McLeod (2004a) argued persuasively that the post-1970s renaissance in Gaelic lan-guage development had been neglecting issues related to corpus planning, with the result that codification and elaboration of the language had seriously fallen behind the status planning ambitions of the Gaelic community. He concluded that corpus planning should become a ‘key priority’ for the new statutory language body, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, created as a result of the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005, and that ‘a dedicated unit focused on corpus planning, including both the ongoing creation of new terms and specific projects such as dictionaries, thesauruses and style guidebooks, should be created without delay and made a top priority’. When the Bòrd published its first five-year National Plan for Gaelic in 2007, it included a commitment that ‘Bòrd na Gàidhlig, consulting with key partners, will investigate the most suitable structure for a Gaelic language academy in order to ensure the relevance and consistency of Gaelic, including place-names’ (BnaG 2007: 35). The need for a Gaelic language academy to deliver codification and elaboration was given further impetus by Bauer et al. (2009) in a Bòrd-commissioned survey of the prospects for Gaelic language technology.

By March 2011, Bòrd na Gàidhlig was reporting that ‘progress on [the Gaelic lan-guage academy] has been slower than expected and it is now anticipated that the public consultation will take place as part of the National Gaelic Language Plan 2012/17 consultations’ (BnaG 2011: 39). In an attempt to break the apparent deadlock, in late 2011 a group of Soillse-affiliated academics from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh drafted a discussion paper for the Bòrd's Gaelic Academy Working Group, recommending ‘a twelve-month investigative survey into corpus planning for Gaelic, aimed at establishing an appropriate linguistic foundation, and surveying and evaluat-ing the work that has already been done’ (McConville et al. 2011). This recommenda-tion was largely accepted in late 2012, and in January 2013 Soillse commenced work on the Dlùth is Inneach public consultation project, commissioned by Bòrd na Gàidhlig to answer the following questions: