learning gaelic

[OC Richard]

I heard somewhere that Nova Scotian Gàidhlig speakers have the purest form (by that I assume it's meant the oldest form?) of Gàidhlig.

I don't know anything about that assertion, but I will say that coming from the standpoint of historical linguistics such a notion is something of a chimera.

All dialects of all languages are equally old, having an unbroken chain of evolutionary forms going back to whatever language was spoken by the group of around 20,000 fully modern humans that eventually populated the world. It's hard to think that the street slang of today traces as far back as Sanskrit or Tocharian B but it does.

For sure all dialects and languages retain archaic features, but side-by-side with these will be new things: semantic shifts and sound shifts and changes in grammar and newly coined words and newly borrowed words and who knows what else. A language only stops evolving when there's no more speech community of native speakers to use it; but that dead language traces exactly as far back as all the other languages that kept being spoken.

It is true that when a language is divided amongst two or more isolated speech communities the old features that are retained and the innovations will vary from speech community to speech community. It's why to American ears some things English that people say sound quaint and old-fashioned, and to English ears some things that Americans say sound quaint and old-fashioned.

[dcommini]

I have a set of PDF lessons that contain 50 lessons and some appendices, can't remember where I got them from. But anybody who wants them can have them. The lessons usually start with some new vocabulary and then exercise sentences.

Also, the BBC used to have some free lessons that were at least good for pronunciation of you didn't like online learning.