Celtic Language - Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh Search The Celtic Language - the basics and what it sounds like The first thing to point out is that there really isn’t one Celtic language. There are in fact a number of them. The languages that we refer to today as being of Celtic origin are Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. These six languages are known as the Insular Celtic languages because they originated in what are known as the British Isles. These 6 living languages of ancient Celtic origin form one branch of the Indo-European family tree and share sounds from other European and Eastern language groups including the languages of Greece and Rome, the Middle East and Germanic and Slavic tongues. (There is another group called the Continental Celtic languages that have not survived) These 6 languages can themselves be organized into two branches– the P-Celtic or Brythonic branch and the Q-Celtic or Goidelic branch. The P-Celt and Q-Celt tag comes from a difference in how words evolved from Indo-European.

While several words remain common to both sides, on the Q-Celtic side, the hard 'k' became prevalent in many words while on the P-Celtic side a 'p' sound was more common in the same words. For example the word 'who' is derived from the Latin qui. On the Q-Celtic side this evolved as cia and today in Irish Gaelic is cé. In P-Celtic it became pwy. Below is an overview of the two branches of the Celtic languages. While I will add detail to what's below over time, I thought it would be interesting to able to compare what the Q-Celtic languages of Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx sound like and to contrast them with the sound of the P-Celtic languages of Breton, Welsh and Cornish. Goidelic (Gaelic) or Q-Celtic Languages The Gaelic language was spread from Ireland to the Isle of Man and Scotland by migrating groups and raiders sometime from the 3rd Century on. While there are still huge similarities between the languages, they have all evolved in their own way. What does Irish Gaelic language sound like?

Listen to weather girl with beautiful Irish Known also as Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge. (In the past and still very occasionally can be called Erse) Number of Native Speakers: 40-80,000 Everybody attending school in Ireland learns Irish and many profess to speaking the language according to the National Census. Irish is the first official language of the country but the working language for most things is English. Although, the government supports the language in many ways and introduced a Language Act in 2003 to increase the level of public services in Irish, the biggest success in the revival of the gaelic language is the growth of gaelscoileanna which immerse kids in the language and the success and popularity of the TV channel TG4. (See also The Gaelic Revival for more information on this topic.) Scottish Gaelic What does Scottish Gaelic language sound like? Known also Gaelic or as Gàidhlig (or sometimes pejoratively as Erse). Gaelic may be pronounced also as Gallic. Number of Speakers: Approx 100,000 Scottish Gaelic was introduced from Ireland by raiders during the 4th and 5th centuries.

Scottish Gaelic is mostly spoken in the Scottish Highlands. It is not to be confused with Scots which is a language/dialect spoken in the Scottish lowlands of Germanic origin and not a Celtic language. Scottish Gaelic has a rich oral and written tradition. While the number of speakers had been falling for a number of years, there is a growing number of young people speaking the language. The Scottish language movement has not been as effective as getting the same level of recognition as Welsh (see below) but this too has been improving since devolution and a Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act was introduced in 2005 to protect the language. What does Manx language sound like? Manx, known also as Gaelg or Gailck, is spoken in the Isle of Man (located in Irish Sea) Number of Speakers: Approx 2000 Like Cornish, Manx is enjoying a growing interest in recent years. However, the chances of a real revival, though slim are much better than Cornish. Many religious books were translated to Manx, including The Common Book of Prayer, the Bible and other catechisms. This means that the language was better preserved.

A primary school teaching through the medium of the Manx has been opened in recent years. More information on Gaelic Language You should really have a look at the following pages if you want to get a better sense of the Gaelic Language, and Irish in particular. Brythonic or P-Celtic Languages The word Brythonic comes from a Welsh word Brython, which means an indigenous Briton, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon or Gael. The Brythonic languages derived from a British language spoken during the Iron Age. Within Britain several languages developed from this over the centuries including Welsh and Cornish. Breton in Northern France emerged as the Brythonic language was taken there by emigrating Britons. Welsh Language What does Welsh language sound like? The News in Welsh with subtitles Welsh is alsoknown as Cymraeg or y Gymraeg Approx 600,000 speakers Welsh is the Celtic language with in the healthiest state. In Wales there has been a real and quite successful effort to restore the language. The number of speakers is actually increasing.

Both the teaching of the language to all children under the age of 16 and the popularity of Welsh media channels have helped reverse the decline.The Welsh Language Act of 1993 also ensures that the public can avail of services in English or Welsh. Breton What does Breton language sound like? Interview with the Breton linguist Donaitien Laurent Breton is also known also as Brezhoneg. Spoken in Brittany in North Western France Number of Speakers: Approx 200,000 Though still a significant number of speakers, the language survives with little official support. If fact the number of speakers has declined from over a million people before the World War II. Unfortunately, most of the speakers are also elderly which means that the language is increasing danger. The French government does not support any schools teaching in any language other than French which has not helped. It refused to incorporate the Breton-language immersion schools (called Diwan) into the public system in the 90's because the Constitution recognizes only the French language. The regional government in Brittany does provide some financial support, however. Cornish Language What does the Cornish language sound like?

Listen to the Lord's prayer in Cornish The Cornish Language is known also as Kernewek. Approx 2000 speakers There are ongoing attempts to revive the Cornish language and there are a number of people studying the language. There are a small number of bilingual speakers and Cornish is now recognized under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The ability of the revival movement to create a real momentum remains in doubt. Without major support, it is hard to see a future for this Celtic language. The information provided above should be pretty accurate. If you feel any details should be corrected, please contact me. What are the Celtic Languages? – Celtic Studies Resources Home » Opinionated Celtic FAQs » What are the Celtic Languages? What are the Celtic Languages? The word Celt today is most usually applied to a Briton or a Gaul. Celt also can refer to a speaker of a modern Celtic language or to a speaker’s descendants, or so says the American Heritage Dictionary, third Ed. The Celtic languages are a group of languages in the Indo-European family.

