What if Your Gaelic Work Takes a Nose Dive

 It’s the quiet decision not to hoard work, even when the sector is small.

People imagine Gaelic is a heavily funded sector with endless projects, steady jobs with reliable income or wages. Reality is different. Many opportunities arrive and disappear quietly — a company needing translation, a school wanting a workshop, a film crew hunting for the right voice. Often there’s no big advert, no recruitment drive, just a message landing in someone’s inbox.

And sometimes that message goes to the wrong person.

Maybe it’s not the right dialect. Maybe the project needs a scholar, a teacher, a translator, a singer, a cultural adviser, a tutor for children, or someone who can stand in front of a boardroom and teach executives how to communicate respectfully. No single practitioner can cover all of that.

That’s where referrals matter.

When one of us passes a project to someone better suited, three things happen:

• the client gets the right person, not just the available person

• a Gaelic professional earns work that might never have reached them

• the language stays present in places where it could have been replaced with English
  

It’s a quiet form of community infrastructure. Nobody applauds it. Nobody mentions it. Nobody funds it. But it keeps our careers alive, especially when our work takes a nose dive periodically. And careers are what keep languages alive — not slogans, not sentiment, not hashtags, but paid work that allows experts, teachers, and creatives to continue.

At Love Gaelic, we see this every year. Students arrive with different needs, different learning styles, different goals. If someone needs academic Gaelic, university credit, local community placement, or a specialist programme we don’t offer, we refer them to other colleges and tutors. The same goes for freelance work: translation, data analysis, digital projects, and niche AI tasks often go to specialists in our network.

But this only works if it’s a two-way street. Referrals can’t flow in one direction forever. If the Gaelic sector expects collaboration, then we all need to pass work where it fits best — not cling to every opportunity, even when someone else is a better match. A small language survives by sharing, not siloing.

Every time a Gaelic job is passed to the right hands, the language wins twice: someone gets income, and someone else sees Gaelic professionalism in action.

Sometimes the strongest support isn’t loud. It’s the quiet decision not to hoard work, even when the sector is small.