Interesting stuff from the Census released today

[weepiper]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-24287591

Hardly anyone here considers themselves 'British not Scottish' (the highest regional figure was 12% of respondents)
Twice as many people who answered said they used Polish as their main home language as those who used Gaelic
However the terminal decline of Gaelic speakers has slowed markedly since the last census and there's been a slight increase in under 20s who speak it

Lots of other interesting stuff about identity, if you like numbers.

 

[danny la rouge]

The usual Census confusion and fudge over what is meant by ethnicity going on in that report.

As for ethnicity, as distinct from place of birth, Scotland was still overwhelmingly white in 2011

However, according to the most recent OED, ethnicity means: "the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition". (Oxford Dictionaries).

What is the white cultural tradition like? If someone asked you what your cultural tradition was, would you really say "white"? I wouldn't.

And if ethnicity takes in national culture, what do we mean if we say that it is "distinct from place of birth"? There is an overwhelming national culture that we can separate out from place of birth. How? I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just interested in what exactly James Cook means by that. (I'm not really - he means "race", and nothing at all to do with culture).