In November 2010 the Ministerial Working Group on the Scots Language delivered its report to the Scottish Parliament. Discussing the promotion of Scots in the educational system, the report noted that the pervasive lack among teachers and the general public of a clear understanding of the status of Scots as a language or the issues surrounding it was a fundamental problem in improving the status of the language.
This lack of public awareness doesn't just apply to the Scots language, the knowledge gap also includes an almost complete lack of awareness of the role that the Gaelic language has played in Scotland, both the Highlands and in the Lowlands. Almost nothing about Scotland's rich linguistic history is taught in schools. Into the vacuum created by a knowledge gap rush myths, stereotypes and confusion.
But before we can have any sensible and informed debate about Scotland's linguistic heritage and how we want to protect and foster it, we first have to distinguish between the myths and the facts.
This short history of Scottish languages was first published on Newsnet at the beginning of 2010. The series explains how languages have spread and contracted across Scotland over the past 2000 years. Each historical period is illustrated with a map showing the approximate distribution of languages in Scotland at that time. Successive maps will cover Scottish language history at 200 year intervals until the present day.
There are a few important points to bear in mind when considering the historical spread of various languages. Firstly, languages evolve and change over time. For example the form of Gaelic introduced into Scotland over 1500 years ago was not the same as modern Scottish Gaelic. It was an early form of Old Irish, identical to that spoken in Ireland. Over the centuries the Old Irish which established itself in Scotland evolved into a distinct language, now known as Scottish Gaelic. This process has occurred several times in Scottish history with each language which has been introduced into the country. Old English evolved into English in England and into Scots in Scotland, Old Brittonic (or simply Brittonic) evolved into Welsh in Wales and Cumbric in Scotland. The same Old Norse that became Icelandic and Faroese evolved into the now extinct Norn language in the Northern Isles and the northern extremities of Scotland.
The spread of languages is often equated with the spread of 'peoples'. However the spread of Old Irish, Old Norse or Old English over parts of Scotland did not mean that the original inhabitants were exterminated or driven out by groups of invaders. Under certain cultural and political circumstances, people find it convenient to adopt a new language. At first this produces bilingualism.
However when many people in a community speak a language as a second language, the children in the community acquire the second language in childhood and, under certain cultural and political circumstances, come to prefer to speak the 'second language' amongst themselves. These children then pass on only the 'second language' to their own children, who acquire it as their first language, and language shift has taken place.
When a society adopts a new language in this way, it often also adopts a new set of myths about its own origins which typically serve to grant political and cultural legitimacy to powerful and influential groups within the population. These processes have also been important in Scottish history. In fact Scots have exhibited a remarkable propensity to play musical chairs with languages throughout our history.
Maps showing the geographical spread of languages are simplifications. In reality there are few hard and sharp borders between languages which can be represented on a map by a line. The examples of this kind of linguistic frontier which do exist always coincide with political frontiers, the modern Scottish-English border is an example. Usually when two languages are spoken in contiguous territories, there is a bilingual zone of varying depth between them. This has always been the case with language boundaries within Scotland. The coloured areas on the maps are meant to give a general idea of the spread of each language at each point in history, they are not intended to represent exact and abrupt frontiers.
The maps are an attempt to simplify a very complex and multilayered story involving several different languages. Some may regard them as an oversimplification. The information upon which the maps are based comes from a range of sources, mostly academic discussions of the Celtic languages and Scots, studies of Scottish place names and studies of the language and names used in historical documents. I have tried to incorporate the most up to date information available to me. Some aspects of Scotland's linguistic history (such as the spread of Gaelic at the expense of Pictish) are very poorly known and so there's a fair amount of educated guesswork in some of the maps, especially those depicting the earlier periods of Scottish history.
It's also useful here to give a little background to the Celtic languages. The Celtic languages form a branch of the much larger and more widespread Indoeuropean language family. The Germanic languages, to which Scots, English and Norse belong, is another branch of this vast family. Other branches include Italic (Latin and its daughters, Italian, French and Spanish), Balto-Slavic, Greek, Armenian, and the vast Indo-Iranian branch which includes Persian, Hindi, and Urdu and the ancient Sanskrit language.
The modern Celtic languages fall into two main sub-branches, those later languages descended from Brittonic - Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Cumbric - and those descended from Old Irish - modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. The two branches of Celtic are most often called Brittonic (or Brythonic, which is identical in meaning to Brittonic) and Goidelic. Collectively they are referred to as Insular Celtic.
The term Continental Celtic is used to refer to Celtic varieties spoken in continental Europe and Asia Minor in Classical times, Gaulish, Celtiberian and Galatian are the most important. Gaulish was spoken across most of modern France, northern Italy and southern Germany. Celtiberian was spoken in the north and centre of the Iberian peninula. Galatian was spoken in what is now central Turkey, around the modern capital Ankara. All these languages died out in the post-Roman period and survive only in brief inscriptions or as words or names recorded by Classical authors. Although St Paul wrote some letters to the Galatians, he wrote to them in Greek. No literature survives from any of these languages. We last hear of Gaulish in the 6th or 7th century, in central France. Galatian may have survived until the Arab invasions of Anatolia of the 8th century.
