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55-666: Gaelic , as a linguistic term, refers to the Gaelic languages but can also refer to the transmission of any other Gaelic cultural feature such as social norms and customs , music and sport. It is often referred to as a part of Celtic identity as Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man are all considered Celtic Nations , and the Gaelic languages are considered a sub-group of the Celtic languages . Examples of ethnic groups who have gone through

110-537: A genitive construction similar to construct state , prepositions with fused inflected pronouns ("conjugated prepositions" or "prepositional pronouns"), and oblique relatives with pronoun copies. Such resemblances were noted as early as 1621 with regard to Welsh and the Hebrew language . The hypothesis that the Insular Celtic languages had features from an Afro-Asiatic substratum (Iberian and Berber languages)

165-507: A great deal of literature survives in it, including the early Irish law texts. Classical Gaelic , otherwise known as Early Modern Irish , covers the period from the 13th to the 18th century, during which time it was used as a literary standard in Ireland and Scotland. This is often called Classical Irish , while Ethnologue gives the name " Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic " to this standardised written language. As long as this written language

220-506: A list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period. These are: The Insular Celtic verb shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attested Indo-European language : verbs have different conjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic having verb–subject–object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by

275-509: A now lost substrate. This was suggested by Jongeling (2000). Ranko Matasović (2012) likewise argued that the "Insular Celtic languages were subject to strong influences from an unknown, presumably non-Indo-European substratum" and found the syntactic parallelisms between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages to be "probably not accidental". He argued that their similarities arose from "a large linguistic macro-area, encompassing parts of NW Africa, as well as large parts of Western Europe, before

330-672: A particle -d (from an older * -t ). Continental Celtic languages cannot be shown to have any absolute/conjunct distinction. However, they seem to show only SVO and SOV word orders, as in other Indo-European languages. The absolute/conjunct distinction may thus be an artifact of the VSO word order that arose in Insular Celtic. Insular Celtic, unlike Continental Celtic , shares some structural characteristics with various Afro-Asiatic languages which are rare in other Indo-European languages. These similarities include verb–subject–object word order , singular verbs with plural post-verbal subjects,

385-689: A period of Gaelicisation in history include the Norse-Gaels , the Picts , the Britons of southwest Scotland , the Scoto-Normans , and the Hiberno-Normans , Today, Gaelicisation, or more often re-Gaelicisation, of placenames , surnames and given names is often a deliberate effort to help promote the languages and to counteract centuries of Anglicisation . The Manx language , which

440-660: A pre-existing Gaelic culture on both sides of the North Channel . Dál Riata grew in size and influence, and Gaelic language and culture was eventually adopted by the neighbouring Picts (a group of peoples who may have spoken a Brittonic language ) who lived throughout Scotland . Manx, the language of the Isle of Man , is closely akin to the Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides , the Irish spoken in northeast and eastern Ireland, and

495-616: A preverbal particle . The situation is most robustly attested in Old Irish , but it has remained to some extent in Scottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in Middle Welsh as well. Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are called absolute , those that appear after a particle are called conjunct (see Dependent and independent verb forms for details). The paradigm of the present active indicative of

550-464: A semantically degraded form of * esti "is", while Schrijver (1994) has argued it is derived from the particle * eti "and then", which is attested in Gaulish. Schrijver's argument is supported and expanded by Schumacher (2004), who points towards further evidence, viz., typological parallels in non-Celtic languages, and especially a large number of verb forms in all Brythonic languages that contain

605-545: A strong partition between the Brittonic languages with Gaulish ( P-Celtic ) on one side and the Goidelic languages with Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other, may be superficial, owing to a language contact phenomenon. They add the identical sound shift ( /kʷ/ to /p/ ) could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and Brittonic, or have spread through language contact between those two groups. Further,

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660-404: A variety of non-past times, and context indicates the time. The sense can be completely tenseless, for example when asserting that something is always true or always happens. This verb form has erroneously been termed 'future' in many pedagogical grammars. A correct, neutral term 'INDEF1' has been used in linguistics texts. In Middle Welsh, the distinction is seen most clearly in proverbs following

715-561: Is derived from Old Welsh Guoidel meaning "wild men, savages". The medieval mythology of the Lebor Gabála Érenn places its origin in an eponymous ancestor of the Gaels and the inventor of the language, Goídel Glas . The family tree of the Goidelic languages, within the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, is as follows During the historical era, Goidelic

770-516: Is proposed as the predecessor of Goidelic, which then began to separate into different dialects before splitting during the Middle Irish period into the separate languages of Irish , Manx , and Scottish Gaelic . Irish is one of the Republic of Ireland 's two official languages along with English . Historically the predominant language of the island, it is now mostly spoken in parts of

825-497: Is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic, especially in Scotland, and therefore is ambiguous. Irish and Manx are sometimes referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), but the use of the word "Gaelic" is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when used to denote languages, always refer to those languages. This is in contrast to Scottish Gaelic , for which "Gaelic" distinguishes

880-748: Is the theory that these languages evolved together in those places, having a later common ancestor than any of the Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian , Gaulish , Galatian , and Lepontic , among others, all of which are long extinct. This linguistic division of Celtic languages into Insular and Continental contrasts with the P/Q Celtic hypothesis . The proponents of the Insular hypothesis (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) point to shared innovations among these – chiefly: The proponents assert that

935-647: Is the transformation of * an , * am to a denasalised vowel with lengthening, é , before an originally voiceless stop or fricative, cf. Old Irish éc "death", écath "fish hook", dét "tooth", cét "hundred" vs. Welsh angau , angad , dant , and cant . Otherwise: In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widespread bilingualism , perhaps because of exogamy , and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. Ranko Matasović has provided

990-444: Is very similar to Irish , has undergone a major revival in recent years, despite the language being so rarely used that it was even mislabelled as extinct by a United Nations report as recently as 2009. The decline of the language on the island was primarily as a result of stigmatisation and high levels of emigration to England . There are now primary schools teaching in the medium of Manx Gaelic, after efforts mainly modelled on

1045-774: The Gaeltachtaí are primarily found in Counties Cork , Donegal , Mayo , Galway , Kerry , and, to a lesser extent, in Waterford and Meath . In the Republic of Ireland 1,774,437 (41.4% of the population aged three years and over) regard themselves as able to speak Irish to some degree. Of these, 77,185 (1.8%) speak Irish on a daily basis outside school. Irish is also undergoing a revival in Northern Ireland and has been accorded some legal status there under

1100-695: The Canadian Gaelic dialect in Nova Scotia . Its historical range was much larger. For example, it was the everyday language of most of the rest of the Scottish 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

1155-617: The European Union . Ireland's national language was the twenty-third to be given such recognition by the EU and previously had the status of a treaty language. 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 60,000 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Scotland , plus around 1,000 speakers of

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1210-779: The Highland Games , with traditional sports such as the caber toss , are mainly restricted to the Highlands and islands . In the 21st century, Scottish Gaelic literature has seen development and challenges within the area of prose fiction publication, and phrases such as Alba gu bràth may be used today as a catch-phrase or rallying cry. Areas which are Gaelicised are referred to as Gàidhealtachd . Goidelic languages The Goidelic ( / ɡ ɔɪ ˈ d ɛ l ɪ k / goy- DEL -ik ) or Gaelic languages ( Irish : teangacha Gaelacha ; Scottish Gaelic : cànanan Goidhealach ; Manx : çhengaghyn Gaelgagh ) form one of

1265-517: The Isle of Man . All surviving Celtic languages are in the Insular group, including Breton, which is spoken on continental Europe in Brittany, France . The Continental Celtic languages , although once widely spoken in mainland Europe and in Anatolia , are extinct. Six Insular Celtic languages are extant (in all cases written and spoken) in two distinct groups: The Insular Celtic hypothesis

1320-631: The Italic languages had a similar divergence between Latino-Faliscan , which kept /kʷ/ , and Osco-Umbrian , which changed it to /p/ . Some historians, such as George Buchanan in the 16th century, had suggested the Brythonic or P-Celtic language was a descendant of the Picts' language. Indeed, the tribe of the Pritani has Qritani (and, orthographically orthodox in modern form but counterintuitively written Cruthin) (Q-Celtic) cognate forms. Under

1375-507: The 15th century, Scottis in Scottish English (or Scots Inglis ) was used to refer only to Gaelic, and the speakers of this language who were identified as Scots . As the ruling elite became Scots 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

1430-621: The 1607 Flight of the Earls (and the disappearance of much of the Gaelic nobility), Irish was spoken by the majority of the population until the later 18th century, with a huge impact from the Great Famine of the 1840s. Disproportionately affecting the classes among whom Irish was the primary spoken language, famine and emigration precipitated a steep decline in native speakers, which only recently has begun to reverse. The Irish language has been recognised as an official and working language of

1485-499: The 1998 Good Friday Agreement but its official usage remains divisive to certain parts of the population. 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 ( c.  1.85 million ) on the island of Ireland can understand Irish at some level. Despite the ascent in Ireland of the English and Anglicised ruling classes following