The Germanic group, which contains Norse, Swedish, Dutch, German and English, is another branch of the Indo-European family tree, while the Romance group, (now often called Italic) which includes the languages Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian French, and Romanian, is a third branch of the I.E. tree. The Celts are an Indo-European people who spread from central Europe across the European continent to western Europe, the British Isles, and southeast to Galatia (in Asia Minor) during the time before the Roman empire. The Celtic family of languages is divided into two branches, the Insular Celtic languages, and the Continental Celtic languages. The Continental branch includes the languages Gaulish, Celtiberian, and Lepontic. These were languages spoken on the European continent. There are no living native speakers left today; they all died over a thousand years ago. But we do have lots of inscriptions, on stone, wood, and especially, metal plates. Scholars have used their knowledge of the other Celtic languages, and of Greek and Latin, in order to make very educated guesses about inscriptions. And sometimes the same inscription is presented in Latin or Greek as well as in one of the Continental Celtic languages.

We now know quite a bit about the various Continental languages, and are learning more as more inscriptions are discovered, transcribed, deciphered and translated. The Insular Celtic languages are mostly those spoken on the islands of Britain, Ireland, Man, and part of France. The Insular languages belong to one of two branches, the Goidelic and the Brythonic. The Goidelic languages are Irish Gaelic , Scottish Gaelic , and Manx . Manx is a form of Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Man. The last native speaker of Manx died in 1974, but many are learning the language today, and we have recordings of native speakers. Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both still used by native speakers. In addition to living native speakers in Ireland and Scotland, there are also native Scottish Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, Canada. We also have many medieval Irish manuscripts , containing Ireland’s national epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge and other Irish myths , poetry and lore, and a few medieval Scottish Gaelic mss. The Brythonic languages form the other branch of the Insular Celtic languages. Welsh , Cornish , and Breton are Brythonic.

There are still many native speakers of Welsh today, mostly in Wales. The last native speaker of Cornish died in the late eighteenth century, but there are a number of people in Cornwall and elsewhere who have attempted to learn Cornish and even rejuvenate the language. Breton is spoken in Bretagne, or Brittany, in France, by descendants of British Celts who moved there over a thousand years ago. We have fewer medieval Welsh manuscripts preserving the mabinogi and other traditional Welsh tales , poetry and lore, than we have of Irish, but Welsh literature is alive and well. The Goidelic languages are often referred to as “Q-Celtic” because they use a “Q” sound, usually represented by a C or K, where the Brythonic or “P-Celtic” languages use P. For instance, Irish and Scottish Gaelic for “head” is ceann, or sometimes kin. Brythonic languages, P-Celtic Welsh and Cornish, use pen. There’s a place on the coast of Cornwall called Pentire, and one on the coast of Scotland called Kintyre.

Both mean “head of the land.” There are hundreds of similar P and C initial words that indicate the relationship between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages. In Celtic linguistics, it really pays to “mind your Ps and Qs.” Irish language, alphabet and pronunciation Search Irish (Gaeilge) Irish is a Celtic language spoken in mainly Ireland (Éire). There are also Irish speakers in the UK (Ríocht Aontaithe), the USA (Stáit Aontaithe Mheiriceá), Canada (Ceanada) and Australia (an Astráil). According to the 2012 census, 1.77 million people in Ireland claim to speak Irish; 77,185 speak it daily; 110,642 speak it weekly; 613,236 speak less frequently, and the rest rarely speak it. The main concentrations of Irish speakers are in the Gaeltachtaí, which are scattered mainly along the west coast of Ireland and have a total population of 95,000. Between 43% and 67% of Gaeltacht residents speak Irish regularly.

Names of the language Irish is known as Irish, Gaelic or Irish Gaelic in English. The official standard name in Irish is Gaeilge /ˈɡeːlʲɟə/. Before the 1948 spelling reform, this was spelled Gaedhilge. In Middle Irish the name was spelled Gaoidhealg, and it was Goídelc in Old Irish. Irish at a glance Linguistic affliation: Indo-European, Celtic, Insular Celtic, Goidelic Number of speakers: c. 1.77 million Spoken in: Irish, and also in the UK, USA, Canada, and Australia First written: c. 4th century Writing systems: Ogham, Gaelic script, Latin alphabet Status: an offical language in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland Other regional variations of the name in modern Irish dialects include Gaedhilic, Gaeilic, Gaeilig or Gaedhlag in Ulster and northern Connacht, and Gaedhealaing, Gaoluinn or Gaelainn in Munster. Relationship to other languages Irish is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages, also known as Q-Celtic.

It is closely related to Manx (Gaelg/Gailck) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), the other Goidelic languages. There is some degree of mutual intelligibility between them, particular between the Scottish Gaelic of Islay and Argyll, Ulster Irish, and Manx. The grammar and vocabulary of these languages are quite similar, but the spelling and pronunciation are different, especially Manx spelling. Irish is distantly related to Welsh (Cymraeg), Cornish (Kernewek) and Breton (Brezhoneg), which form the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages, also known as P-Celtic. The Celtic languages all have a similar grammatical structure, but have relatively little vocabulary in common. Celtic connections - words that are similar in the Celtic languages Dialects There are three main dialects of Irish: Munster (An Mhumhain), Connacht (Connachta) and Ulster (Ulaidh). The Munster dialect is spoken mainly in Kerry (Ciarraí) and Muskerry (Múscraí) in the western part of County Cork (Contae Chorcaí).

The Connacht dialect is spoken mainly in Connemara (Conamara), the Aran Islands (Oileáin Árann) and Tourmakeady (Tuar Mhic Éadaigh) in County Mayo (Maigh Eo). The main area where the Ulster dialect is spoken is the Rosses (na Rosa). The dialect of Gweedore (Gaoth Dobhair) is essentially the same as the Ulster dialect. The Official Standard (An Caighdeán Oifigiúil) During the 1950s and 1960s a standardised form of Irish, known the An Caighdeán Oifigiúil (The Official Standard) was developed. It combines elements from the three major dialects and its pronunciation is based on the Connacht dialect. This is the form of the language taught in most schools. Decline and revival Between the 17th and early 20th centuries, the Irish language was gradually replaced by English in most parts of Ireland. Famine and migration in the 19th and 20th centuries led to its further decline.

However when the Republic of Ireland came into being in 1922, Irish was adopted as an official language, along with English, and the government and civil service become, in theory at least, officially bilingual. Irish terms were also adopted for the titles of public figures and organisations - Garda (Police), Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Dáil (Parliament). Recently the Irish language has experienced a revival with the foundation of new publications, a radio service, a television station and the growth of Irish-medium education. Irish is also increasingly being used on independent radio stations in Ireland. Origin of writing in Ireland Irish first began to appear in writing in Ogham inscriptions between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. When St Patrick introduced Christianity to Ireland in the 5th century, Irish writers began to write in Latin, and at the same time Irish literature written in the Latin alphabet began to appear. The Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries led to the destruction of many early manuscripts, so most surviving manuscripts were written after that time.

The Ogham alphabet (᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜) The Ogham alphabet was used to write Archaic Irish, Old Welsh and Latin and Ogham inscriptions have been found in various parts of Ireland and the British Isles. More information about Ogham Irish uncial alphabet/Gaelic Script The Irish uncial alphabet originated in medieval manuscripts as a variant of the Latin alphabet. It was used for printing Irish until quite recently and is still used on road signs and public notices throughout Ireland. More information about the Irish uncial alphabet Modern Irish alphabet (an aibítir) Today Irish is usually written with a version of the Latin alphabet similar to the one used for Scottish Gaelic , though a spelling reform in 1957 eliminated some of the silent letters which are still used in Scottish Gaelic. A a té ú The letters j (jé), k (ká), q (cú), v (vé), w (wae), x (ex), y (yé) and z (zae) do not occur in native Irish words, but do appear in some English loanwords, for example jab (job) and veain (van).

You can hear the names of the letters at: Irish pronunciation Notes Consonants are broad when preceded and/or followed by a, o or u, and slender when preceded and/or followed by e or i. Lenition (séimhiú) is a change in sound that occurs to the beginning of words caused by a preceding word, such as a preposition. Lenition is indicated by adding an h after the initial consonant. For example, the Irish for shoe is bróg, [brok] but my shoe is mo bhróg [mɔ vrok]. Eclipsis (urú) happens after certain words, such as i, which means "in". Eclipsis in indicated by adding a extra consonant before the initial consonant. For example, the Irish for "in Paris" is i bParis [ɪ bariʃ]. The important thing to remember about eclipsed consonants is that only the first consonant is pronounced. Sample text in Irish Saolaítear na daoine uile saor agus comhionann ina ndínit agus ina gcearta.

Tá bua an réasúin agus an choinsiasa acu agus dlíd iad féin d'iompar de mheon bráithreachais i leith a chéile. A recording of this text by Benny Lewis of Fluent in 3 months Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Celtic languages | Britannica.com Celtic languages Gaulish language Celtic languages, also spelled Keltic, branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken throughout much of Western Europe in Roman and pre-Roman times and currently known chiefly in the British Isles and in the Brittany peninsula of northwestern France. On both geographic and chronological grounds, the languages fall into two divisions, usually known as Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic.

Continental Celtic Continental Celtic is the generic name for the languages spoken by the people known to classical writers as Keltoi and Galatae; at various times during a period of roughly 1,000 years (approximately 500 bc–ad 500), they occupied an area that stretched from Gaul to Iberia in the south and Galatia in the east. The great bulk of evidence for Continental Celtic consists of the names of persons, tribes, and places recorded by Greek and Latin writers. Only in Gaul and in northern Italy are inscriptions found, and the interpretation of these is in most cases doubtful. Given the nature of the evidence, knowledge of these languages is confined largely to the sound system and a small part of the vocabulary, and no certain conclusions can be reached as to their historical development or the differences between them. Insular Celtic Insular Celtic refers to the Celtic languages of the British Isles, together with Breton (spoken in Brittany, France). As the name Breton implies, it is an importation from Britain and is not a Continental Celtic dialect .

Although there is some scanty evidence from classical sources—mainly place-names—and a small body of inscriptions in the Latin and ogham alphabets from the end of the 4th to the 8th century ad, the main sources of information on the early stages of these languages are manuscripts written from the 7th century onward in Irish and somewhat later in the British languages. The Insular languages fall into two groups—Irish and British. Irish (often called Goidelic , from Old Irish Goídel “Irishman,” or Gaelic, from Gael, the modern form of the same word) was the only language spoken in Ireland in the 5th century, the time when historical knowledge of that island begins. The two other members of this group, Scottish Gaelic and Manx , arose from Irish colonizations that began about that time. There were also important Irish-speaking colonies in Wales , but no trace of their language survives apart from a few inscriptions. Similar Topics Luwian language British (often called Brythonic , from Welsh Brython “Briton”) had almost the same degree of influence on the island of Britain and the Isle of Man.