It is universally agreed that Galatian was an offshoot of Gaulish, but the differences between Celtiberian and other Celtic languages seems to have been substantial. Celtiberian is thought to descend from an early offshoot of Common Celtic. It preserved some ancient features lost in all the other Celtic languages.
Specialists in Celtic languages are still debating exactly how Insular Celtic relates to the ancient Celtic languages of continental Europe. There is a consensus that Brittonic was very close to Gaulish, the two were apparently mutually intelligible. However there is less certainty about the exact position of Goidelic within the Celtic family.
Some scholars hold that Goidelic was, like Celtiberian, an early and independent offshoot of Common Celtic, but most of the - admittedly massive - differences between Goidelic and Brittonic seem to have arisen in the post-Roman period. Once these changes are stripped away, the earliest form of Goidelic appears much more similar to Brittonic. More modern scholarship stresses the fundamental unity of Insular Celtic languages.
In older usage the branches of Celtic were known as P-Celtic (Brittonic) and Q-Celtic (Goidelic). These terms refer to a sound change distinguishing the two branches. Ancient Celtic is thought to have had a sound pronounced 'kw' which changed to the sound 'p' in P-Celtic, but which was retained in Q-Celtic before later simplifying to k (written c) in Goidelic. The earliest written Goidelic, the ogam inscriptions, preserve kw as a distinct sound which was traditionally transcribed Q, hence the term Q-Celtic. So we have correspondences between c in Sc. Gaelic words and p in Welsh words, 'head' is ceann in Sc. Gaelic but pen in Welsh, both descend from common Celtic *qennos. Son is mac in Gaelic but map in Welsh, from common Celtic *maqqos.
The terms Q-Celtic and P-Celtic have fallen out of favour since they confuse the classification of Celtic. "Q-Celtic" is a negative term. It simply refers to those varieties of Celtic where the sound change kw to p failed to occur. Celtiberian was also a "Q-Celtic" language, but this does not mean that it had a particularly close linguistic relationship to Goidelic. On the other side of the P-Q divide, although Gaulish was considered a P-Celtic language, it preserved some words with kw like the river name Sequani which gives the modern name Seine. To complicate matters even further, a Celtic variety called Lepontic is meagrely attested in some early inscriptions from northern Italy. The older inscriptions show kw, but the later ones show p. Lepontic changed from a "Q-Celtic" language to a "P-Celtic" language. Lepontic was spoken by the people later known to the Roman as the Cisalpine Gauls. Their speech was viewed by the Romans as a type of Gaulish.
It's best to think of early Celtic as a large dialect complex with different local varieties in different parts of the Celtic speaking lands. Early Goidelic varieties were spoken on the extreme northwestern edge of this dialect area, whereas early Brittonic varieties were geographically more central and more exposed to influences from Gaul. One of these "Gaulish" influences was the change of kw to p, it spread into Brittonic but hadn't pentrated into every Celtic variety in Ireland and Britain by the time that Classical writers start to inform us about the remote islands on the edge of the world.
Originally there would have been numerous transitional varities between the dialect ancestral to Goidelic and the dialect that gave rise to Brittonic. However during Roman times typically Gallo-Brittonic features continued to spread in Roman Britain, but no longer penetrated into Ireland. Here typically Goidelic features spread instead.
Gradually the transitional varieties were absorbed into these more prestigious dialects and a sharp division arose between Goidelic and Brittonic on the ground. This division then became a gaping chasm in the late Roman and post-Roman period when the two Celtic branches independently underwent a series of far-reaching and complex changes. By the time they are first recorded in continuous texts, the oldest Irish and the oldest Welsh had become very different from one another, but this does not reflect the linguistic situation in pre-Roman times.
150 AD : Scotland was inhabited by various tribes whose names were recorded by the Classical geographer Ptolemy around 150 AD. Each of these tribes was politically independent. It is believed that most, if not all, of the Iron Age tribes of Northern Britain spoke a northern dialect of the same Ancient Brittonic language then spoken in what is now England and Wales. Historical linguists and archaeologists believe that an early form of Celtic was introduced into the British Isles either in the late Bronze Age or the early Iron Age and then spread rapidly across Britain and Ireland. It is unknown what language or languages Celtic speakers encountered when they first arrived in Scotland. The enigmatic Pictish ogam inscriptions, which date to much later, are believed by some to be written in a pre-Celtic language, but the evidence is slight and is open to several interpretations. These inscriptions will be discussed in a later chapter.
The tribal names recorded by Ptolemy come down to us in Latin or Greek guise as they were preserved in Latin and Greek manuscripts, but most of them are apparently Celtic in origin. Unfortunately in the process of repeated copying by scribes who did not understand the significance of the original form, the names became corrupted and some are now difficult to understand. Irrespective of the language (or languages) spoken by the tribes of Scotland, the names recorded by Ptolemy probably came to him via a Brittonic source in Roman Britain and so may represent a southern Brittonic version of a name rather than the indigenous form.