1540-480: 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 under Scots law ) with English, sparking hopes that Scottish Gaelic can be saved from extinction and perhaps even revitalised. Long the everyday language of most of the Isle of Man , Manx began to decline sharply in the 19th century. The last monolingual Manx speakers are believed to have died around

1595-462: The 2011 Census, these numbers increased to 94,000 and 1.3 million, respectively. Active Irish speakers probably comprise 5 to 10 per cent of Ireland's population. In recent decades there has been a significant increase in the number of urban Irish speakers, particularly in Dublin. The dispersed but large, educated and middle-class urban Gaeilgeoir community enjoys a lively cultural life and is buoyed by

1650-409: The 20th century, recording their speech and learning from them. In the 2011 United Kingdom census , there were 1,823 Manx speakers on the island, representing 2.27% of the population of 80,398, and a steady increase in the number of speakers. Today Manx is the sole medium for teaching at five of the island's pre-schools by a company named Mooinjer veggey ("little people"), which also operates

1705-429: The Insular hypothesis, the family tree of the insular Celtic languages is thus as follows: Irish Scottish Gaelic Manx † Pictish † Cumbric Welsh Breton Cornish This table lists cognates showing the development of Proto-Celtic */kʷ/ to /p/ in Gaulish and the Brittonic languages but to /k/ in the Goidelic languages. A significant difference between Goidelic and Brittonic languages

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1760-483: The Irish system. The efforts have been widely praised, with further developments such as using technology to teach the language being put into place. Estimates of numbers of native speakers of the Irish language in the Republic of Ireland in 2000 ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. According to the 2006 census for the Republic, 85,000 people used Irish daily outside of school and 1.2 million used Irish at least occasionally. In

1815-494: The Old Irish verb beirid "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particle ní "not". In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in certain verb-forms across almost all verbs (except for a very few). This is a VSO language. The example given in the first column below is the independent or absolute form, which must be used when the verb is in clause-initial position (or preceded in

1870-415: The arrival of the speakers of Indo-European, including Celtic". The Afro-Asiatic substrate theory, according to Raymond Hickey , "has never found much favour with scholars of the Celtic languages". The theory was criticised by Kim McCone in 2006, Graham Isaac in 2007, and Steve Hewitt in 2009. Isaac argues that the 20 points identified by Gensler are trivial, dependencies, or vacuous. Thus, he considers

1925-402: The clause by certain preverbal particles). Then following it is the dependent or conjunct form which is required when the verb is preceded in the clause by certain other preverbal particles, in particular interrogative or negative preverbal particles. In these examples, in the first column we have a verb in clause-initial position. In the second column a negative particle immediately precedes

1980-401: The formula "X happens, Y does not happen" (Evans 1964: 119): The older analysis of the distinction, as reported by Thurneysen (1946, 360 ff.), held that the absolute endings derive from Proto-Indo-European "primary endings" (used in present and future tenses) while the conjunct endings derive from the "secondary endings" (used in past tenses). Thus Old Irish absolute beirid "s/he carries"

2035-630: The growth of Irish medium education and Irish-language media . In some official Gaeltachtaí (Irish-speaking regions) areas, Irish remains a vernacular language alongside English. In Northern Ireland the Gaelicisation process is significantly slower and less-supported than elsewhere on the island and the status of the Irish language in Northern Ireland is the subject of heated political debates. In Scotland, Scottish Gaelic and traditional Gaelic customs such those manifested at

2090-625: The language from the Germanic language known as Scots . In English, it is common to have distinct pronunciations of the word, with Scottish Gaelic pronounced / ˈ ɡ æ l ɪ k / compared to Irish and Manx Gaelic pronounced / ˈ ɡ eɪ l ɪ k / . The endonyms ( Gaeilge , Gaelic and Gaolainn in Irish, Gaelg in Manx and Gàidhlig in Scottish Gaelic) are derived from Old Irish Goídelc , which in turn

2145-518: The language was not really Scottish, and therefore foreign. This was something of a propaganda label, as Gaelic has been in Scotland for at least as long as English, if not longer. 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

2200-495: The middle of the 19th century; in 1874 around 30% of the population were estimated to speak Manx, decreasing to 9.1% in 1901 and 1.1% in 1921. The last native speaker of Manx, Ned Maddrell , died in 1974. At the end of the 19th century a revival of Manx began, headed by the Manx Language Society ( Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh ). Both linguists and language enthusiasts searched out the last native speakers during

2255-616: 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 Crown following the second Jacobite Rebellion of 1746 caused still further decline in the language's use – to a large extent by enforced emigration (e.g. the Highland Clearances ). Even more decline followed in

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2310-531: The now-extinct Galwegian 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 from about the 4th century. The forms of this speech are very close, and often identical, to the forms of Gaulish recorded before and during

