Goidelic languages

The Goidelic languages are one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, the other consisting of the Brythonic languages. Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from the south of Ireland through the Isle of Man to the north of Scotland. There are three modern Goidelic languages: Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), and Manx (Gaelg).

Classical Gaelic, otherwise known as Early Modern Irish, was used as a literary language in Ireland and in Scotland from around the year 1200 until the 18th century, and was the sociolect of the educated elite. As these during the 17th century, 18th century and 19th century either emigrated, were executed, reduced to poverty, or became anglicised, the regional dialects started coming to the fore, with divergence of the traditional orthography. However, most orthographic divergence has been held to a minimum through standardisation into a pluricentristic orthography with a certain amount of freedom to represent regional forms, be these spelling variants (e.g. ciad vs ceud in Scotland, Classical Gaelic céad "hundred"), or vocabulary or idiomatic variants. The Manx orthography introduced in the 16th century and 17th century was based on English and Welsh practice, however was never widely in use, as the educated elite were of Anglo-Norman descent at the time. A similar spelling system was in some use in Scotland, however never took hold.

The Goidelic languages are generally classified in comparative/linguistic short-hand parlance as the Q-Celtic division of the Celtic languages.

Nomenclature

Although Irish and Manx are often referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), the use of the word Gaelic is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when referring to language, only ever refer to these languages, whereas Scots has come to refer to a Germanic language, and therefore Scottish can refer to things not at all Gaelic. The word Gaelic by itself is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic; in reality Gaelic is the dialect variant as used in Northern Irish, which is the real origin of the word in English.

The names used in the dialects/languages themselves, Gaolainn Munster, Gaeilge Connaght, Gaelic Ulster, Gaelg/Gailck Isle of Man, and Gàidhlig Scotland) are derived from Old Irish Goídelc, based on Goidel (Modern Gaelic Gael (Irish), Gàidheal (Scottish) Gaelic person), derived from the Old Welsh Gwyddel meaning "pirate, raider".

Classification

The family tree of the Goidelic languages is as follows:

• Insular Celtic
  • Primitive Irish
    • Old Irish
      • Middle Irish
        • Modern Irish
        • Scottish Gaelic
        • Manx

As with all such family trees which represent what is in reality a dialect chain, there is a large amount of over-simplification. Northern Irish and Southern Scottish Gaelic tend to have much more in common than either with the dialects further to the north or the south.

History and range

Britain & Ireland in the mid-late 5th century.
Red: mainly Brythonic areas.
Green: mainly Gaelic areas.
Blue: mainly Pictish areas.

Goidelic was once restricted to Ireland, but sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries groups of Irish, called by the Romans by the general term Scoti, began migrating from Ireland to what is now Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. Those who settled in Cornwall and Wales made little longterm impact, however the Dál Riada settlers in Scotland eventually assimilated the Picts (a group of peoples who may have spoken a Brythonic language) who lived throughout Scotland^[1]. Manx, the former language of the Isle of Man, is closely akin to the Irish spoken in northeast and eastern Ireland and the now extinct Gaelic of Galloway (in southwest Scotland), with some influence from Old Norse through the Viking invasions and from the previous British inhabitants.

The oldest written Goidelic language is Primitive Irish, which is attested in Ogham inscriptions up to about the 4th century. The forms of this speech are very close, and often identical, to the forms of Gaulish recorded before and during the Roman Empire. The next stage, Old Irish, is found in the margins of Latin religious manuscripts from the 6th to the 10th century, as well as in archaic texts copied/recorded in Middle Irish texts. Middle Irish, the immediate predecessor of the modern Goidelic languages, is the term for the language as recorded from the 10th to the 12th century: a great deal of literature survives in it, including the early Irish law texts. Early Modern Irish (alt. Early Modern Gaelic) covers the period from the 13th to the 17th century: its literary form was used as a literary language in Ireland and Scotland consistently until the 18th century and in some cases well into the 19th century. This is often called Classical Irish, while the Ethnologue gives the name "Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" to this standardised written language. As long as this written language was the norm, Ireland was considered the Gaelic homeland to the Scottish literati.

