"Ceud mille failte" is a traditional Gaelic greeting and if you pronounced it correctly then either you've heard it before or you should seriously consider buying a lottery ticket this week because your luck is most definitely in.

The Gaelic is notoriously - often hilariously - difficult for English speakers, full of false friends: letters and combinations of letters which you think you know how to pronounce but which are completely different from English. Even the English translation "Gaelic" is problematic, pronounced to sound like "garlic" without the "r" when referring to Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) whereas the Gaelic peoples are "the Gaels", pronounced to sound like a weather forecast for high winds.

As for "Ceud mille failte", "ceud" is pronounced "kay-u(d)t" with just the hint of a "d" in there, "mille" is pronounced "meel-uh" and "failte" is pronounced "falsh-uh" with both those "uh" sounds a bit like when a Scottish rugby player expels air having been thumped in the ribs by an opponent's shoulder. You're allowed to do that in rugby. You're not allowed to do it in Sauchiehall Street though.

Before you get too impressed by my Gàidhlig pronunciation skills, however, I have to confess that I can only pronounce "Ceud mille failte" correctly - now - because I asked more than half a dozen different folk and one of them eventually phoned Invernesshire and got the definitive answer from her 13-year-old nephew who has been taking Gaelic lessons since he was about 5. You see, although Gaelic is thought of as the traditional language of Scotland and although it was indeed the language of most of Scotland for hundreds of years, according to the census in 2001 less than 1.2% of the population (58,552 from a total population of 5,062,011) can now speak Scottish Gaelic.

Compare this to a separate study carried out in Edinburgh schools in the same year which suggests that around 1.54% of the population can speak Urdu, the same percentage speak French, 1.26% speak Chinese, and 1.12% speak Panjabi, and you start to get a clearer perspective not only of the pluralistic nature of modern Scotland but also of Gaelic's position as a (very) minority language.

That same study identified a total of 59 languages other than English currently in use in Scotland, the most common being Lowland Scots or "Lallands" at 2.66%. It would be fitting then, since I welcomed you in Gàidhlig, to close with a short lesson in Lowland Scots. Where "reek" means "to smoke", "yir" means "your", "lang" means "long" and "lum" means "chimney", I'll leave you with the immortal words of my granny:

"Lang may yir lum reek"

Then she would give a wee smile, " - wi' other folk's coal."

Census 2001 Scotland

Edinburgh Schools Study