‘You seem a very intelligent man, and can speak English’: Gaels and Government Inquiries in the Later Nineteenth Century

The Napier Commission (1883), with its focus on the condition of the crofting communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, enjoys a particularly prominent status within the historiography due in large part to the voluminous evidence it collected from a cross-spectrum of Highland society. This article considers the ways in which Gaelic speakers were accommodated by this commission and by the later Deer Forest Commission (1893−4), while the language in which many of the witnesses delivered their testimony was simultaneously invisibilised by the official, published evidence. The approaches of governmental evidence-gathering from earlier in the century are considered before focusing on these two commissions which afforded Gaelic speakers the opportunity, on an unprecedented scale, to address these inquiries in their native language. The hazy figure of the interpreter is considered, supplemented by evidence from the contemporary press, as are the ways in which this interpreting process was handled and some of the challenges it presented for witnesses and commissioners. This raises questions relating to the wider linguistic landscape of the nineteenth-century Highlands, to the power dynamic between Gaelic and English speakers and to the ways in which this language barrier was negotiated.