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In the 15 years during which I was constantly visiting the East Sutherland district of the northeast Scottish mainland or living there, actively studying the dying Scottish Gaelic dialect of the region and clearly deeply engaged by its distinctive history and unique flavor, I was asked many times whether my activities or indeed anyone else's could make any difference to the ultimate fate of the dialect. But I was never asked that question by a native of the region. Both academics and laypeople in other parts of the world thought it theoretically possible that the ebb tide of linguistic retreat might turn or be turned. And theoretically of course such a thing is perfectly possible and has in fact happened in the case of a good many languages. The heroic, nearmiraculous example of Hebrew, regaining vernacular status after centuries of more or less fossilized existence, is always to the fore, and the number of other languages once threatened but now perfectly secure is sufficient to make the question reasonable enough. For a compilation of success stories, see Ellis and mac a' Ghobhainn (1971); for examples of enclaved peoples who have survived against all odds, sometimes with their languages as part of the persisting identity, see Castile and Kushher (1981). Nonetheless, at the risk of casting a dark shadow over a subject already rendered gloomy by the sheer number of languages known to have died or acknowledged to be in the gravest danger of doing so very shortly, I wish to deal here with some of the more knotty problems which pose severe obstacles to well-intended and even well-funded efforts to promote the survival (whether in terms of true maintenance or of revival from a barely existing population base) of threatened languages. I will deal first with the East Sutherland Gaelic case and then add examples from the Irish experience. My reason for emphasizing the negative rather than the positive in this paper is not a wish to deny the value of language-maintenance programs in general (see the closing sections of this paper in evidence), but rather an uneasy sense that maintenance programs are too easily and comfortably invoked as a solu-

The value of language-maintenance efforts which are unlikely to succeed