Inscriptions and personal names surviving from Scotland show clearly that there was a non-Indo-European language spoken there, usually called Pictish , which was later replaced by British. There were undoubtedly dialectal differences within the island, but the existing dialects arose from the fragmentation of British by the Irish invasions of Man and what is now Scotland and by the English invasions that began in what is now southern England and finally reached Scotland. Scotland has ever since been partitioned linguistically between English (or “Scots”) and Irish (or “Erse”—the Scots form of “Irish”—or “Gaelic”). A British dialect, now labeled Cumbric, lingered on in the western borderlands between England and Scotland until perhaps the 10th century, but almost nothing is known about it. In what is now Wales , British survived as the dominant language until a century or so ago; it is now known as Welsh. Another pocket of British speech survived in Cornwall until the end of the 18th century. It was from this area that emigrants in the 5th and 6th centuries ad had brought Celtic once more to the European mainland by establishing a colony in northwestern France, still called Brittany.

It is just possible that there were some traces of the Continental Celtic language (i.e., Gaulish ) at that time in this remote area, although Breton is too similar to Cornish (an Insular Celtic tongue) to suggest any serious influence from Gaulish. Historical development Eyjafjallajökull volcano Continental Celtic Celtic died out very quickly in eastern Europe. In its farthest outpost in Asia Minor , it may be assumed that the Letter of Paul to the Galatians was addressed to a people whose culture was already Greek but whose Celtic origins are clear from names preserved by classical authors; e.g., Drunemeton “the very sacred place,” formed from two distinctively Celtic elements. When commenting on that Letter, St. Jerome (died ad 419/420) said that the Galatians still spoke a language almost the same as that of the people of Trier. As he had been in both places, his evidence cannot be dismissed offhand, and it may be that a few speakers of Celtic still existed in both areas. Since St. Jerome did not claim to know any Celtic dialect, however, his statement cannot be accepted with certainty.

Speaking generally, the history of Continental Celtic comes to an end as that of Insular Celtic begins. Insular Celtic The earliest evidence for Insular Celtic consists, like that for Continental Celtic, mainly of names recorded by Greek and Latin authors. In the case of Ireland, these were entirely by hearsay, and many of the Irish place-names recorded by Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad have not yet been identified. From perhaps the 4th century, ogham inscriptions (see alphabet ) are found in Ireland, consisting almost entirely of personal names. From the 5th century onward, British names in Latin inscriptions are recorded in Wales, as well as Irish names in both Latin and ogham alphabets in areas of Irish settlement. These scanty records are of value above all in establishing that, up to very nearly the time at which written documents become available, British and Irish had remained similar in structure to Gaulish. Thus, in Britain is found the genitive (possessive form) Catotigirni, which in Old Welsh gives Cattegirn, and in Ireland the genitive Dovatuci exists, which in Old Irish gives Dubthaich.

These changes—loss of final syllables and connecting vowels, weakening of consonants between vowels, and so on—are very similar to what was happening to Latin in France at the same time; e.g., Latin avicellus and aqua finally became oiseau and eau. There is no satisfactory explanation of why these profound changes should have occurred at this time, nor can the period at which they occurred be fixed precisely, for the engravers of the inscriptions clearly went on using traditional forms long after the sound had changed. Linguistic characteristics of the Insular Celtic tongues The new languages, the only forms of Celtic that are known thoroughly, present a considerable number of unusual features, some of them unknown to other Indo-European languages. Some scholars have argued that these features may have resulted from the presence of a large non-Celtic substratum in the British Isles. Because it is hardly likely that the Celtic invasions of those islands began much before 500 bc or that the invaders exterminated the existing inhabitants, such a possibility cannot be denied. On the other hand, some features once thought to be exotic, such as the initial position of the verb in the sentence, have been convincingly demonstrated to be organic developments from Indo-European.

Others, such as the system of counting by 20s, are clearly innovations , but this system is shared by English (“three score and ten”), French (quatre-vingts “80”), and Danish, in all of which it is also an innovation , as well as Basque , in which it appears to be old. Phonological characteristics The most remarkable phonological feature of Insular Celtic is the development of a double series of consonants in which strongly articulated consonants are distinguished from their weak counterparts. The two series were originally merely phonetic variants, with the strong variety occurring in absolute initial position and in certain consonant clusters and the weak elsewhere. Later, however, the two series became independent, or phonological. In the languages as they first appear in writing, considerable changes have taken place in the phonetic forms of the two series. Both in Irish and in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, the opposition (contrast) of strong:weak in the voiced stops has been replaced by stop:spirant (e.g., b:v).

(A spirant, such as v, f, s, is produced with local friction and without complete stoppage of the breath stream.) Irish has the same system for the unvoiced stops (e.g., t:th), but Welsh, Cornish, and Breton have voicing in this instance (e.g., voiceless t:voiced d). These changes by themselves are not very different from the weakening of consonants between vowels that occurs in other western European languages (compare Welsh pader “prayer,” a loanword from Latin pater “father,” with Spanish padre “father,” deriving from Latin patrem), but, in Insular Celtic, they occurred not only inside the word but also inside the phrase, so that the initial consonant of a word preceded by another word ending in a vowel was weakened. When the final syllables were lost in the evolution to the modern languages, these variations remained, and a system of initial mutations (changes) was thus set up.

If, for example, a Goidelic nominative form *sindos kattos koilos “the thin cat” is reconstructed, this will give Old Irish in catt coel after the loss of final syllables, but the genitive *sindī kattī koilī “of the thin cat” will give in chaitt choíl with changed initial consonants. The same sort of change occurred in one Italian dialect: in Tuscan , there occur porta “door,” la forta “the door,” tre porte “three doors,” from Latin porta, illa porta, tres portae. In both cases, consonant weakening has spread from word to sentence; there is a common development, but it cannot be claimed that it is distinctively Celtic. Grammatical characteristics Another feature of Insular Celtic is its lack of the infinitive form of the verb found in most other Indo-European languages—e.g., English “to do,” “to call.” The equivalent is the verbal noun, which is a noun closely linked to the verb, though not necessarily derived from the same stem.

Being a noun, it can have a following noun in the genitive case, which, in the older languages at least, is subjective or objective according to whether the verb with which it is linked is intransitive or transitive. Thus, from the Old Irish sentence téit in ben “the woman goes,” the verbal noun phrase techt inna mná “the coming of the woman” can be derived, whereas from marbaid in mnaí “he kills the woman” can be formed marbad inna mná (lais) “the killing of the woman (by him).” Among many other functions of the verbal noun is its use, when preceded by the appropriate preposition, with the substantive verb to provide a tense with continuous meaning.

Thus, to téit in ben there is a parallel a-tá in ben oc techt “the woman is at going” (= “the woman is going”), and to marbaid in mnaí corresponds a-tá oc marbad inna mná “he is killing the woman.” The close resemblance of this system to that of modern English, in which it is a comparatively recent development, has been variously explained as the working of a substratum or, more recently, in terms of areal (regional) development. Modern languages of the family The discussion of the individual languages that follows divides them into the two main groups, beginning with Irish , which is the oldest attested. Irish The history of Irish may be divided into four periods: that of the ogham inscriptions, probably ad 300–500; Old Irish, 600–900; Middle Irish, 900–1200; and Modern Irish, 1200 to the present. This division is necessarily arbitrary, and archaizing tendencies confuse the situation, especially during the period 1200–1600, when a highly standardized literary norm was dominant.

After 1600, the modern dialects, among them Scottish Gaelic and Manx, begin to appear in writing. A discussion of the Irish language in modern Ireland and of Irish language instruction at … University College Cork, Ireland (A Britannica Publishing Partner) The Latin alphabet was introduced into Ireland by British missionaries in the 5th century and soon began to be used for writing Irish. By the middle of the 6th century, the process of putting into literary form the rich oral tradition of the native learned class was certainly well advanced. The problems of interpreting the early writings are complicated by the fact that the orthography was based on that of Latin, but with a British pronunciation; e.g., Latin pater was read as pader, the form of the loanword in Modern Welsh, and Old Irish Pátric was read as Pádraig (as it is spelled in Modern Irish).

No new letters were evolved; the weak (less forceful) consonants were distinguished only in instances in which there were Latin spellings that could be utilized (e.g., strong ll: weak l, strong rr: weak r, nn:n, c:ch, t:th) or with the help of the punctum delens (s:ṡ, f:ḟ), a dot that shows that the sound is not pronounced. As a result, many ambiguities remain: ní beir can mean either “he does not carry” or “he does not carry it,” according to whether the b- is read as a b sound or a v sound. Nor was the Latin alphabet capable of dealing with the new system of consonant quality that appears in Irish alone among the Celtic languages. Thus, from the Celtic nominative singular and plural forms bardos, bardī developed Welsh bardd, plural beirdd, with a vowel alternation like that of English “mouse, mice.” In Irish, the forms are bard, baird; the -i- of baird is purely graphic, serving to indicate that the following consonants are both palatalized.

(Palatalized consonants are those in which the pronunciation is modified by raising the tongue toward the hard palate.) This palatalization had been purely phonetic as long as the -ī that caused it survived, but in Old Irish the palatalization became independent, so that each consonant of Common Celtic evolved into four distinct consonants (i.e., phonemes); for example, from original Common Celtic b are derived a b sound and a palatalized b sound, and a v sound and a palatalized v sound. Apart from these phonetic developments, Old Irish is striking chiefly for the extraordinary proliferation of particles that appear before the verb and are used in forming compound verbs . For example, the Latin word suffio “I fumigate” is translated as fo-timmdiriut, composed of fo “under,” to “to,” imb- “around,” di “from,” and the stem reth- “run,” with vowel and consonant changes appropriate to the 1st person singular present tense.

Such forms, combined with a system of infixed accusative and dative pronouns (i.e., pronouns inserted within a word) and syntactical accent shifts, produced a verbal system almost as complicated as that of Basque, though transparently Indo-European in origin. This system began to break down during the Old Irish period; the process was no doubt accelerated by the Viking raids that began at the end of the 8th century and that disrupted the monastic system, the guardian of the literary norm of Old Irish. Popular forms broke through in the Middle Irish period, though always mixed with archaizing forms; the backward-looking Irish scribes were never content to write down their own vernacular . During the 12th century, many ecclesiastical synods were held with the object of bringing the organization of the Irish Church more closely into line with that of western Europe, and the Anglo-Norman invasion took place in the latter part of the same century. It may have been these far-reaching changes that inspired the Irish literati to undertake a new standardization of their language.

