Goidelic languages: Encyclopedia II - Goidelic languages - Scottish

Goidelic languages - Scottish

Some people in the north and west of Scotland and the Hebrides still speak Scottish Gaelic, but because of its minimal official recognition and because of large-scale emigration from those parts of Scotland, 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 had also been a Goidelic-speaking region, but the Galwegian language 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. Most other areas of the Lowlands also spoke forms of Gaelic, the only exceptions being the area which lies on the south-eastern part of the modern border with England - the area called Lothian in the Middle Ages - and the far north-east (parts of Caithness), Orkney and Shetland.

The very word Scotland in fact takes its name from the Latin word for a Gael, Scotus, which itself may come from the primitive Irish scotos (now "scoth"; = "best one", "the pick of the bunch", etc). So Scotland or Scotia originally meant Land of the Gaels. Moreover, until late in the 15th century, it was solely the Gaelic language used in Scotland which in English was called Scottish or - more authentically - Scottis. Scottis continued to be the English name for the language, although it was gradually superseeded by the word Erse, an act of cultural disassociation which contributed to the language's declining status. In the early 16th century the dialects of Middle English which had developed in Lothian and had come to be spoken elsewhere in the Kingdom of Scotland themselves appropriated the name Scots. By the seventeenth 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 emmigration. 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.

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