Michael Bauer

Michael Bauer was born into a trilingual family in Munich in 1974. While none of them was a Celtic language, it was not long before he developed a fascination with "interesting" languages. The first was Irish, soon followed by Basque and Scottish Gaelic. A strange chain of events led him to switch not only courses but also countries in 1998 - to Edinburgh University for a degree in Linguistics and Celtic Studies. Having focussed heavily on phonology, language acquisition and modern Gaelic he graduated in 2002 and after some extra training to deepen his knowledge of Scottish Gaelic, he began working with the language professionally around that time. While highly appreciative of the academic contribution, he made a conscious decision to focus on developing resources for Scottish Gaelic speakers and learners instead of taking up an academic career. In his own words "Bardic poetry of the 12th century isn't going away but if we don't do more for the living language today, we may end up consigning Gaelic to the history books". A large part of his work to date has centered around improving the availability of technology in and for the language, including two large online dictionaries (Dwelly-d and the Faclair Beag) and software localisation (such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Opera, a spellchecker and various other tools) Publishing was in some ways an inevitable outcome both through his career in teaching Gaelic to adults and his academic background. His first book, Blas na Gàidhlig, grew out of the need for a better approach to the teaching of pronunciation to Gaelic adult learners. After graduating he focussed on honing the methods and materials to suit this target audience and following highly encouraging feedback from many users and learners in the global learners' community, he embarked on the 8-year journey of producing his magnum opus. He intends to continue in his work, in terms of adult teaching, publishing and the development of software tools for Scottish Gaelic.