From the beginning of the 13th century, there is a rigidly fixed norm, often called Classical Modern Irish, which, for over four centuries, was used as the exclusive literary medium in Ireland and in Gaelic-speaking Scotland (there is no evidence for the Isle of Man). The Scandinavians were first contained and then absorbed; they contributed a small number of loanwords to Irish, mainly in the field of navigation but also in that of urban life, for they were the first to establish towns in Ireland, though only on the coast. The Anglo-Normans were a more serious problem. After almost complete success in the early period, however, they became largely Gaelicized in custom and language outside the towns they had founded. They contributed a large number of loanwords to Irish in the fields of warfare, architecture, and administration, though many of these were comparatively short-lived. When English took over from Anglo-Norman as the language of administration and English colonies began to be planted in Ireland, English loanwords began to come into Irish. Few of these, however, were recognized in the literary language, and only from the evidence of the modern dialects has it become clear that they were quite numerous.

It was not until the beginning of the 17th century that the English power was finally consolidated in Ireland, first by military conquest and later by the planting of English-speaking colonists on a much larger scale than before. From this time onward, the decline of Irish began, with Irish becoming the language of an oppressed people. With no schools to teach the literary language nor any native nobility to support the literati who used it, the dialects appeared for the first time and began to be written in the paper manuscripts that constituted almost the only form of publishing available to those using Irish. By the beginning of the 19th century, it is probable that the population was almost equally divided between Irish speakers, mainly in the western half, and English speakers, mainly in the eastern half. The real imbalance lay in the fact that many of the Irish speakers were bilingual, whereas few of the English speakers were. The first census to record language use was taken in 1851, after the great famine that had struck the western areas with exceptional severity.

By this time, the total number of Irish speakers was 1,524,286 (23 percent of the population), but only 319,602 spoke Irish exclusively. The decline of Irish has continued to the present day, in spite of a revival campaign initiated by the Gaelic League in 1893 and made part of official policy after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921. Since then, Irish has been recognized as the first official language of the state; it is a compulsory subject in all of the schools and is a requirement for civil service and some other posts. There are probably more people able to read Irish—perhaps 300,000—than there ever were before. From 1945 onward, a standard written language has evolved, and there is a small but flourishing literary movement. Nearly all of the readers of Irish are English speakers by upbringing, however, and not many of them would claim that Irish had become their main language.

In the western areas in which Irish was the traditional speech, there are now fewer than 50,000 people to whom it is a mother tongue, and all but a handful of these have a more or less adequate command of English. Scottish Gaelic Some aspects of the modern Scottish Gaelic dialects show that they preserve features lost in the language of Ireland during the Old Irish period; such archaism is characteristic of “colonial” languages. The innovations are, however, more striking than the archaisms. Most remarkable is the loss of the voicing feature (i.e., the vibration of the vocal cords) in the stops. All of the stopped consonants are unvoiced, and the original voiceless stops have become strongly aspirated; for example, the equivalent of Irish bog “soft” is [pok], p being the voiceless counterpart of b, and that of cat “cat” is [khaht], the superscript h after k indicating the aspirated quality. (The brackets indicate that the symbols printed within them are phonetic rather than orthographic.) Scottish Gaelic was planted on British soil, and the verbal system has been remolded on the lines of the British language, which originally had no future tense.

As in Modern Welsh, the inherited present tense has largely future meaning, and present time is mainly expressed by the present-tense form of the substantive verb and the preposition a(ig) with the verbal noun. (In Insular Celtic, there are two verbs for “to be,” a substantive verb with the meaning, roughly, “to exist,” and a linking verb such as “is” in “John is a boy” or “sky is blue.”) Thus, from Old Irish téit in ben “the woman goes” is derived Scottish Gaelic théid a’ bhean “the woman will go,” and from Old Irish a-tá in ben oc techt “the woman is going” results the Scottish Gaelic form thà an bhean a’ dol “the woman goes” or “the woman is going.” It is only from the 17th century onward that the development of Scottish Gaelic can be studied, for, up until then, Classical Modern Irish was the literary norm.

Indeed, the first book to be printed in Irish was a translation of the Calvinist Book of Common Order , published in Edinburgh in 1567, and the Scottish Reformers used the Irish Bible for some time, until it became clear that it was too foreign for the people to understand. A native Scottish standard emerged gradually during the 17th century, as poets ignorant of the Irish norm began to compose in their native dialects. It was not until the 18th century that the orthography became more or less fixed, and, until recent reforms in Ireland, the divergencies between the written languages were comparatively small. It is clear, however, that Scottish Gaelic must now be regarded as a separate language, though the differences between it and Irish are no greater than those between standard German and the Swiss dialects. Scottish Gaelic was confronted by northern dialects of English (Scots) from the very beginning; these rapidly penetrated into the east of the country, especially in the area centred on Edinburgh, the capital. The so-called Highland Line, marking the boundary between the two languages, has been steadily receding to the west since medieval times.

By 1901, there were 230,806 speakers of the language, including 28,106 who spoke Scottish Gaelic exclusively; 106,466 persons, including nearly all of the monolingual Scottish Gaelic people, lived in the two counties of Inverness and Ross . The decline has continued steadily, and, even in those two counties, Gaelic is rapidly disappearing from the mainland, though it is holding its ground well in the Hebrides . Scottish Gaelic speakers in the early 1980s numbered about 90,700, which shows that the state of Scottish Gaelic survival is in many ways less serious than that of Irish. Because the majority of Gaelic speakers are Protestants who are accustomed to reading the Bible and using the vernacular in their religious services, literacy in Gaelic has been widespread. Furthermore, however low the census figures may be, they give an accurate picture of the number of those to whom Gaelic is a mother tongue because the number of English speakers who have acquired it is negligible.

