Scotland Is Celtic (Sort of)
5 min read ⭑
As a Scot who for 18 years has lived abroad (well, in Brighton and London), I am very occasionally asked if I can speak Gaelic. This well-intentioned but slightly misguided question tacitly implies that Gaelic is the primary, authentic language of Scotland, and perhaps even assumes that Scotland’s history mirrors nations like Ireland and Wales, where the reason English is spoken in Scotland is down to our big, bad southern neighbour (boo hiss) subjugating the populace and imposing cultural hegemony.
To be fair to my non-Scottish brethren, even some Scots subscribe to the above narrative, a narrative which, anecdotally at least, seems to have gained traction in recent years with the concurrent rise of Scottish nationalism and a resurgent interest in Gaelic culture, possibly driven by a desire to ‘symbolically mark the distinctiveness between Scotland and England’. As a country, however, Scotland’s linguistic history is not quite analogous to the other ‘Celtic’ nations in this respect. Therefore, I thought it useful to offer a brief and simplified overview of Scotland’s historic languages, which will hopefully help in understanding and contextualising its rich cultural identities.
Firstly, it is absolutely true that Scotland is a Celtic nation in the sense that Gaelic was for a significant period the majority language in Scotland. According to traditional dating, the language first arrived via settlers (‘the Gaels’) from Ireland around 500 AD into what is now north-western Scotland. Interestingly, the Romans used the term Scoti to describe the Gaels, which is ultimately where Scotland derived its name, with the Latin Scottus meaning ‘Irishman’. Scottish Gaelic belongs to the Goidelic (or ‘Q-Celtic’) subbranch of the Celtic languages, along with Irish and Manx. However, before the arrival of the Gaels, present-day Scotland, along with the rest of Britain, would have spoken languages belonging to the Brythonic (or ‘P-Celtic’) subbranch of Celtic languages, which includes languages like Welsh and Cornish. Have you ever wondered, for instance, why you can observe place names like Abergavenny in southern Wales and 500 miles away find Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland? This is because Aber is Old Welsh for ‘mouth of the river’, and in the pre-Roman era, Britain universally spoke languages very similar to Welsh.
Taxonomy of the Celtic Languages in the British Isles and Ireland
In the centuries that followed the arrival of the Gaels in Scotland, Gaelic eventually ousted other languages such as Pictish (another P-Celtic language) spoken by a tribe called the Picts in the north-east of the country, and it also became established in the south-west and south-east by annexing the British kingdom of Strathclyde (‘British’ in the original sense of the word, that of the Ancient Britons) and the northern part of the Angles’ kingdom of Northumbria, respectively.
The expansion of Gaelic lasted until around the 11th to 12th century, where a reorganisation along Anglo-Norman lines among the mainly Gaelic-speaking Scottish monarchy took place under Malcolm III, King of Scotland from 1058 to 1093, following the Norman conquest south of the border in England. This ‘reorientation’ was continued by the monarchs who followed him, such as Malcolm’s youngest son David I (c1084-1153), who is said to have turned the ‘face of Scotland’ away from the Irish Sea and towards ‘the North Sea, England, and the continent’. After the reign of David I, most Scots would continue to speak Gaelic, but the ‘Davidian Revolution’, as it became known, was a key turning point. By the 12th to 13th century, Scottish royals had begun the shift from Gaelic towards a language that would later be known as ‘Scots’.
The Scots language (or ‘dialect’, depending on your viewpoint) is Anglo-Saxon in origin and a sister language of English. Its genesis can be traced to the dialects spoken by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the north-east of present-day England (Northumbria) and the south-east of present-day Scotland (Lothian) around the 6th and 7th centuries. This is also why much of Scotland and north-east England share so much of their lexicon. Just think of words like broon for ‘brown’, wee for ‘small’, tak for ‘take’, mak for ‘make’, and bairn for ‘child’, amongst many other examples. These are not bastardised or corrupted versions of ‘proper’ (read ‘southern’) English: these are legitimate regional varieties.
Across Scotland’s medieval period, there was a fascinating linguistic pluralism present in the country, including:
Cumbric, a relic of the P-Celtic Brythonic languages, which was spoken in present-day south-west Scotland and north-west England and is closely related to Old Welsh
Gaelic
Latin, which was spoken in the church and for a significant time was used for all official documents and literature in Scotland until around the 15th century
Aristocratic French in the royal courts (until around the 14th to 15th centuries)
Norn, spoken in Orkney and Shetland due to the influence of the Scandinavians
Scots, which confusingly was known to Scotland’s inhabitants as Inglis – ‘English’ – until the late 15th century, where it then acquired the name Scots, suggesting that during this period it began to be seen as a distinct language from its English relative
The Scots Language truly flourished during the 1400s, where it became fully established as the main language of the monarchs, nobles, and peasants of the Scottish Lowlands (i.e. the east coast and south of the country). The influence of Scots continued to grow until the 17th century. Conversely, Gaelic was still widely spoken and remained the predominant vernacular in the ‘Hebrides and Highlands’ and even as far east as parts of Aberdeenshire.
Scots eventually succumbed to influence from its linguistic cousin south of the border, primarily down to further convergence politically and culturally with England. In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died without any children and had no direct heir to the English throne. James VI of Scotland – who was Elizabeth’s cousin, as both were direct descendants of Henry VII, the first Tudor king – therefore amalgamated the two monarchies with The Union of the Crowns, becoming James I of both England and Scotland and unifying the two realms under one monarch, which is why to this day Britain has a single royal family. The union meant that the Scottish royal court moved camp to England and eventually adopted the norms and language of their new, southern home. Before this, The Protestant Reformation had also had a deleterious effect on the Scots language, with the most popular version of the Bible in Scotland in the latter half of the 16th century being produced by ‘English Protestants exiled to Geneva, with the language they used being southern English’. The Acts of Union in 1707, which united the two states ‘into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain’, continued the marked decline of Scots and the increase in anglicising influences.
There is of course a great deal more to say when it comes to a topic as large as this, but I think I will pause there for now and leave it to actual experts. I hope this short yet concise overview has been at least partially useful in understanding Scotland’s heterogenous socio-linguistic landscape, contextualising both its Celtic and non-Celtic historic influences, and pushing back against a common narrative that, intentionally or otherwise, often suggests a cultural homogeneity, failing to acknowledge the rich tapestry of Scotland’s myriad cultures.
