Celtic languages
-
What are Celtic languages?
Celtic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, once spoken across Western Europe in pre-Roman and Roman times. Today, they are primarily known in the British Isles and Brittany in northwestern France.
The languages are divided geographically and chronologically into two groups: Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic. Insular Celtic languages have unusual features, possibly from a non-Celtic language base in the British Isles. The relationship of Common Celtic to other Indo-European languages remains open, with the eastern part of central Europe as the likely origin of the Celts.
2 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
Where were Celtic languages traditionally spoken?
Celtic languages were spoken across Western Europe in Roman and pre-Roman times. These languages stretched from Spain and the British Isles to the Balkans, with one group even settling in Asia Minor. Although little has survived from that time, the Insular Celtic languages, including Irish and Welsh, are known from the British Isles from the 8th century CE onward.
Insular Celtic refers to the Celtic languages of the British Isles, as well as Breton, which is spoken in Brittany, France. The Insular languages fall into two groups: Irish and British.
3 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What are the main groups of Celtic languages?
The Celtic languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family, were spoken across Western Europe in ancient times. Today, they are mainly known in the British Isles and Brittany. The Celtic languages are divided into two main groups:
-
Goidelic languages include Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. They are also referred to as Q-Celtic because of the retention of the sound q (later developing to k, spelled c).
-
Brythonic languages include Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. They are sometimes referred to as P-Celtic because of the presence of the sound p in these languages.
6 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
-
Which Celtic languages are still spoken today?
Today, several Celtic languages continue to be spoken, mainly in the British Isles and Brittany. These languages fall into two groups: Brythonic and Goidelic.
The Brythonic languages consist of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. The Goidelic languages include Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. While most people in Scotland speak English, Scottish Gaelic is still spoken by a small percentage of the population, especially in the Western Isles and the western Highlands.
5 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
Why have some Celtic languages become endangered or extinct?
Several factors have contributed to the endangerment or extinction of some Celtic languages. These include the rise of more dominant languages and the social and economic pressures that encourage speakers to adopt these languages. For instance, the consolidation of English power in Ireland from the 17th century led to a decline in Irish, as it became associated with an oppressed population.
Globalization, urbanization, mass travel, universal education, broadcasting, ease of communication, and social mobility have further fostered larger regional and social dialects, contributing to the decline of smaller languages. However, there has also been enthusiasm for preserving minority languages, as seen in the Gaelic revival.
4 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
How are people working to preserve and revive Celtic languages now?
Celtic languages, once spoken across Western Europe, are now primarily found in the British Isles and Brittany. Today, efforts to preserve and revive these languages include:
-
Government Support: The Scottish government allocates funds to support Gaelic in education and broadcasting. Local authorities teach Gaelic in Gaelic-speaking areas and include Scots literature in curricula. In Ireland, government subsidies and programs support traditional cultural activities, such as Irish language use and arts and crafts revival.
-
Cultural Organizations: Organizations such as the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) promote Irish language use. Folk music festivals (feiseanna) host competitions in traditional storytelling, dancing, instrumental music, and singing.
-
Media and Education: The revival of Irish has continued through compulsory education in schools, the designation of Irish as Irelandâs first official language, the expansion of Irish-language media, and its recognition as an official language of the European Union.
5 Britannica SourcesCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
Celtic languages, 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 bcâad 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 sourcesâmainly place-namesâand 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.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
The Insular languages fall into two groupsâIrish and British. Irish (often called Goidelic, from Old Irish GoĂdel âIrishman,â 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.
British (often called Brythonic, from Welsh Brython âBritonâ) 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 âScotsâ) and Irish (or âErseââthe Scots form of âIrishââor âGaelicâ). 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
Common Celtic
The reconstruction of Common Celtic (or Proto-Celtic)âthe parent language that yielded the various tongues of Continental Celtic and Insular Celticâis of necessity very tentative. Whereas Continental Celtic offers plenty of evidence for phonology (the sound system), its records are too scanty to help much with the grammar (morphology or syntax), for which the best available evidence is Old Irish, the most archaic of the Insular languages. The records provide a picture of a language of the same type as Latin or Common Germanic; that is, one that still maintains a considerable part of the structure of the ancestral Indo-European language and has not lost final or medial syllables. Its vowel system differs only slightly from that reconstructed for Indo-European by the French linguist Antoine Meillet. Differences include the occurrence of Celtic *Ä« for Indo-European *Ä (e.g., Gaulish rix and Irish rĂ, âkingâ; compare Latin rex) and *Ä in place of *Ć. (An asterisk [*] before a letter or word indicates that the sound or word is not attested but is a hypothetical, reconstructed form.)
The consonantal system, too, is conservative, although there are some striking features. Among them are the loss of *p (e.g., Irish athair âfatherâ; cf. Latin pater) and the falling together of the aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops assumed for Indo-European. (A stop is a consonant made with complete momentary stoppage of the breath stream some place in the vocal tract; voiced stops are those produced with the vocal cords vibrating, such as b, d, g. An aspirated sound is accompanied by a puff of breath, often written as an h, as in bh, dh, gh; an unaspirated consonant lacks this accompanying puff of breath.) Thus, Old Irish dĂĄn âwhat is givenâ corresponds to Latin donum âgiftâ (from Indo-European *d), but Old Irish de-naid âsucksâ corresponds to Latin fe- in fe-mina, fe-llare (from Indo-European *dh). This loss of distinctive aspiration occurs with three out of the four voiced stops, a situation close to that of Slavic.
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
Other considerations, however, show that Celtic belongs to the so-called southern group of the European branch of Indo-European languages, or in another classification, to the same centum group as Latin, whereas Slavic belongs to the satem group. (The centum and satem divisions of Indo-European languages are made according to the treatment of certain sounds, called palatals, that existed in the ancestral Indo-European language.)
The loss of *p in Celtic was very early; only the place-name Hercynia, preserved in Greek, shows that, in initial position, it became an h sound before disappearing. In most of the known Celtic languages, a new p sound has arisen as a reflex of the Indo-European *kw sound. Thus there is Gaulish pempe, Welsh pimp âfive,â compared to Old Irish cĂłic and Latin quinque âfive.â The Irish evidence shows that *kwenkwe must be reconstructed as the form in Common Celtic. The terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are sometimes used to describe assumed divisions of Common Celtic; to use one sound shift to distinguish dialects is, however, hardly justified, and the classification will not be used in this article.
The morphology (structure) of nouns and adjectives shows no striking changes from Indo-European. The Irish verb, however, exhibits a remarkable archaism not found in any other recorded Indo-European language. It has recently been demonstrated that the so-called primary and secondary endings of the Indo-European verb, as in the 3rd person singular endings *-(e)t and -(e)ti, both occurred in the same tense. The forms with *-i were used when the verb had absolute initial position; those without it were used in the normal verbal position at the end of the sentence. This is reflected in the Old Irish forms beirith (from *bereti) âhe bearsâ and nĂ beir (from *beret) âhe does not bear.â It cannot be stated with certainty that Continental Celtic had preserved such forms. The Continental Celtic dialects show a few cases of sentencesâadmittedly imperfectly understoodâin which the verb appears to be placed after the subject and before the object, as in modern western European languages. The history of Insular Celtic, however, shows a gradual shift from the older final position of the verb to the initial position, a position that has now become regular in all of the languages.