It must be admitted, however, that the recent literary revival finds its audience among the displaced Gaelic speakers of Edinburgh and Glasgow rather than in the Hebrides, where Gaelic is still confined to the home and English is the language of culture. In addition, there were about 500 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s. Manx The history of the Isle of Man is imperfectly known. It was first inhabited by British speakers, then colonized from Ireland, and later became part of the Scandinavian Lordship of the Isles until 1266, when the King of Norway ceded both Man and the Hebrides to Scotland. From then on, it became involved in the wars between England and Scotland until 1346, when it passed finally to England. Though an Irish dialect survived as the speech of the majority of the people, these circumstances were not propitious for literary contacts with Ireland, and Manx was apparently not written until the Welsh bishop John Phillips translated the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1610, using an orthography based on that of English.

This orthography makes Manx difficult to understand for readers of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, to whom it is of considerable interest because it represents a dialect entirely free of literary influences. The orthography soon became fixed, and a far-reaching series of later phonetic changes made the written form a highly inaccurate representation of the final stages of the language. Phonologically, it has more in common with the eastern dialects of Irish than with Scottish Gaelic, but its morphology and syntax are much more like those of Scottish Gaelic, probably because of the common British substratum. Its tense system is similar to that of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and its use of periphrastic verb forms (i.e., longer forms with several elements) with the auxiliary meaning “to do” goes further than either of these, especially in its final stages. In the beginning of the 18th century, English was still not understood by most of the people, but during the 19th century the decline of Manx was rapid, and the census of 1901 showed only 4,419 speakers of the language, all bilingual.

Twenty years later, the language had ceased to be used as a normal means of communication , but, until recently, investigators have been able to find old people capable of giving useful information. British languages Britain was thoroughly romanized, and it is clear that the British language itself had been much affected by Latin ; on the level of vocabulary, such an everyday word as Welsh pysg “fish,” for example, derives from Latin piscis. The vowel system lost independent vowel quantity, the length of vowels becoming determined by the structure of the syllable, a situation that also occurred when the later Latin developed into Romance. Even after the collapse of Roman rule, Latin retained the same prestige among British Christians that it had in the rest of the Western Empire. The Irish monks introduced to the British speakers the custom of writing down the vernacular language at about the end of the 8th century; they adapted the clumsy Irish orthography for that purpose. At this period, the British dialects were very close to one another and can hardly be classed as separate languages, though they soon began to diverge. Like Old Irish, they had lost their final syllables and had undergone many other changes from the state shown by the inscriptions.

Notably, the languages show only the merest traces of the declension of the noun, although the verb preserves a full inflectional system (that is, it has a full series of endings). It is clear that no future tense existed in early British, though the separate languages were later to fill this gap by various means. Welsh Welsh is the earliest and best attested of the British languages. Although the material is fragmentary until the 12th century, the course of the language can be traced from the end of the 8th century. The earliest evidence may represent the spoken language fairly accurately, but a poetic tradition was soon established, and by the 12th century there was a clear divergence between the archaizing verse and a modernizing prose. The latter was characterized by a predominance of periphrastic verbal-noun constructions at the expense of forms of the finite verb. By this time, too, the forms corresponding to other Celtic and Indo-European present-tense forms had largely acquired future meaning; e.g., Welsh nid â “he will not go” (future) contrasts with Irish ní aig “he does not drive” (present).

The gap thus left was filled, as in Scottish Gaelic and Manx, by a construction involving the substantive verb and the verbal noun; e.g., y mae’r wraig yn myned “the woman goes” or “the woman is going” is composed of the verb mae “is” and the verbal noun myned “going.” By the 14th century, prose and verse styles became more similar, the prose being less colloquial and the verse less archaic. This marks the beginning of modern literary Welsh, which was finally fixed by the Bible translation of 1588. Modern literary Welsh developed at a time when Welsh national identity was beginning to be seriously threatened by the close relations with England that followed on the accession of the Welshman Henry Tudor ( Henry VII ) to the English throne in 1485. Welsh was being written less and less, and the spoken language was being penetrated by English words. In 1536, the Act of Union deprived Welsh of its official status. By the beginning of the 18th century, the position of the Welsh language had fallen very low, though it was still the vernacular of the vast majority of the people.

It was saved by the Methodist revival of the 18th century, which established schools everywhere to teach the people how to read the Welsh Bible and which brought the Bible itself, together with Welsh religious books, into almost every home. The literary language rejected most of the English loanwords that had come into the popular speech, and, by the 19th century, a highly literate Wales was equipped with reading material of every kind in the Welsh language. Meanwhile, however, the popular speech diverged further from the fixed literary norm, which was never spoken except in the pulpit or on the platform. Modern Wales has a literary language that no mother speaks to her child and widely differing dialects that appear in print only to represent dialogue in stories and novels. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century first undermined the dominance of Welsh in Wales: English-speaking workers were brought into the mines and factories in such numbers that they could not be absorbed linguistically. By 1901 English speakers outnumbered Welsh speakers for the first time.

Out of a population of 2,012,876, only 929,824 were reported as Welsh-speaking, though 280,985 people spoke Welsh alone. By the early 1980s the number of Welsh speakers had dropped to about 395,000, representing about 14 percent of an increased population. Most of rural Wales, however, is still Welsh speaking, and recent years have seen a great improvement in the official status of Welsh and a considerable increase in its use in the schools; it is certainly the most firmly rooted of the modern languages of Celtic origin. In addition, there are still about 8,000 Welsh speakers in parts of Patagonia , Argentina , which was colonized by Welsh settlers in 1865. These people maintain cultural contacts with the homeland but are all bilingual in Welsh and Spanish and seem fated to final assimilation. Breton Breton disappeared from sight after the early period, and no literary texts are available until the 15th century.