Many Celtic tribes named themselves after animals, perhaps the tribal totem or emblem. The name of the Taezali of Aberdeenshire may contain a Celtic word for badger *tazgos, the Caeroni take their name from the sheep or goat *kairos (compare modern Gaelic caora 'sheep'), whilst the name Orcades is derived from a Celtic word for pig or boar *orkos. The Epidii of Argyll took their name from the Brittonic word *epos 'horse'. This last name is clearly Brittonic, the contemporary Goidelic (Q-Celtic) word was *ekwos from which Sc. Gaelic each 'horse' descends.
The names of some other tribes reflect the warlike preoccupations of Iron Age peoples, Smertae means "the smeared ones", those who smeared themselves in the blood of their enemies. They may have been devotees of a Celtic goddess known from other sources, Rosmerta 'the exceedingly smeared one'. The name Caledonii most likely derives from the word *kaletos 'hard', they were 'the hard men'. The Selgovae claimed fame as hunters, their name means 'the huntsmen' (compare Gaelic sealg 'hunt').
The tribal organisation of the northern end of the island of Britain was deeply affected by the Roman occupation further south. Even after the Romans abandoned their brief attempt to make the Antonine Wall their northern frontier, Roman power and influence extended far beyond Hadrian's Wall. The tribes in the region between the Walls became client states of Rome. Those beyond Roman control formed alliances for mutual protection and eventually merged to become the people known to later history as the Picts.
Although all the linguistic relics which can be identified from this remote period of Scottish history are Celtic, there are also some important names which resist explanation and which have not, so far, been identified as belonging to any known language family. There are a few others which are apparently Indo-European but which don't seem to be Celtic or Germanic. These names include the names of some of the larger islands like Skye, Islay and Lewis as well as the original name for the Hebribes recorded in Latin texts as Eubudes. Some of these names may turn out to be Celtic, but some may very well reflect the now lost languages of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Scotland.
Part 2 - 300 AD and the birth of the Picts
By Paul Kavanagh
300 AD : By this time the Brittonic dialect of Roman Britain was beginning to undergo a massive set of phonetic and grammatical changes which would eventually lead to the emergence of the Brittonic languages, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and the extinct Cumbric of southern Scotland and northern England. (Breton originates in the speech of Brittonic refugees fleeing the Anglosaxon invasion of Roman Britain.) Brittonic was profoundly affected by its contact with Latin. During Roman times Brittonic borrowed thousands of words from Latin. These words even replaced native Celtic words, for example the Welsh word for fish is pysgodyn, which ultimately derives from the Latin word pescatum 'seafood' (literally, "that which is fished"). Goidelic, spoken in Ireland beyond Roman control, escaped this influence and often preserves the native Celtic word, the Gaelic word for fish is iasg which descends directly from the original Celtic word *eiskos.
The Brittonic dialect of southern Scotland participated in all the developments which characterised the Brittonic spoken south of Hadrian's Wall. When Cumbric is first attested several centuries later, it appears very similar to contemporary Old Welsh. These developments were massive and far reaching, affecting grammar, vocabulary but above all pronunciation. An idea of just how radical the changes were can be gained from an examination of the Latin words borrowed into Brittonic during the Roman occupation. The descendants of many of these words in modern Welsh are almost unrecognisable. The Welsh word gwyrdd 'green' descends from the Latin loanword viridem, but the relationship between the modern Welsh and the Latin word is no longer immediately apparent. What we now know as the Cumbric of Scotland was also affected by these changes and it evolved in tandem with Brittonic dialects spoken further south. Cumbric was simply the most northernly variety of the Brittonic language that was common to all of Roman Britain.
It is likely that the ancient Brittonic varieties spoken by the Picts did not take part in all these linguistic developments as, like the Irish, the Picts were by now politically and culturally estranged from their Romanised cousins. By 300 AD the Pictish language was already starting to differentiate itself from the rest of Brittonic, but unfortunately the details are now quite lost so we do not know how Pictish differed from other Brittonic varieties.
Pictish came under strong influence from Ireland at an early date, and it's likely that even as early as 300 AD there were groups of Archaic Irish speakers on the West coast of Scotland. Again the details are lacking, since Pictish was never adequately recorded, but it is quite likely that Pictish began to borrow substantially from Celtic varieties spoken in Ireland. As time went on the influence of Goidelic upon Pictish would increase.
In contemporary Roman documents it seems clear that the Romano-Britons now regarded the Picts as being quite a different and foreign people, and although we have no surviving records from the Pictish side, it's highly probable that the feeling was mutual. The political and cultural estrangement between the Picts and the Romano-Britons would have created precisely the right set of sociolinguistic conditions to cause the Picts to preferentially select those features of their speech which most differentiated them from their Romano-British cousins. Picts didn't want to be mistaken for Romano-Britons any more than Romano-Britons wanted to be mistaken for Picts.
