Goidelic languages: Encyclopedia II - Goidelic languages - History and range

Goidelic languages - History and range

Goidelic languages were once restricted to Ireland, but sometime between the 3rd century and the 6th century a group of the Irish Celts known to the Romans as Scoti began migrating from Ireland to what is now Scotland and eventually assimilated the Picts (a group of peoples who may have originally spoken a Brythonic language) who lived there. Manx, the former common language of the Isle of Man, is closely akin to the Gaelic spoken in north east Ireland and the now extinct Gaelic of Galloway (in southwest Scotland), with heavy influence from Old Norse because of the Viking invasions. Shelta, a cant spoken by the Irish Travellers, is considered its own language even though it is based largely on Irish. Goidelic languages may once have been common on the Atlantic coast of Europe and there is evidence that they were spoken in the region of Galicia in modern Spain and Portugal, around Marseille, at the head waters of the Seine, in the Celtic heartlands of Switzerland, Austria and so on, and in Galatia. The Goidelic languages had their own unique script, known as ogham, in use from at least the 5th century until the 15th, especially for carving on wood or stone.

The oldest written Goidelic language is Primitive Irish, which is attested in Ogham inscriptions up to about the 4th century AD. Old Irish is found in the margins of Latin religious manuscripts from the 6th century to the 10th century. Middle Irish, the ancestor of the modern Goidelic languages, is the name for the language as used from the 10th to the 16th century. A form of Middle Irish was used as a literary language in Ireland and Scotland until the 17th century, and often in both countries well into the 18th century; the Ethnologue gives the name "Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" to this purely written language. Often called Classical Irish, the modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic written forms [of which there are at least four] are merely modernisations (in general in parallel, sometimes in different directions) of the 'classical' language. As long as this written language was the norm, Ireland was always considered the Gaelic homeland to the Scottish literati.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History and range", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki