Samuel Johnson: Standardizer of English, Preserver of Gaelic

Samuel Johnson's hostility towards Scotland and the Scots English dialect of the Lowlanders is well-known. Not so, however, his support for the preservation of Scottish Gaelic. A seeming contradiction, Johnson's position on Gaelic is essential for what it reveals about language, dialect, and national identity in the eighteenth century. Although Johnson believed in preserving all languages, he opposed diversity of dialect within languages. For him, Gaelic was a language of its own, but Scots English was an impure, corrupted dialect of a language.