Direct evidence has not survived, but it is highly likely that the Pictish variety of ancient Brittonic was also experiencing massive and rapid linguistic change at this time, although the changes occurring in Pictish would have been somewhat different from the changes affecting the Brittonic of the Romano-Britons. As the new Pictish identity emerged and crystalised and the Picts began their rise to power, a distinctively Pictish language would also emerge and crystalise. It may still have been mutually intelligible with the speech of the Romano-Britons, but socially, culturally and politically it was considered a different language.
600 AD : Pictish and Cumbric were now seen as quite different languages spoken by distinct peoples. They may still have been mutually intelligible, but were considered different languages for political and cultural reasons. In much the same way in modern times we consider Swedish and Norwegian to be different languages although Swedes and Norwegians can usually learn to understand one another without too many difficulties.
Roman power had collapsed 200 years earlier, leaving Britain fully exposed to the incursions of 'barbarian' groups. Old Irish and Germanic speaking tribes took advantage of the chaos in the last years of Roman Britain to attack formerly Roman territory. Together with the increasingly Gaelicised Picts, these peoples took territory from the Romano-Britons. The Gaelic and Germanic speakers became the new elites and the conquered Romano-Britons were soon assimilated linguistically. Successive generations of "Anglosaxons" or "Gaels" were increasingly made up of people whose families had once spoken Pictish or Brittonic, yet had now come to regard themselves as Anglosaxons or Gaels. As new languages spread, people adopted new social identities.
The Goidelic branch of Celtic originated in Ireland where it had evolved in relative isolation during Roman times. Although during the Iron Age ancestral Goidelic and Brittonic were very similar to one another, by the end of the Roman Empire Goidelic was radically different from Brittonic. Like the Picts, the ancient Irish found themselves culturally and politically estranged from the inhabitants of southern Britain during the Roman Empire, and like the Picts they too were highly motivated to distinguish their language from that of their Romanised cousins. In its general appearance, Goidelic seems a more archaic form of Celtic than Brittonic, preserving the original kw sound of Celtic as k (written c), whereas in Brittonic, Pictish and continental Gaulish this sound had changed to p. Like Brittonic, Goidelic underwent a period of massive and far reaching changes during the late Roman period, the cumulative effect of these changes was to produce the Old Irish language which is first attested in writing around this time. After Latin and Greek, Old Irish possesses the oldest literature of any European language. Since Old Irish would later evolve into modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, this literature is the cultural property of modern Scots and Manx people as much as it belongs to the Irish.
In the form of Old Irish Goidelic was by now securely established in Argyll where Irish settlers had founded a kingdom called Dalriata (lit. 'the long-arm portion'). Gaelic also was spreading rapidly into Pictish territory, even though the Picts remained independent. Another nucleus of Old Irish had been established perhaps as early as 350 AD in the Rhinns of Galloway, this was expanding at the expense of local Cumbric. In these regions local Pictish and Cumbric speakers were acquiring Gaelic, first as a second language, but due to the extensive use of Gaelic in these communities their children acquired it natively. Within a couple of generations they came to think of themselves as Gaels. As use of the Gaelic language became established, it became capable of absorbing even more Pictish and Cumbric speakers.
The Germanic languages are distantly related to the Celtic languages, like most other European languages they belong to a large family called Indoeuropean. Celtic and Germanic are each separate offshoots from the original proto-Indoeuropean language. They are believed to have separated from their common ancestor sometime in the early Bronze Age. Celtic originated somewhere in west Central Europe and was probably brought to the British Isles at the beginning of the Iron Age, Germanic originated in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany and was not present in the British Isles until the later part of the Roman period.1.
The variety of Germanic brought to Britain was a collection of closely related dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes of the North Sea coast of northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. The initial settlements of these tribes were probably as Roman foederati, barbarian mercenaries in the employ of Rome. After the collapse of Roman power, the military and social organisation of these groups was less affected by internal decay, and as one of the few organised military forces remaining in the country they were in an ideal position to seize power for themselves. Although traditionally described as an invasion, the establishment of the first Anglosaxon kingdoms in Britain was probably rather more like a coup d'etat. With success comes influence, and soon the local Romano-Britons were adopting the Old English language and Anglosaxon customs.
The Germanic tribes who settled in Britain are traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. They first became established in south eastern Britain around the year 450, but soon extended their influence over most of southern Britain. Within a few generations these Germanic tribes had absorbed the local Romano-Britons and coalesced into a people calling themselves Englisc and their country Englaland. We know them as the Anglosaxons and call their language Old English. It was the ancestor of modern English and Scots.
By 600 AD the Anglosaxons had reached the Bristol Channel and divided the Cornish from the Welsh. They were also advancing up the east coast, and sometime in the early 7th century established a small kingdom called Bernicia which became the nucleus of the Anglosaxon kingdom of Northumbria. The events of the wars between the Anglosaxons and the Britons of this region are preserved in the Welsh poem the Gododdin. It is the oldest known work of literature which survives from the territory of modern Scotland. The name Gododdin is the later Welsh version of the ancient tribal name Votadini, which incidentally also gives an idea of just how drastic and far-reaching were the sound changes experienced by Ancient Brittonic as it developed into Welsh and Cumbric.