Irish

Irish is one of Ireland's two official languages (along with English). Historically the predominant language of the island, it is now a minority language in most parts, although Irish-speaking areas still exist in parts of the south, west, and northwest of Ireland. The legally defined Irish-speaking areas are called the Gaeltacht; all government institutions of the Republic of Ireland (in particular, the parliament (Oireachtas), its upper house (Seanad) and lower house (Dáil), and the prime minister (Taoiseach)) are officially named in this language, even in English. At present, the Gaeltachtaí are primarily found in Counties Cork, Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, and, to a lesser extent, in Waterford and Meath. 1,656,790 (41.9% of the total population aged three years and over) regard themselves as competent Irish speakers.^[2] Of these, 538,283 (32.5%) speak Irish on a daily basis.^[2] Irish is also undergoing a revival in Northern Ireland and has been accorded some legal status there under the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The 2001 census in Northern Ireland showed that 167,487 (10.4%) people "had some knowledge of Irish". Combined, this means that around one in three people (~1.8 million) on the island of Ireland can understand Irish to some extent, although a large percentage of these do not speak it fluently. The census figures do not take into account those Irish who have emigrated, and it has been estimated (rightly or wrongly) that there are more native speakers of Irish in Britain, the US, Australia, and other parts of the world than there are in Ireland itself.

Before the period of the Great Famine of the 1840s, the language was spoken by the vast majority of the population, but the famine and emigration, as well as the general assumption by the English and Anglicised ruling classes following the Flight of the Earls and disappearance of much of the Gaelic aristocracy that Irish was a language spoken by ignorant peasants, led to a decline which has begun to reverse only very recently.

The Irish language has been officially recognised as a working language by the European Union. Ireland's national language is the twenty-first to be given such recognition by the EU and previously had the status of a treaty language.

Scottish Gaelic

Some people in the north and west of mainland Scotland and most people in the Hebrides still speak Scottish Gaelic, but the language has been in decline. There are now believed to be approximately 1,000 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia and 60,000 in Scotland.

Its historical range was much larger. For example, it was the everyday language of most of the rest of the Highlands until little more than a century ago. Galloway was once also a Gaelic-speaking region, but the Galwegian dialect has been extinct there for approximately three centuries. It is believed to have been home to dialects that were transitional between Scottish Gaelic and the two other Goidelic languages. While Gaelic was spoken across the Scottish Borders and Lothian during the early High Middle Ages it doesn’t seem to have been spoken by the majority and was likely the language of the ruling elite, land owners and religious clerics. Some other parts of the Lowlands spoke forms of British, and others Scots Inglis, the only exceptions being the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland where Norse was spoken.

Scotland takes its name from the Latin word for a Gael, Scotus (of uncertain etymology). Scotland originally meant Land of the Gaels. Until late in the 15th century, Scottis in Scots English was used to refer only to Gaelic, and the speakers of this language who were identified as Scots. As the ruling elite became Inglis/English-speaking, Scottis was gradually associated with the land rather than the people, and the word Erse Irish was gradually used more and more as an act of culturo-political disassociation with an overt implication that the language was not really Scottish, and therefore foreign - with the implication that the true language of the Scots was Scottis (Scots), and that therefore Inglis = English and therefore the language of the English.

In the early 16th century the dialects of northern Middle English, also known as Early Scots, which had developed in Lothian and had come to be spoken elsewhere in the Kingdom of Scotland themselves later appropriated the name Scots. By the 17th century Gaelic speakers were restricted largely to the Highlands and the Hebrides. Furthermore, the culturally repressive measures taken against the rebellious Highland communities by the British crown following the 2nd Jacobite Rebellion of 1746 caused still further decline in the language's use – to a large extent by enforced emigration. Even more decline followed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Scottish Parliament has afforded the language a secure statutory status and equal respect (but not full equality in legal status within Scots Law [1]) with English, sparking hopes that Scottish Gaelic can be saved from extinction and perhaps even revived.

Manx

Today Manx is used as the sole medium for teaching at five of the island's pre-schools by a company named Mooinjer Veggey, which also operates the sole Manx primary school—the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh. Manx is taught as a second language at all of the Island's primary and secondary schools and also at the Isle of Man College and Centre for Manx Studies.

Comparison

Numbers

Common phrases

Influence on other languages

There are two languages that show Goidelic influence, although they are not Goidelic languages themselves.

Shelta language is sometimes thought to be a Goidelic language, but is in fact a cant based on Irish and English, with a primarily English-based syntax.

The Bungee language in Canada is an English dialect spoken by Métis that was influenced by Orkney English, Scots English, Cree, Ojibwe, and Scottish Gaelic.

See also

• Differences between Scottish Gaelic and Irish
• Connacht Irish
• Munster Irish
• Newfoundland Irish
• Ulster Irish
• Canadian Gaelic
• Galwegian Gaelic
• Goidelic substrate hypothesis

References

External links

• Ethnologue file on Goidelic languages
• Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia
• Irish language Wikipedia
• Manx Wikipedia
• Comparison of Irish and Scottish Gaelic

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