The creation of ‘new speakers’ via education and language policy interventions has become an increasingly crucial objective in many contexts of minority language revitalisation. The phrase was initially coined in respect of L2 users of the Galician and Catalan languages, and has since been employed frequently in the sociolinguistics of other minoritised language groups. The concept of ‘new’ speakers refers to individuals who have acquired high levels of oracy in an additional language to that of their principal childhood socialisation, and make frequent use of it in the course of their daily lives. At the respective levels of national and provincial government, policymakers in Scotland and Nova Scotia make frequent reference to the role that such individuals may play in the future of the Gaelic language. In addition to Scotland's 57,600 Gaelic speakers, the 2011 Canadian census recorded 1,275 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, or just over 0.1 per cent of the total population of the province. Of that number, only 300 individuals reported Gaelic as their mother tongue. The Nova Scotia Gaelic community is thus substantially smaller than that of Scotland relative to the total population, having declined from an estimated population of over 80,000 in the early twentieth century. In both polities, policymakers have emphasised the importance of Gaelic language teaching as a mechanism for revitalising Gaelic. New speakers have thus emerged in both contexts as a significant element in the Gaelic language community.

Notably, Gaelic educational opportunities in Nova Scotia are limited by comparison with Scotland, where over 6,000 children are currently enrolled in Gaelic-medium immersion education. Immersion programmes have been available to Indigenous Mi’kmaw children and to Acadian children for some years, and in September 2021 North America's first Gaelic immersion school opened its doors to nine primary school pupils in Mabou, Cape Breton. For the most part, however, Gaelic language teaching in the province remains largely limited to a small number of schools teaching the language as a subject, evening classes, residential immersion courses and university classes.

Given this disparity, a major objective of the present research has been to assess the language learning and life experiences that inform Scottish and Nova Scotian new speakers’ decision to acquire and use Gaelic, and, relatedly, their cultural identifications with the language.