1. Recently a theory has been popularised, most notably by Stephen Oppenheimer in his book 'The Origins of the British', which claims that English descends from a Germanic language which was already spoken in southern and eastern England before the Roman invasion. This theory is propounded by certain archaeologists and geneticists (who really ought to know better, to be honest) but it is not accepted by any linguist who specialises in the history and development of Germanic or Celtic languages. The theory of a pre-Roman English wreaks havoc on the linguistic evidence, and should be discounted completely.
Part 4 - 800 AD: The Picts and the Gaels merge
800 AD : The Picts were still independent, but would shortly merge with the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada to create the kingdom of the Scots. The Pictish language was by now under severe pressure from Gaelic, and had already been displaced by Gaelic throughout large tracts of Pictland. It would disappear soon afterwards. The exact dating of the spread of Old Irish at the expense of Pictish is unknown. Goidelic speaking elements seem to have formed an elite group in Pictish society at an early date, there was probably a protracted period of bilingualism in Pictish and Gaelic before Pictish finally expired. On the dawn of the merger between the kingdom of Dalriada and Pictland to form the kingdom of the Scots, it seems safe to say that a knowledge of Gaelic was already widespread throughout Pictland. Pictish disappears from the historical record in the 9th century, but the use of spoken Pictish doubtless lingered on in more remote locations for several generations afterwards. It died out unrecorded and its passing went unmarked, so it is impossible to say exactly when the language died out.
To approximately this period date some two dozen enigmatic inscriptions in the Ogham script used for the oldest Irish. The inscriptions mostly come from the north and north west of Scotland, with noticeable clusters in the Northern Isles. Although they can be read and appear to contain some Goidelic elements, the inscriptions make no sense. They are believed to be authentic examples of written Pictish. Unfortunately the Pictish Ogham inscriptions are the only examples of Ogham being used to write something other than ancient Irish, and linguists and historians have no idea how Ogham was adapted to the needs of a non-Goidelic language. It doesn't help that Ogham inscriptions can be notoriously difficult to read at the best of times. The inscriptions have sparked off many theories, but most of them are highly speculative. One theory was that the inscriptions were not in any language, but were some sort of symbolic code. Another theory claims the inscriptions are in Old Norse but this has not found general acceptance. In recent years a couple of the inscriptions have been identified as being in archaic Irish after all. All that can be said for certain is that the type of Pictish written in Ogham displayed influence from Goidelic, and the use of the Ogham alphabet itself demonstrates the strong cultural influence of Goidelic speakers upon the Picts.
Cumbric was also under pressure, being squeezed between the spread of Gaelic in the west and Old English in the east. By this time only the western Cumbric kingdoms survived, Strathclyde with its capital at Alcluith (Dumbarton) and Rheged, generally believed to have had its capital at Carlisle. These kingdoms maintained close cultural links with north Wales but were also coming under increasingly strong influences from their Gaelic and English speaking neighbours.
Gaelic was expanding rapidly across the Highlands and had probably already reached the east coast. During this period there is even evidence that it was used in the Northern Isles although it's uncertain whether Gaelic was ever spoken natively there. Gaelic continued to expand in south west Scotland, becoming established in what is now Galloway and penetrating into Ayrshire and Central Scotland. The Cumbric kingdom of Strathclyde was under heavy cultural influence from Goidelic speakers, there was considerable intermarriage between the ruling classes of the Cumbric kingdoms and their Gaelic neighbours. It's likely that a knowledge of Gaelic was already widespread in parts of Strathclyde, the lower Forth Valley and Fife. Bilingualism, and even multilingualism, was commonplace in many parts of Scotland.
Old English was also in an expansionist phase, the language consolidated itself in the lower lying districts and river valleys of the south east, leaving the hilly country to remnant groups of Cumbric speakers. Old English also began to penetrate into south-western Scotland. The Ruthwell Cross from Dumfriesshire dates to this period. This carved stone cross bears one of the oldest runic inscriptions in Old English. Groups of Old English speakers apparently also established themselves in parts of Ayrshire and Strathclyde. As the power of the Anglosaxon kingdom of Northumbria grew, so a knowledge of English was spread. In the south east of Scotland the population had by this time already shifted to the exclusive use of Old English. English spread first onto the fertile coastal plains and up the broad river valleys. As it did so Cumbric retreated into the hillier ground.
But everything was about to change, within a few years Scotland would be attacked by Vikings, who would introduce yet another language, one which would eventually influence all the other languages of Scotland.
