For many people, the topic of Celtic languages brings to mind Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, areas where these languages are still spoken. However, the Celtic language family has an ancient and important history throughout Europe, not just in the western fringes.
At one time Celtic languages were spoken throughout western Europe. As the Romans began their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, Celtiberian was the dominant language of the region. In his book The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer writes:
“The record of Iberian inscriptions shows Celtiberian as a major Continental branch of Celtic languages. This evidence comes from around seventy inscriptions totaling around a thousand words dating from the third to the first century BC.”
With the Roman expansion into western Europe, the Celtic languages declined as the Celtic tribes were incorporated into the Latin-speaking Roman Empire. The languages survived on the peripheries of the Empire, in Britain and Ireland. Today, there are two Celtic language groups: Brythonic (P-Celtic) which includes Welsh, Breton, and Cornish (extinct); and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) which includes Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx (extinct).
While the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1676, in the twentieth century there has been a renewed interest in the language and, as a result, there are about 3,500 Cornish second-language speakers today. Cornish is officially recognized by the United Kingdom as a minority language.
Breton, a Celtic language spoken in France, has about 500,000 speakers. In his book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Jared Diamond reports:
“However, the French government’s official policy is in effect to exclude the Breton language from primary and secondary schools, and Breton’s use is declining.”
With regard to the Celtic languages spoken in Ireland and Scotland, Alistair Moffat and James Wilson, in their book The Scots: A Genetic Journey, write:
“Both the Irish and Scots dialects of Gaelic contain very unusual locutions, ways of saying everyday things which exist in only 10 per cent of the world’s languages, and not at all on mainland Europe.”
There are about 57,000 Scots Gaelic speakers in Scotland with the highest concentration in the Outer Hebrides. Migrations from Scotland to Canada in the eighteenth century resulted in a dialect known as Canadian Gaelic. There are about 4,000 speakers of Canadian Gaelic, concentrated primarily in Nova Scotia.
In Wales, there are about 875,000 Welsh (Cymraeg) speakers. Welsh is the national language of Wales and one of the official languages of the National Assembly for Wales. Outside of Wales, there are an estimated 110,000 to 133,000 Welsh speakers in England, 1,500 to 5,000 in Argentina, nearly 4,000 in Canada, and 2,200 in the United States.
Irish Gaelic is spoken by approximately 1.8 million people in the Republic of Ireland and by 105,000 in Northern Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, Irish is most frequently spoken as the first language in counties Galway, Kerry, Cork, and Donegal. In the United States, more than 22,000 Irish Americans speak Irish at home.
With regard to word order—that is, the order of Subject (S), Verb (V), and Object (O)—English is strongly an SVO language, while the Celtic languages as VSO. That is, sentences in English usually begin with the subject, while sentences in Celtic begin with the verb. In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter writes:
“But in Celtic, verbs come first in a sentence, which is less ordinary worldwide, and downright freaky with Indo-European languages.”
Origins and Spread of the Celtic Languages
The linguistic concept of a Celtic language family has its roots in the late seventeenth-century study of languages. In his entry on the Celts in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Timothy Champion reports:
“It was realized that some of the languages surviving in the periphery of Europe were related to the language of pre-Roman western Europe. This family of languages was called Celtic.”
By the eighteenth century, scholars began to view the Celts as a kind of romanticized ethnic group who had come to dominate most of Europe prior to the Roman conquest. One of the early hypotheses envisioned the Celtic languages and the migration of Celtic peoples as being associated with the European Iron Age. One common view saw the Celts invading Britain and Ireland, bringing with them both iron technology and the Celtic languages. Improved archaeological techniques and dating methods during the twentieth century, however, suggested that this hypothesis was not valid.
In looking for the origins of the Celtic languages from a linguistic viewpoint we need to keep in mind that the Celtic languages are a part of the larger Indo-European language macro-family. In his chapter in Exploring Celtic Origins: New Ways Forward in Archaeology, Linguistics,and Genetics, Barry Cunliffe writes:
“Since Celtic is an Indo-European language it follows that its development must be consequent upon the introduction of Indo-European to the European peninsular.”
Current data suggests that the Celtic languages in the form of Proto-Celtic were present during the European Neolithic Period, thus predating the Iron Age. In his book The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer writes:
“New evidence places the split that produced the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family rather earlier than previously thought. Dating this branch split could be Celtic linguistic origins at the start of the European Neolithic, consistent with the separate southern Neolithic expansion round the coast of the Mediterranean. The final break-up of the Atlantic coast Celtic languages may have been as early as 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period in the British Isles.”
With regard to the division of Proto-Celtic into branches and languages, Barry Cunliffe reports:
“Proto-Celtic then splits to create two branches, Hispano-Celtic and Proto-Goidelic-Gallo-Brythonic: the first being the basis of the Celtic languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula; the second giving rise to the languages spoken in France, Britain, and Ireland. A later splitting of Proto-Goidelic-Gallo-Brythonic created the Goidelic branch, from which Manx, Scots Gaelic, and Old Irish eventually emerged, and a Gallo-Brythonic branch leading to Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Gaulish (the language spoken in Gaul at the time of the Roman invasion.”
