ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 340: Scots GaelicScots Gaelic is a Celtic language, not to b
ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 340: Scots GaelicScots Gaelic is a Celtic language, not to be confused with Scots aka. Broad Scots, which is a Germanic sister of English. It is spoken by 50-60,000 people in Scotland, primarily on the western edge of the kingdom with the greatest concentration in the islands of the Outer Hebrides. There is also a noteworthy population in Canada’s Nova Scotia. Scots Gaelic, also called simply Scottish, is of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic family, making it sister to Irish and Manx, more distantly related to the Brittonic Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Scottish came to Scotland from Ireland in the 4th and 5th centuries, and the Scottish Gaels drove the native Pictish people to extinction or, more accurately, assimilation around the 9th century. The language peaked as a cultural force around 1000 CE, and began a slow decline the following century as Scottish aristocracy became anglicized. Though the language has been one decline since that decline has slowed significantly over the last centuries due to the efforts of the Scottish community to preserve and support their language. This decline has especially slowed, to the point of near stabilization, amongst younger speakers, which is a good sign that the language may be on the verge of resurgence.Scottish has many of the features common to Celtic languages readers of my previous posts will come to expect: verb first word order, and consonants that mutate for grammatical purposes. Like Irish, the spelling system can be confounding to those not familiar with it as it employs many silent letters and other conventions to help convey the aforementioned sound mutations. English has accrued a number of loans from Scottish including “whiskey”, “trouser”, “slogan”, and “glen”. -- source link