English can be quite a possessive language, which I only realized after studying Scottish Gaelic in university.

Most of my maternal family were Scottish Highlanders who immigrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia a few generations back. They brought their language with them, and studying it felt like an important task of remembrance and reverence. But it also completely reshaped my worldview.

For example:

In Gaelic the sense of ownership over things and people that we see in many Western European languages/cultures does not exist. The land is seen as a living being and words have gender because the world is animate, imbued with spirits and life forces in rivers and mountains.

In Gaelic you don’t say “Mary has a child,” you say “There is a child at Mary,” and this connotation implies that Mary does not possess or own the child, but that they are related.

In much the same way, you wouldn’t say that you “own” land. There is a beautiful concept called Dùthchas, which stresses the interconnectedness of people, land, culture, including an ecological balance among humans and more than human. We “steward” the land that nourishes us.

Even creativity has an inherent liveliness. Imbas is the Gaelic word for inspiration, but it carries an otherworldly or divine element to it. Many feel that it runs in the blood of families through generations and has been the root essence of divine creativity for poets, musicians, and artists throughout Celtic history.

Gaelic defines the world as a relationship, while English seems more adept at defining the world as ownership and separation. I think about this a lot.

**EDIT: I want to note that when I first wrote this, it was rather quick and lacks nuance (and I haven’t had much traction on my substack, so I fully expected it to go into the void). I in no way mean to romanticize Celtic culture or pretend that they were perfect. What I really intend is for people to understand that there are other ways of looking at the world, that we should interrogate language, and challenge ourselves to see things from other perspectives. That by doing so, we might try and make things better for the here and now.

Also: as a Canadian of mostly-settler origin (I have Mi’maq ancestry as well), I recognize now the role that English language dominance, and the deliberate oppression of local Indigenous languages, has shaped how I saw the world. It is a process of decolonization to examine how the language I speak impacts the ongoing harm that we are doing to Indigenous communities and our natural environment. Those languages/cultures may not be perfect, but there is still value in exploring them (think of the millions of people who felt so moved by Braiding Sweetgrass).