languages, I had reasons to doubt it.

One sign of proof was the Faroe Islands, which I visited some time ago. With just 40,000 people in total, this small semi-independent nation boasted eight daily newspapers and 150 titles of books a year in Faroese - its much-treasured indigenous language.

The purity of Faroese was fiercely defended by the committee for the protection of the language - a government-supported watchdog, making sure that every child born on the islands was given a Faroese name and that as few foreign borrowings as possible could sneak into the mother tongue. This might sound too harsh, but the Faroese had to resort to extreme measures to revive their language after five centuries of Danish domination.

Likewise, the history of Gaelic is, to a large degree, a story of its suppression, the first (successful) attempt at which was undertaken by the Romans. It was outlawed by the Crown in 1616. In the eighteenth century, Gaelic books were publicly burned in the streets of Edinburgh.

The 1872 Education Act made English compulsory in all schools, and Highland children were beaten into speaking it. This centuries-long chronicle of repression stretches as far as November 2002, when the Scottish Executive voted down the bill that would give Gaelic equal status with English in certain areas of the Highlands and Islands.

It looked almost as if it had been done deliberately - to force the number of Gaelic speakers under the ''magical'' 50,000 mark, after which it would be pronounced ''officially dead'' and hence not worth bothering about.

How about the occasional Gaelic signs, you might ask? How about (pounds) 20m (allegedly) spent on promoting Gaelic every year? How about regulation photos of schoolchildren, happily learning Gaelic, carried by many a Scottish newspaper? How about the college itself, after all?

I got the answer while crossing from Mallaig to Skye on a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry, whose skipper welcomed the passengers in Gaelic, only to switch over to English for the rest of his lengthy announcement concerning the ship's rules and safety procedures.

I thought it was symbolic of the executive's general attitude to Gaelic: while supporting it on a purely superficial ''window-dressing'' level (signs, greetings, some public broadcasting, the ''national tongue'' rhetoric, etc), very little is being done in the areas where funding is essential to stop the language from dying.

For years, the staff of the Gaelic College have been denied money for compiling and publishing a comprehensive Gaelic-English dictionary (the latest goes back to 1880s). Compared to the eight Faroese dailies for 40,000 population, there is not a single Gaelic daily or weekly newspaper left in Scotland, with its ''official'' 58,652 fluent Gaelic speakers. The only literary magazine in Gaelic - the acclaimed Glasgow-based ''Germ'' quarterly - had to fold last year due to lack of funds. Many teachers and students at the college lamented what they called ''the death of Gaelic publishing''.

One of the college students told me bitterly: ''Gaelic has become a marketing gimmick for Scottish tourism officials promoting it as if it were a tartan.''

Outside the college, there are not many Gaelic speakers left in Sleat. Even the pupils at the local Gaelic medium school are likely to ''play in English'' during the breaks. A native of Sleat, himself, a Gaelic speaker (yet not a reader or a writer), told me of his shock on spotting two toddler girls ''playing in Gaelic'' not far from his house.

''I haven't seen anything like this from childhood,'' he said. Those two little girls were probably daughters of Lindsey Campbell, a local sculptor. She and her husband speak to the girls exclusively in Gaelic. They also had to chuck out their TV set. ''I hate it when tourists take photos of my Gaelic-speaking children, as if they were monkeys. They are like all other kids and simply play in their native language,'' she said.

Sir Iain Noble, the founder of the Gaelic College and a Gaelic patriot himself, shared with me his conviction that to reverse the number of Gaelic-speakers from dwindling even further, special pockets of language-enforcement should be created on the Islands. ''In such areas, only Gaelic should be taught at schools, and all public servants should be Gaelic-speaking.''

Sadly, such enforcements, unless properly weighed up and legislated, like they were in the Faroes, seldom work in real life. Language is a living body and as such it cannot be imposed from above. But it can be helped from above to develop naturally - by carefully targeted funding and legislation. As it is, the state of Gaelic in Scotland can be compared to an old croft, with a restored and freshly painted facade, but a neglected and crumbling interior.

A language dies every week somewhere in the world. Is Gaelic destined to become one of them? ''Death is outside the language. The end of language is beyond language,'' wrote Iain Crichton Smith. He was right of course. Forget about the mythical 50, 000 viability mark. Even if only two people speak a language between themselves, it cannot be pronounced ''officially dead''. And Gaelic, this undisputed linguistic gem, should not be allowed to disappear in the years and centuries to come. For losing it would be like losing the very soul of Scotland.

How do people come to Gaelic? I addressed this question to many students and teachers of the Gaelic College. Only very few of them were brought up as Gaelic speakers. Some, like Rob MacilleChiar, got interested in Gaelic through its peculiar place names.

Others, like Simone Dietrich from Germany (the college has a number of students from abroad), were inspired by Celtic music. Scott MacDonald, another student, took up Gaelic after living in Holland - encouraged by the linguistic prowess of the Dutch.

''People turn to Gaelic to find a soul, a root, a ground under their feet,'' Rob told me in his Portakabin, where his weekly Gaelic writing class was about to begin. Angus Macleod, a shy first-year student and a native of Skye, read his poems - in Gaelic and in English (for my sake, I presume). His verse was dynamic and full of imagery. I liked two metaphors from one of his poems: his head being ''a cluster of dreams'' as he wakes up in the morning, with ''dawn scratching at the door''.

Gaelic verse was alive and well. And as long as the poetry lives, the language can never die.

Dawn was ''scratching at the door'', or rather at the window, of my room overlooking the Sound of Sleat - no more than 50 yards away.

A bright piercing light, its source still invisible, was blending the sky and the sea into a pinkish whisky of sunrise. I opened the window and heard the surf whispering something in Gaelic. It was probably saying good-bye: ''Tiaraidh an drasda!''

As the ferry was chugging further and further away from Skye, the following four-liner formed itself in my head:

Every letter - a tree,

Every sound - a sigh.

I'll be missing the sea,

Speaking Gaelic to Skye.

Next week: Vitali Vitaliev attends the Old Firm match at Parkhead.