TRAVELLERS at the airport in Inverness navigate a revolving door adorned with posters urging them to teach their children Gaelic. “Being bilingual is magic! Bilingual children find it easier to learn a third language,” claims one which depicts a cherubic toddler waving a magic wand over a rabbit in a hat. “Give your child a flying start—learn Gaelic,” says another.

The posters are part of a larger effort in Scotland to preserve its Celtic language, which was disappearing at a precipitous rate until recently. In 1755 almost a quarter of Scotland’s people spoke Gaelic. A new education law in 1872 forbade the language in classrooms, and children caught speaking it got the belt. Another statute in 1918 required authorities to “make adequate provision for Gaelic,” but by 1981 only 1.6% of people in Scotland spoke it. Many of them were older folk or clustered in the Highlands and islands. Their slim ranks thinned by 21% in the ten years from 1981 and by 11% in the one after that.

Now, however, Gaelic is fighting back. The proportion of Scots who speak it barely dipped between 2001 and 2011, when the most recent census was finished. And more than before are under the age of 20.

Robert Dunbar, head of the Celtic-languages department at the University of Edinburgh, attributes the uptick to the spread of Gaelic education outside the Western Isles. In 2007 one school taught in Gaelic. Five now do—including one in Glasgow and another in Edinburgh—and the number of pupils has grown by a third. The government minister in charge of Scotland’s languages, Alasdair Allan, holds that the bigger budget for Gaelic education (up by £400,000 over the past eight years) is being driven by parental demand. “The government is struggling to keep up,” he says.

For Karen Campbell of Kilmaluag, a windswept village at the northern tip of the Isle of Skye, the decision to send her children to a Gaelic school was an easy one. “Gaelic was my own first language… I feel being able to read and write the language, as well as speak it, leaves children better placed to appreciate their own unique culture and, in turn, other cultures.” Parents who do not speak Gaelic may think a bilingual education will help their child learn other tongues, says Mr Dunbar.

Gaelic television is also stirring up interest. Founded in 2008, BBC Alba—a collaboration between the BBC and MG Alba, a Gaelic broadcasting company—reaches 700,000 viewers a week, eight times the number of people who are thought to understand Gaelic. All the programmes, which include Scottish rugby and football, traditional music and a popular drama series, are subtitled in English.

Both Mr Dunbar and Mr Allan deny that the recovery of Gaelic has anything to do with independence aspirations or tension between Scotland and its southern neighbour. Instead they attribute it to a growing appreciation for cultural and linguistic diversity in the age of globalisation—a trend that transcends Scotland’s borders. Manx, the Celtic language historically spoken on the Isle of Man, has also made a comeback after having been declared extinct by UNESCO in the 1990s.