Humiliation for SNP after road sign blunders spotted in new ‘Gaelic’ campaign

The SNP have been left embarrassed after typos were found on Gaelic road signs, amid a big push in the public sector to get more children learning the language.

Public money will now have to be spent on upgrading or altering the signs, which showcase the country’s founding language, The Scottish Daily Express reports.

Millions are spent each year promoting the language, which is now spoken by only around 1.1 percent of the population – a figure which barely increased between the 2011 and 2021 censuses.

In recent years the road signs have proved controversial, with critics citing the cost and claiming it could impact road safety. Several roads in the Highlands have place names displayed in both English and Gaelic, as do train stations throughout the whole country, as well as police and ambulance services.

Our sister newspaper has now revealed that Transport Scotland and its operating company BEAR Scotland have put up multiple road signs which feature misspelled names, two of which were first reported this year but are yet to be changed due to legal difficulties.

Irked Gaelic speakers contacted the transport quango to voice their disappointment about the errors, correspondence received by the outlet through freedom of information legislation revealed.

This included signs on the A87, with one being amended using a patch overlay and another was renewed due to a larger sign plate being needed.

One road user said the sign for Crianlarich in Gaelic – which was missing accented vowels – was “catastrophically wrong” and was assured that it would be fixed.

But two signs on the A82 remain incorrect. One person wrote in to flag the errors, both of which are on the approach to Fort William from the north, near the junction to old Inverlochy Castle and at the roundabout which follows it.

“The Gaelic phrase ‘Meadhan a’ Bhaile’ is misspelled two different ways. On the first sign, ‘Meadhan’ is misspelled ‘Meahdan’ and on the second one ‘Bhaile’ is misspelled ‘Bhal,'” they wrote.

“In the first sign, the words ‘Chrion’ and ‘Lariach’ are also misspelled; the accents are omitted. It would be very helpful if these signs were corrected and replaced at an early date.”

The email was sent in February this year, but according to Bear Scotland corrections on the signs are yet to take place.

Correspondence also showed that last year a Transport Scotland employee urged colleagues triple check spellings on signs were right after previous errors. “Please send PDF proofs of any signs before they are printed to avoid typos,” they wrote, as per the news outlet.

“There have been a handful of signs appearing across Scotland with typos which are in particular related to the way Microsoft uses the apostrophe key these days that we need to watch out for.”

A spokesperson for BEAR Scotland said: “The sign at North Road Roundabout, Fort William, which have incorrect Gaelic spelling, was installed by the developer within private property during the construction of the retail development at this location.

“The owner of the land has informed that a formal legal agreement requires to be put in place before BEAR Scotland can be given permission to access to the sign to correct the Gaelic misspelling. This has delayed matters and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.

“BEAR Scotland had planned to make best use of resources by attending to both signs at the same time. However, as the formal legal agreement is still ongoing for one of the signs, we are not wishing to delay rectifying the spelling of the other sign any further and are currently arranging for this sign to be attended to.”

Express.co.uk has approached the Scottish National Party for comment.