These, mainly mystery plays and similar religious material, are written in a standardized language that is by now completely differentiated from Welsh and, to a lesser degree, from Cornish. The divergence between Breton and Cornish is largely a matter of the English loanwords in Cornish and the French loanwords in Breton. The present tense was retained in its original function, whereas a future and conditional were formed from the present and past subjunctive, respectively. Later, the Breton dialects became written and showed considerable divergencies in this form. Not until the 1920s was an attempt at standardization made, and even then it was necessary to adopt two norms. One was called KLT, from the initials of the Breton names of the dioceses of Cornouaille, Léon, and Tréguier, the dialects of which agree with Welsh and Cornish in having the stress accent on the next to the last syllable. The other norm was the dialect of Vannes in the south, which has the stress accent on the final syllable and many other distinctive features, at least some of which can be explained by its close contacts with French.

More recently, two norms have been evolved to cover all four dialects; one of these is used by most writers, whereas the other is officially recognized by the universities of Brest and Rennes , in both of which Breton is taught. Up until recently, Breton was the common language of the people in Cornouaille, Léon, Tréguier and Vannes, within the boundaries of the départements of Côtes-du-Nord, Finistère, and Morbihan. Breton may still have more speakers than Welsh, but this is quite uncertain because no language statistics exist for France. There is, however, general agreement that very few children today are being brought up speaking Breton. This is at least partly the result of French official policy, which in effect excludes the language from primary and secondary schools, though the poor economic opportunities in Brittany also play a part. The literary movement is, therefore, confined to an intelligentsia of perhaps not much more than 10,000 people, many of whom live outside Brittany. The overwhelming mass of the remainder of Breton speakers are literate only in French, and chances for the survival of Breton seem very poor.

Cornish Like Breton, Cornish had no literary texts before the 15th century. Those that exist are mainly mystery plays, some of which are almost literal translations from English. Cornish is much closer in structure to Breton than to Welsh, but it has also been heavily influenced by English. At the beginning of the 18th century, there were still a number of areas in which Cornish was spoken, but it died out as a means of communication by the end of the century. Difference Between Gaelic and Celtic | Difference Between Difference Between Gaelic and Celtic • Categorized under Culture , Miscellaneous | Difference Between Gaelic and Celtic Gaelic vs Celtic Generally speaking, Gaelic, also known as Scottish Gaelic, is one of the Celtic languages that belong to the Goidelic branch, and it is a native language in Scotland. Other Gaelic languages that belong to the Goidelic branch are Manx and Irish, which, together with Scottish Gaelic, originated from old Irish. However, Manx is no longer being spoken, and according to some accounts, the last person to use the language died in 1962; although there’s no consensus on this.

Another branch of the Celtic language is the Brythonic branch, which is different from, and larger than, Goidelic. It includes Breton, Welsh and Cornish. Other Celtic language families include Gaulish, which is closely related to Lepontic, Galatian and Noric, which are all now extinct. Another family is the Celtiberian, which was, in the ancient times, a native language in the Iberian Peninsula, which is the present day northern Portugal, parts of Leon in Spain, Galacia and Aragon. The Celts (or Celtics) were a well-known group of people, with a specific culture, who lived in Western Europe. Originally, they occupied southern Poland, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia, but were driven out of central Europe by their neighbors, the Germanic tribes. Their Celtic languages originated with the Common Celtic (also called Proto-Celtic), which is a branch of the Indo-European languages. Currently, Celtic languages are not that widely spoken, and they are limited to selected places in Western Europe, particularly Ireland, places in Great Britain, including Wales, Cornwall and Scotland, and France’s peninsula of Brittany, Patagonia, Cape Breton Island and the Isle of Man.

It’s worth noting, that in modern times, Celtic languages are only spoken by minority communities, although revival efforts have also regained momentum. In Australia, where it was spoken before the federation in 1901, is now also extinct. Scholars handling the subject of Celtic languages have never consented to the true origins of these languages; a situation made worse by the lack of original data sources. Some argue that Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic are different, stating that the split of the Goidelic and Brythonic languages from Continental Celtic caused the differences. Summary: Gaelic is a language, whereas, Celtic was a group of people with a specific culture that used the Celtic languages. Gaelic is a ‘subset’ of the Celtic languages, specifically belonging to the Goidelic family of Celtic languages. Related Posts Celtic languages Celtic languages Search Celtic languages This section contains a collection of vocabulary, grammar and other details of the six modern Celtic languages: Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

Information about the Celtic languages to be (bí/bi/be) in the Gaelic languages Prepositional pronouns Gaelic prepositional pronouns (Irish, Manx & Scottish Gaelic) Phrases in: Irish (with more details and sample phrases) Tower of Babel in: Other Celtic languages: British/Brythonic, Celtiberian, Cornish, Cumbric, Gaulish and Leptonic Please note I am not a native speaker of any of these languages, but have been studying them, on and off, for quite a few years: Scottish Gaelic since 1996, Welsh since 1998, Irish since 2004, Manx since 2006, Breton since 2012, and Cornish since 2016. By putting this information together here, my aim is to improve my knowledge of these languages and to share that knowledge with others. If you have corrections, questions or suggestions, please contact me .

Question: Goidelic is one type of the Celtic language. What is the other?
Answer: Brythonic