2000 AD : Gaelic has suffered a catastrophic decline and has now almost entirely vanished from almost all of mainland Scotland except for a few pockets in the north west. As recently as the 20th century it was possible to find Gaelic speakers in every part of the Highlands, but now the traditional Gaelic of most areas has died out completely. Even in districts such as the Cowal peninsula there were still surviving native Gaelic speakers until well into the second half of the last century. However this last generation of native speakers has now passed away in most Highland districts close to the Lowlands. The language fares rather better in the islands and on the west coast, but now only the Western Isles and a small corner of Skye have a Gaelic speaking majority. (Only some 37% of the total population of Skye claimed to speak Gaelic in 2001.) Everywhere else in Scotland Gaelic is now spoken by a minority in a sea of English.
The solid coloured areas of Gaelic on the map are the districts where the language was spoken by over 50% of the population according to the 2001 census. In districts in heavy shading Gaelic speakers represent between 20% and 50% of the total population. Areas in light shading are those where Gaelic speakers represent between 10% and 20% of the local population. Speakers in these areas tend to be predominantly elderly. The census counted a total of 58,552 Gaelic speakers in the whole of Scotland. A total of 92,400 people in Scotland claimed to have at least some knowledge of the language.
Although the demographic fortunes of Gaelic have been calamitous, its political fortunes have fared somewhat better in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Gaelic now has a degree of official support and recognition which it was denied in the past, and bilingual Gaelic-English education is widespread in the remaining Gaelic regions and increasingly popular elsewhere. The language now enjoys a public presence in the form of Gaelic television and radio broadcasting, and is used on signs in public places in the Highlands and to some extent elsewhere.
Gaelic in Scotland, along with Welsh in Wales and Irish in Northern Ireland, is now legally protected thanks to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML). This European treaty, to which the UK is a signatory, obliges the Westminster government to make funds available to support, promote and develop the language, to ensure its presence and availability in the educational system, to provide public signs in the language to guarantee and promote its public presence, to establish radio and tv channels broadcasting mainly or exclusively in the language and as far as possible to ensure the right of Gaelic speaking citizens to deal with government agencies through the medium of Gaelic. In the case of Gaelic, the Scottish government and agencies of the Scottish government and local government act as agents of the UK government under the terms of the treaty. It is due to these international treaty obligations of the Westminster government that the public presence of Gaelic has greatly increased in recent years. Although Scots is also recognised by the UK government as a minority language of the UK warranting official protection and recognition, the British government only signed chapter 2 of the treaty in respect of Scots whereas it signed chapters 2 and 3 in respect of Gaelic. Chapter 3 is the section of the treaty obliging governments to ensure a public presence for the language and its use in the broadcast media and educational system. It is because of this decision of the British government that in recent years Scotland has witnessed a great improvement in the public presence of Gaelic, but not a corresponding improvement in the public presence of Scots. Despite the hysterical claims of some, especially certain Unionist journalists writing for the UK press, this difference is not part of some imaginary nationalist plot to foist Gaelic on the whole of Scotland at the expense of Scots. It is directly the result of a Westminster decision taken by a Labour government.
In 2005 the Scottish Parliament passed the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act. The act aims to establish Gaelic as an official language of Scotland, and to ensure that it is treated with "equal respect" as English. The act also established Bòrd na Gàidhlig (the Gaelic Language Board) a government quango charged with promoting and strengthening the language and increasing the number of speakers. The implementation of the act by the Scottish executive (as it then was) was a direct result of British governmental treaty responsibilities incurred by the signing of the ECRML. The act has been criticised as it applies only to devolved functions. Agencies of the British state which are not devolved, such as the Post Office or the Driving and Vehicle Licencing Agency are not bound by the act, and have on the whole failed to implement it.
The future for Gaelic is still bleak, but there are small signs of hope that efforts to secure the language will have a positive outcome. Gaelic medium education is increasingly popular, and well established in areas where the language retains a presence. It is also spreading in the larger cities where there are substantial Gaelic speaking communities, and attempts are being made to make the language accessible to students and pupils in other parts of the country. Although the provision of Gaelic in the education system remains patchy outside the last Highland strongholds of the language, there has been a massive shift in public and professional attitudes. No Gaelic speaking schoolchild now has to fear punishment or disapproval from teachers because they have used the language in school.
This year's census will be crucial, as language activists hope that the figures it produces will display signs of the recovery of Gaelic amongst the youngest generation. Should this prove to be the case, it will provide an enormous boost for the language and will be the first concrete evidence that the tide is beginning to turn in the long and sad decline of Scotland's Celtic language.
Even so, in the long term the challenges faced by Gaelic are extreme. Unlike Welsh, which still retains a substantial number of speakers living in districts where the language is spoken by most people, the Scottish Gaelic speaking population is small and scattered. The total population of the Western Isles, the only local authority district where a majority still speak Gaelic, is only some 26,000. Of these around 60% claim to speak Gaelic, so only approximately 15,500 people out of a total Scottish Gaelic speaking population of 58,500 live in areas where Gaelic is still a community language and speakers can reasonably expect to use the language regularly in their daily business and interactions outside the home. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is for Gaelic to establish 'virtual' Gaelic speaking communities, centred around bilingual Gaelic schools and Gaelic organisations in predominantly non-Gaelic speaking areas.
