25/08/2026
🏴 Every October, in a different Scottish town each year, hundreds of people stand up in a village hall and sing in a language that generations of schoolchildren were once punished for speaking.
It is called the Mòd, and it is one of the quietest acts of defiance in Scottish history.
An Comunn Gàidhealach, the Highland Association, was founded in Oban in 1891 with one stubborn aim: to keep Scottish Gaelic alive. The following year, in 1892, they held their first gathering in Oban, modelled deliberately on the Welsh Eisteddfod. Competitions in solo song, choral singing, poetry, recitation and storytelling. The Oban Times reported that the competitions were keen and the audience thoroughly appreciative. It has been held nearly every year since.
You have to understand what was happening at the same time. Across the Highlands and Islands, children were being taught in English only. Gaelic was treated as a backward tongue, something to be grown out of, and plenty of people alive today can still tell you about a grandparent who was made to feel ashamed of the first words they ever spoke. 💙
And against all of that, a group of people rented a hall and gave out medals for singing in it.
The Mòd did something no policy could have done. It made Gaelic a thing you could be proud of in public. Choirs formed in townships and in city Gaelic societies alike. Families travelled for days. The Gold Medal became something a young singer might spend ten years working toward. And it crossed the water too, because wherever Gaelic speakers settled, local mòds followed them.
It is still going. It is still full. Small children still stand on those platforms and sing songs their great great grandparents sang on a shore two hundred miles and a hundred and fifty years away.
A language does not survive in a dictionary. It survives in a room full of people who decided it was worth singing out loud.