2365-451: The sentence. If the first word in the sentence was another particle, * (e)s came after that and thus before the verb, but if the verb was the first word in the sentence, * (e)s was cliticized to it. Under this theory, then, Old Irish absolute beirid comes from Proto-Celtic * bereti-s , while conjunct ní beir comes from * nī-s bereti . The identity of the * (e)s particle remains uncertain. Cowgill suggests it might be

2420-591: The sole Manx-medium 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 University College Isle of Man and Centre for Manx Studies . Comparison of Goidelic numbers, including Old Irish. Welsh numbers have been included for a comparison between Goidelic and Brythonic branches. * un and daa are no longer used in counting. Instead

2475-495: The south, west, and northwest. The legally defined Irish-speaking areas are called the Gaeltacht ; all government institutions of the Republic, in particular the parliament ( Oireachtas ), its upper house ( Seanad ) and lower house ( Dáil ), and the prime minister ( Taoiseach ) have official names in this language, and some are only officially referred to by their Irish names even in English. At present,

2530-478: The suppletive forms nane and jees are normally used for counting but for comparative purposes, the historic forms are listed in the table above There are several languages that show Goidelic influence, although they are not Goidelic languages themselves: Insular Celtic languages Insular Celtic languages are the group of Celtic languages spoken in Brittany , Great Britain , Ireland , and

2585-475: The time of the Roman Empire . The next stage, Old Irish , is found in glosses (i.e. annotations) to Latin manuscripts —mainly religious and grammatical—from the 6th to the 10th century, as well as in archaic texts copied or 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;

2640-531: The two groups of Insular Celtic languages , the other being the Brittonic languages . Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from Ireland through the Isle of Man to Scotland . There are three modern Goidelic languages: Irish ( Gaeilge ), Scottish Gaelic ( Gàidhlig ), and Manx ( Gaelg ). Manx died out as a first language in the 20th century but has since been revived to some degree. Gaelic , by itself,

2695-645: The two other Goidelic languages. While Gaelic was spoken across the Scottish Borders and Lothian during the early High Middle Ages it does not 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 Scottish Lowlands spoke Cumbric , and others Scots Inglis , the only exceptions being the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland where Norse

2750-418: The verb, which makes the verb use the verb form or verb forms of the dependent conjugation. The verb forms in the above examples happen to be the same with any subject personal pronouns, not just with the particular persons chosen in the example. Also, the combination of tense–aspect–mood properties inherent in these verb forms is non-past but otherwise indefinite with respect to time, being compatible with

2805-522: Was first proposed by John Morris-Jones in 1899. The theory has been supported by several linguists since: Henry Jenner (1904); Julius Pokorny (1927); Heinrich Wagner (1959); Orin Gensler (1993); Theo Vennemann (1995); and Ariel Shisha-Halevy (2003). Others have suggested that rather than the Afro-Asiatic influencing Insular Celtic directly, both groups of languages were influenced by

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2860-445: Was restricted to Ireland and, possibly, the west coast of Scotland . Medieval Gaelic literature tells us that the kingdom of Dál Riata emerged in western Scotland during the 6th century. The mainstream view is that Dál Riata was founded by Irish migrants, but this is not universally accepted. Archaeologist Ewan Campbell says there is no archaeological evidence for a migration or invasion, and suggests strong sea links helped maintain

2915-583: Was spoken. Scottish Gaelic was introduced across North America with Gaelic settlers. Their numbers necessitated North American Gaelic publications and print media from Cape Breton Island to California. Scotland takes its name from the Latin word for 'Gael', Scotus , plural Scoti (of uncertain etymology). Scotland originally meant Land of the Gaels in a cultural and social sense. (In early Old English texts, Scotland referred to Ireland.) Until late in

2970-512: Was the norm, Ireland was considered the Gaelic homeland to the Scottish literati . Later orthographic divergence has resulted in standardised pluricentristic orthographies. Manx orthography, which was introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, was based loosely on English and Welsh orthography, and so never formed part of this literary standard. Proto-Goidelic, or Proto-Gaelic, is the proposed proto-language for all branches of Goidelic. It

3025-580: Was thought to be from * bʰereti (compare Sanskrit bharati "s/he carries"), while conjunct beir was thought to be from * bʰeret (compare Sanskrit a-bharat "s/he was carrying"). Today, however, most Celticists agree that Cowgill (1975), following an idea present already in Pedersen (1913, 340 ff.), found the correct solution to the origin of the absolute/conjunct distinction: an enclitic particle, reconstructed as * es after consonants and * s after vowels, came in second position in

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