There are moments when language stops being a tool and becomes a refuge.
For me, Gaelic has always been like that. Not simply a language I inherited, but a way of being in the world, one that shaped how my family understood land, kinship, humour, grief and responsibility. It was there in the background of my childhood: half-heard phrases, songs that carried more feeling than explanation, a sense that words could hold people together even when life was hard.
In a previous blog now five years ago I spoke about how I had to be taught English to replace my mixture of twin-speak and Gaelic, of how I missed the cadences and rootedness of my original tongue, and of how my mother’s dementia was shaped by her return to the language of her childhood. I am mindful of all this in the year that the Gaelic language has received official status from the Scottish Government and two days out from the start of Seachdain na Gàidhlig (World Gaelic Week) which runs from 23rd February to the 1st March 2026. It is a Scotland wide and international celebration of Scottish Gaelic language and culture which is funded by Bòrd na Gàidhlig, with events in communities, schools, care settings, arts venues, and online. The theme for 2026 is: “Use It or Lose It / Cleachd i no caill i”
As I have grown older, that sense of language as belonging has deepened in me especially as I watched my own mother live with dementia. The sense of losing language unless it is used is also very pressing as every year without my mother’s Gaelic chats I grow further and further away.
Something remarkable happens as memory frays both with age and especially with dementia. The acquired, professional, socially expected layers of language often fall away first. What remains is older. Deeper. More elemental. For my mother, Gaelic had not disappeared in the way that names, dates or recent events sometimes did. Instead, it returned, even more dominant, unexpectedly, tenderly, as if the mind, in its own wisdom, retreated to the place where language first felt safe.
This is not nostalgia. It is neurology, identity and care colliding.
During Seachdain na Gàidhlig, we rightly celebrate the living language, its creativity, its resilience, its future. But we also need to speak about its role at the end of life, and in the long, complex middle space of ageing, frailty and cognitive change. Because language is not just about communication. It is about recognition.
To be spoken to in your first language, especially when you are vulnerable, is to be told: you still belong here.
People living with dementia do not lose their personhood. But they do lose the scaffolding that helps them navigate a world built for speed, efficiency and cognitive performance. In those moments, language becomes more than semantics. It becomes emotional geography.
A familiar phrase can calm distress where medication cannot. A song can unlock connection when logic fails. A word spoken with the right rhythm and accent can say you are known in a way no care plan ever could.
This is as true for Gaelic speakers as it is for people whose first language is Urdu, Polish, Cantonese, BSL, Scots, or any other language carried into later life. Scotland is not monolingual in its ageing. Our care systems often behave as if it is.
Cianalas
There is a Gaelic word I keep circling back to as I get older: cianalas.
It is usually translated as homesickness, but the word is larger than that. Cianalas is the ache for what shaped you, the place, the people, the sounds, the blàs (the flavour, the accent) of speech that tells you you belong. It is a longing that is not simply for a geography, but for a known way of being.
In the gentle erosion that dementia brings, I have watched how cianalas moves from the edges of a life to its centre. My mother’s English, the language that carried so many of her adult years slipped away like a tide. But Gaelic did not go far. It returned in the mornings, in the intimacies of care, in the quiet between questions. A phrase. A hymn. The cadence of a blessing half‑remembered. And when a carer answers in kind, even with a few words, even with an approximation of the blàs, recognition sparks. The room settles. The person is seen.
This is not romanticism. It is what so many of us know from lived experience and professional practice: first languages often endure somewhere in the layered self, and when we meet someone in that language, we meet them in a place of safety and identity.
But what happens to language when the system and structures of social care become so pressured and stressed that just as in this past week we read of yet another Health and Care Partnership warning that care will potentially have to be reduced just to those with critical need?
For years, we have spoken about person‑centred care as a moral and professional baseline. But the reality across social care today is stark. Underfunding, workforce shortages and crisis commissioning have narrowed care down to task completion and risk management.
When the system is forced to focus only on what is “critical”, everything relational is framed as optional. A focus on language becomes a “nice to have”. Culture becomes an “extra”. Time becomes the enemy.
And yet, for someone living with dementia, language is not an extra. It is care.
A care plan that captures first language, familiar songs, place‑names; a team who learn basic greetings; signage and small rituals that carry the beul‑aithris (oral tradition) into daily life – these simple acts lowers anxiety, restores dignity, and anchors the self.
I have seen a single line of a psalm do more to soothe than any sedative; a remembered place‑name (An t‑Eilean, An Gleann) restore orientation more quickly than any timetable. These are not luxuries. They are expressions of dignity. But they are precisely the things most at risk when care is reduced to survival mode.
Gaelic carries concepts that modern care policy struggles to articulate. Ideas of belonging, mutual responsibility, and continuity between generations. Words that assume relationship rather than transaction. Care as something done with, not to.
When older people lose access to their language, they are not just losing words. They are losing a moral universe that once made sense of the world.
In a country that is ageing, diverse, and increasingly unequal, this should trouble us deeply.
If we allow the social care crisis to hollow out language, culture and relationship; if we accept a system that only meets “high‑level needs” while neglecting the human ones then we will end up with services that keep people alive but fail to help them live.
Seachdain na Gàidhlig reminds us that languages survive not because they are protected in law, but because they are used in daily life especially in moments of vulnerability.
I leave you with a poem:
Speak to me
not only so I understand,
but so I am recognised.
When my words come slowly,
meet me there.
When they come from another time,
do not correct them,
walk with them.
Care is not the task you finish,
but the person you remain with
when the task is done.
If we forget this,
we will build places
where bodies are kept safe
and selves are quietly lost.
Listen.
The language is still here.
It is asking
to be answered.
Donald Macaskill