Scots has in some respects fared even worse than Gaelic. The fact that Gaelic and English are different languages is in the realms of the obvious, but Scots was in competition with a language to which it was extremely closely related and with which it already had much in common. Whereas competition with English saw a geographical retreat of Gaelic, the competition with English saw Scots being worn out from within as Scots words, grammatical constructions and pronunciations were replaced by their English equivalents in a piecemeal fashion. Today most Scots in the Lowlands do not speak traditional Scots, rather they speak varieties which contain lesser or greater proportions of Scots and English depending upon the social occasion and the people they are speaking to. In recent decades the amount of Scots which goes into this mixture has become very slight indeed for many people in the larger cities and towns. However the number of Scottish people who retain a passive knowledge of Scots (they understand it but don't usually speak it themselves) is far higher. Most adult Scottish people in the Lowland have a large passive repertoire of words and constructions which they heard older generations using, but they do not generally use these words and constructions in their own speech. In previous decades, it was possible for Scottish children whose parents tried to use English with them to acquire Scots from other children in the local community, but this is becoming less likely to happen as the proportion of active speakers of Scots in the population decreases.
Scots now has a presence in the educational system, although when it is used it is usually taught as a subject and is not used as a medium of education. The further development of Scots in the school system is greatly hampered by the widespread ignorance amongst teaching staff of the issues which affect the language. Most of these teachers are themselves products of an educational system which at best marginalised and sidelined Scots and at worst actively punished its use.
Traditional Scots probably preserves itself best in rural districts in the North East, but it is impossible to state with any degree of precision how many people speak the language or to pin point accurately the districts where the language remains strongest. The number of people who understand Scots is considerably higher, but many modern Scots would find difficulties with much of the traditional vocabulary of Scots. The picture ought to become much clearer later this year as for the first time a question will be asked in the census about Scots. Getting this question into the census has been the result of a long campaign by Scots language activists. Under the previous Labour - Lib Dem administration, there was considerable official obstructionism to adding such a question to the Scottish census. The Labour party in Scotland simply has little or no interest in promoting Scottish culture - other than when it can be shown to be a direct benefit in cash terms to the tourism industry, or when they are forced to take action as the result of international British treaty obligations. The saying "some people know the price of everything but the value of nothing" was scarcely more apt.
It is hoped that by identifying areas where the language is still relatively strong, efforts to maintain Scots and efforts to increase its presence in the educational system can be better targetted. It is widely expected that the number of people who identify as Scots speakers will be substantially greater than the number who identify as Gaelic speakers. This will give language activists powerful ammunition to use in future campaigns to exert pressure on the UK government to grant Scots the same degree of protection and recognition under the ECRML as it currently grants to Gaelic. The UK government already officially recognises that Scots is a language (and not simply a dialect), and it will be difficult for them to justify granting a higher level of official protection to one of Scotland's languages than to another Scottish language which has even more speakers. The real reason for British lack of co-operation in this matter is probably the cost implication. If Scots were to achieve the same legal status as Gaelic, it would have major implications for the language in terms of educational provision, public presence and broadcasting. It could even lead to the establishment of a national Scots language TV channel.
For all these reasons it is vital that the Scots language question in this year's census receives maximum publicity. The campaign is being led and promoted by the Scots Language Centre who have collaborated with the census authorities in producing a website to explain the question to the public. This website will also contain audio files of Scots in order to make it easier to recognise the many different dialects and styles of the language. Newsnet Scotland will do its part to support the publicity campaign.
Scots still suffers the immense handicap of lacking a recognised written standard, and until one is established it can only hope to survive as a dialect of English. The lack of a common written variety of Scots means that Scots speakers have no real means of distinguishing Scots from non-standard English. Everything which is not standard English in Scottish speech tends to be regarded as 'Scots'. However everywhere in the English speaking world dialectal forms of English are giving way to the standard and to emerging urban colloquials which are fundamentally derived from the standard. There is a great shortage of information here, as the only model of language standardisation which Scottish people are familiar with is the English model of a single prescribed form of the language which is not very tolerant of dialectal and regional variation. However there are many different kinds of language standardisation, such as the Norwegian model which has two different standards each of which permits considerable local variation, or the Rumantsch Grischun model (used by the Rumantsch language of Switzerland) where the standard is explicitly not intended as a replacement for local dialects and is not based on any single Rumantsch dialect. Rumantsch Grischun was codified on the basis of maximum intelligibility, and is used solely by the government in official publications and public notices. Rumantsch speakers are only taught to read Rumantsch Grischun, they continue to write in their own local dialects. The existence of Rumantsch Grischun and a common spelling system for all the dialects means that dialect texts are now more easily accessible to speakers of other dialects, and has also led to a great increase in the public presence of the language. Instead of squashing local dialects, some forms of standardisation actually foster and promote dialect writing. However in Scotland any attempt to create a standard Scots language immediately runs into the accusation that it is artificial and contrived. People who make this argument rarely appreciate that all codified standard languages - including English - are by definition artificial and contrived.
