from Part II - Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: The Celtic Languages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2024
This chapter considers the history, political context, and linguistic characteristics of Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland since approximately 400 CE and was a majority language of Scotland around 1000 CE. Today, Gaelic is a minority, endangered language undergoing revitalisation. Currently, there are around 58,000 speakers in Scotland, and 1,500 in Canada. Around half of speakers in Scotland live in the north-west Highlands and islands, but many also live in Lowland cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh due to migration and revitalisation policies. Gaelic’s linguistic features are substantially different from English and, along with other Celtic languages, are quite different from many other Indo-European languages. For example, Gaelic is a VSO language and retains morphological complexity such as case and gender. Phonological features include contrastive palatalisation, pre-aspiration, and some dialects have lexical pitch accents. In some morphophonological contexts, consonants undergo mutation. Recent sociolinguistic developments including language revitalisation have led to new linguistic structures emerging. This chapter outlines some of these developments such as new varieties of Gaelic in urban settings, and dialect levelling in traditional areas among Gaelic-immersion school pupils.
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