Argyll Hose with Day Wear

[IsaacW]

I'm from Cape Breton and we practice forms of dance, play a style of music and indeed sing and speak in some dialects of Gaelic that have been largely lost or changed in Scotland.

Indeed, that is why I knew you would understand my meaning.

"A person who plays dance style pipes in the old style in Cape Breton is practicing an art that was developed in the Highlands of Scotland but he's not a traditional Scottish style piper. They play very differently nowadays."

Indeed, traditions change. The difficult question, and I think what we are all trying to do here, is figure out when a tradition ceases to become a tradition and simple fade into history. In some cases, ethnohistorians might separate "tradition" and "current/modern tradition." Of course this is far too confusing, as that would imply that modern tradition is different from tradition based in the historical (but then, that is the thing of ethnohistorians).