The fact remains that there is an immense barrier of linguistic ignorance to overcome, and it's the responsibility of Scottish language geeks like me to start telling our fellow country people what the real alternatives and possibilities are. That's one of the reasons I wrote this short history of Scottish languages.
The language maps which accompany this series are multicoloured and ever changing. The past 200 years have seen Scotland's languages come under a serious threat to their long term survival and unless the actions already being taken to protect them are built upon and further developed, we risk losing them entirely, and future maps of Scotland's languages will show only one colour. Things have improved, there is no doubt about that, but the road ahead is fraught with difficulties and challenges. This is a crucial time for Scotland's languages. The decisions made by our generation will determine whether they live or die.
The numbers 1-10 in Scottish languages
It's all very well blythely discussing different languages, but it's always helpful to get an idea of what they looked like on the page and how they were related to one another. The known languages of Scotland belong to two different language families, the Celtic languages and the Germanic languages.
Proto-Celtic was probably introduced into Britain during the early Iron Age. Eventually it came to be spoken in Scotland. It is not known what language or languages it replaced. Proto-Celtic evolved into different branches in situ once it was already established in the British Isles. The varieties of Celtic which developed in Britain and Ireland are conventionally referred to as Insular Celtic. The two branches of Insular Celtic are Brittonic (or P-Celtic) which arose in Britain, and Goidelic (or Q-Celtic) which arose in Ireland. The extinct Gaulish language of Roman Gaul was also a P-Celtic language and was seemingly closely related to Brittonic. The terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic have fallen out of favour amongst modern linguists. Although all 'P-Celtic' languages display the common (albeit minor) innovation of changing original Celtic kw to p, 'Q-Celtic' languages are negatively defined. They are simply those Celtic languages in which this change failed to occur. Some ancient Continental Celtic languages, Celtiberian and Lepontic, were also 'Q-Celtic' but this does not necessarily imply that they had a particularly close relationship to Goidelic within the Celtic languages. In fact the 'Q-Celtic' Lepontic was apparently an early form of the 'P-Celtic' language of the Cisalpine Gauls. Although it was once widely believed that Celtiberian and Goidelic were closely related within Celtic, this is no longer thought to be the case. Celtiberian and Goidelic are best thought of as descended from peripheral dialects of a large and ancient Celtic dialect complex. Brittonic and Gaulish descend from dialects closer to the core.
Brittonic is the language into which proto-Celtic had evolved in Britain by the time of the Roman invasion. Meanwhile in Ireland proto-Celtic had evolved into the language known as Archaic Irish. This was the form of Gaelic originally brought to Scotland in the 4th and 5th centuries. Classical Irish was the literary language of Gaelic speakers from around 1000 AD until the early 18th century. The proto-Celtic, Brittonic, and Archaic Irish numerals given here are simplified linguistic reconstructions.
Cumbric and Pictish were daughter languages of Brittonic. Pictish was an earlier offshoot from Brittonic, diverging from other Brittonic varieties during the Roman period. The other Brittonic languages diverged from Late Brittonic in the post-Roman period. Old Welsh was the close relative and contemporary of Cumbric and Pictish. Since Cumbric and Pictish were not recorded, the Old Welsh numerals are given here.
The Germanic languages represented in Scotland belong to the West and North Germanic subfamilies. (There was a third subfamily, the now extinct Gothic or Eastern Germanic. It was never spoken in the British Isles.) West Germanic originally developed along the North Sea coast of Germany and Denmark, North Germanic originated in Scandinavia. Both arrived in Scotland in the post-Roman period. These two Germanic subfamilies were introduced separately into Scotland, the West Germanic Old English from around 600 AD onwards, and Old Norse from 800 AD onwards. Scots is the native development of Old English in Scottish territory although it was subject at various periods to strong influence from more southern varieties. English developed out of southern dialects of Old English and was introduced into Scotland from approximately 1600 onwards.
By the Middle Ages the Norse of Scotland had evolved into the Norn language. Norn was never adequately recorded but was apparently rather similar to Faroese. The Faroese numerals are given here to represent Norn.
Proto-Celtic : oinos dwai treis kwetweres kwenkwe swexs sextam oxtu nowan dekam
Brittonic : oinos dau tris petwar pempe swexs sextan oxta nowan dekan
Old Welsh : un dou tri petguar pump chwech saith oith naw dec
Archaic Irish : oinas dau tris kwetur kweggwe swes sextan oxtan nouin dekan
Classical Irish : óen dáu trí cethir cóic sé secht ocht nói dech
Sc. Gaelic : aon dà trì ceithir còig sia seachd ochd naoi deich
Old English : án twá þrí féower fíf sex seofon eahta nigon tíen
Scots : yae twa three fower five sax seiven acht nine ten
English : one two three four five six seven eight nine ten
Old Norse : einn tveir þrír fjórir fimm sex sjau átta níu tíu
Faroese : ein tveir tríggir fýra fimm seks sjey átta níggju tíggju
http://newsnetscotland.com/index.php/art...s-9-and-10