Today, the strongest surviving Celtic languages are found in Britain and Ireland. In their book The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat and James Wilson write:
“Q-Celtic is the oldest language still spoken in Britain and Ireland, reaching back perhaps into the second millennium BC. Around the seventh or eighth centuries BC, a language shift occurred and what is now England, Wales and most of Scotland began to adopt P-Celtic.”
One way of approaching an understanding of how languages have spread is through comparison: comparing the linguistic characteristics of several languages, linguists can see the influence of these languages and from this determine geographic patterns. Alistair Moffat and James Wilson write:
“These and at least fifteen other common and fundamental structural differences are shared in one particular area. Along the North African coast, speakers of Berber, Egyptian Arabic and some of the other Semitic languages (including Maltese, the only Semitic language to be written in the Roman alphabet) use the same forms as a Gaelic-speaking crofter on the Isle of Lewis.”
In other words, this suggests that the early speakers of the Celtic languages or Proto-Celtic were in contact with people from the Mediterranean area including North Africa.
Another clue to the spread of languages can be found in toponyms, the names people give to places and geographic features. In her book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, Jean Manco writes:
“People may move and take their languages with them, but place-names are fixed to the territory. Thus they can provide clues to the sequence of languages spoken in a region. The names we see on signposts today have typically gone through a long process of evolution.”
The highest percentage of Celtic place names is in Iberia, Britain, and northwestern France.
Inscriptions found on stelae in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula were written in the Phoenician script, but the language was Celtic. These inscriptions have been dated to the eighth century BCE. Barry Cunliffe writes:
“The implication then is that not only was Celtic spoken in the region in the 8th century but that it was in all probability an indigenous language going back much earlier.”
At the present time, there are two basic hypotheses regarding the origin and spread of the Celtic languages. One of these, the “Celtic from the West Hypothesis”, sees the origins of the Celtic languages along the Atlantic coast. The other, the “Celtic from the East Hypothesis”, sees the origins of the Celtic languages in the Mediterranean.
Celtic from the West Hypothesis
According to this hypothesis, Proto-Celtic originally developed as a trade language along the Atlantic coast perhaps as early as the fifth millennium BCE. In the ancient world, waterways, such as coastal areas and rivers, were the superhighways for transporting people, goods, and ideas. According to Barry Cunliffe:
“It argues that the Celtic language began to develop in the Atlantic zone from the Indo-European language spoken by groups of people who moved westwards in the 6th millennium BC bringing farming practices with them.”
During the early period, tentatively dated from about 5000 BCE to about 2700 BCE, Proto-Celtic emerged as a trade language. Barry Cunliffe writes:
“The formation and consolidation of social networks along the Atlantic zone was the result of maritime interactions. This was the period when a distinctive Celtic language evolved as a lingua franca.”
By 900 BCE, regional variations of Proto-Celtic have formed the basis of the different Celtic languages.
Celtic from the East Hypothesis
Some linguists see the development and spread of Proto-Celtic as being associated with agriculture rather than ironworking. The hearth for agriculture is in the eastern portion of the Mediterranean. Linguistically there are some connections between the Celtic languages and those Indo-European languages originating in this area. In his chapter in Exploring Celtic Origins: New Ways Forward in Archaeology, Linguistics,and Genetics, John Koch writes:
“The gist of this is that Celtic shares some grammatical features with Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, and these are seen as supporting the conclusion that the Celtic branch had originally formed in the east of the Indo-European world.”
Celtic Influence on English
At one time, the Celtic languages dominated Britain, the home of the English language. While English eventually replaced the Celtic languages in most areas, Celtic did have some influence on the formation of English. John McWhorter writes:
“Old English speakers met Celts starting in A.D. 449. This would be when Celts started learning and transforming the English language.”
If we look at English vocabulary, we see that the language has adopted many words from Latin, from Scandinavian languages (i.e. the Vikings), from French, but relatively few words from the Celtic languages. This lends to the impression that Celtic had little impact on English, but John McWhorter points out:
“Celtic grammar is underneath all of those utterly ordinary utterances in Modern English.”
John McWhorter also writes:
“Celtic was English’s deistic God—it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own.”
Among the Celtic words which have been incorporated into English are whiskey, bard, glen, bog, blarney, shamrock, galore, clan, and ptarmigan.
More about Language
Origins of English: The Search for Indo-European Roots
Language 201: The Indo-European Language Family
Language 201: Place-Names
Language 201: Glottochronology and Dating the Evolution of Language
Language 101: Linguistics and Signed Languages
Language 101: Language Change
A Very Short History of the English Language
Origins of English: The Irish Dialect