The Celtic languages ( ) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language.["The Celtic languages: An Overview", Donald MacAulay, The Celtic Languages, ed. Donald MacAulay, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 3.] The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707,[Cunliffe, Barry W. 2003. The Celts: a very short introduction. pg.48] following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh language and Breton language languages.[Alice Roberts, The Celts (Heron Books 2015)]
During the first millennium BC, Celtic languages were spoken across much of Europe and central Anatolia. Today, they are restricted to the northwestern fringe of Europe and a few diaspora communities. There are six living languages: the four continuously living languages Breton language, Irish language, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh language, and the two Cornish language and Manx language. All are minority languages in their respective countries, though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is an official language in Wales and Irish is an official language across the island of Ireland and of the European Union. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO. The Cornish and Manx languages became extinct in modern times but have been revived. Each now has several hundred second-language speakers.
Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages, since Breton, the only living Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, is descended from the language of settlers from Britain. There are a number of extinct but attested Continental Celtic languages, such as Celtiberian, Galatian and Gaulish. Beyond that, there is no agreement on the subdivisions of the Celtic language family. Traditionally, they are considered to be divided into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. However, Gaulish is widely considered more closely related to Insular Celtic than either of these two are to Celtiberian; together, Gaulish and Insular Celtic may form the Nuclear Celtic subfamily.
The Celtic languages have a rich literary tradition. The earliest specimens of written Celtic are Lepontic inscriptions from the 6th century BC in the Alps. Early Continental inscriptions used Italic and Paleohispanic scripts. Between the 4th and 8th centuries, Irish and Pictish language were occasionally written in an original script, Ogham, but Latin alphabet came to be used for all Celtic languages. Welsh has had a continuous literary tradition from the 6th century AD.
Living languages
SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of which four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are: the Goidelic languages (
Irish language and
Scottish Gaelic, both descended from
Middle Irish) and the Brittonic languages (
Welsh language and
Breton language, descended from
Common Brittonic).
The other two,
Cornish language (Brittonic) and
Manx language (Goidelic), died out in modern times
with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and
Ned Maddrell respectively. Revitalisation movements in the 2000s led to the re-emergence of native speakers of both languages following their adoption by adults and children.
By the start of the 21st century, there were roughly one million speakers of Celtic languages,
increasing to 1.4 million speakers by 2010.
Demographics
|
| Gaeilge / Gaedhilg / Gaelainn / Gaeilig / Gaeilic | Goidelic | 40,000–80,000
In the Republic of Ireland, 73,803 people use Irish daily outside the education system.
Canada: 530 (2021) | Total speakers: 2,024,095
Republic of Ireland: 1,774,437 (2011)
1,873,997 (of whom 788,927 (14.6% of the population) could speak it "well")(2022)
United States: 18,000
Canada: 5,355 (2021) | Gaeltacht of Ireland | italic=no | Dublin: 184,140
Galway: 37,614
Cork: 57,318
Belfast: 14,086 |
| Brittonic | 538,000 (17.8% of the population of Wales) claim that they "can speak Welsh" (2021) | Total speakers: ≈ 947,700 (2011)
Wales: 788,000 speakers (26.7% of the population)[Office for National Statistics 2011 2011-census-key-statistics-for-wales]
England: 150,000
Chubut Province, Argentina: 5,000
United States: 2,500
Canada: 2,200 | Wales | Welsh Language Commissioner
The Welsh Government
(previously the Welsh Language Board, Bwrdd yr Iaith Gymraeg) | Cardiff: 54,504
Swansea: 45,085
Newport: 18,490
Bangor: 7,190 |
| 206,000 | 356,000[ Données clés sur breton, Ofis ar Brezhoneg ] | italic=no | Rennes: 7,000
Brest: 40,000
Nantes: 4,000 |
| Goidelic | Scotland: 57,375 (2011)[ 2011 Scotland Census , Table QS211SC.]
Canada: 385 (2021) | Scotland:
87,056 (2011)
130,156 (2022)
Canada: 2,170 (of whom 630 in Nova Scotia) (2021) | italic=no | Glasgow: 5,726
Edinburgh: 3,220
Aberdeen: 1,397 |
| Brittonic | 2,000[Around 2,000 fluent speakers. ] | Akademi Kernewek
Cornish Language Partnership (Keskowethyans an Taves Kernewek) | Truro: 118 |
| Goidelic | 100+, | 2,223 have some skills in Manx, of whom 2,023 could speak it (2021) | Douglas: 507 |
Mixed languages
Classification
, where Celtic languages are spoken today, or were spoken into the modern era:
]]
Celtic is divided into various branches:
-
Lepontic, the oldest attested Celtic language (from the 6th century BC).
[MORANDI 2004, pp. 702–703, n. 277]
-
Celtiberian, also called Eastern or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic, spoken in the ancient Iberian Peninsula, in the eastern part of Old Castile and south of Aragon. Modern provinces: Segovia, Burgos, Soria, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Zaragoza and Teruel. The relationship of Celtiberian with Gallaecian, in northwest Iberia, is uncertain.
[Villar F., B. M. Prósper. (2005). Vascos, Celtas e Indoeuropeos: genes y lenguas. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. pgs. 333–350. .]
-
Gallaecian, also known as Western or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic, anciently spoken in the northwest of the peninsula (modern Northern Portugal, and the Spanish regions of Galicia, Asturias and northwestern Castile and León).
["In the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and more specifically between the west and north Atlantic coasts and an imaginary line running north-south and linking Oviedo and Merida, there is a corpus of Latin inscriptions with particular characteristics of its own. This corpus contains some linguistic features that are clearly Celtic and others that in our opinion are not Celtic. The former we shall group, for the moment, under the label northwestern Hispano-Celtic. The latter are the same features found in well-documented contemporary inscriptions in the region occupied by the Lusitanians, and therefore belonging to the variety known as LUSITANIAN, or more broadly as GALLO-LUSITANIAN. As we have already said, we do not consider this variety to belong to the Celtic language family." Jordán Colera 2007: p.750]
-
Gaulish languages, including Galatian and possibly Noric language. These were once spoken in a wide arc from Belgium to modern-day Turkey. They are now all extinct.
-
Brittonic, spoken in Great Britain and Brittany. Including the living languages Breton language, Cornish language, and Welsh language, and the lost Cumbric and Pictish language, though Pictish may be a sister language rather than a daughter of Common Brittonic.
[Kenneth H. Jackson suggested that there were two Pictish languages, a pre-Indo-European one and a Pritennic Celtic one. This has been challenged by some scholars. See Katherine Forsyth's "Language in Pictland: the case against 'non-Indo-European Pictish . See also the introduction by James & Taylor to the "Index of Celtic and Other Elements in W. J. Watson's 'The History of the Celtic Place-names of Scotland . Compare also the treatment of Pictish in Price's The Languages of Britain (1984) with his Languages in Britain & Ireland (2000).] Before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century, there may have been a Brittonic language there. The theory of a Brittonic Ivernic language predating Goidelic speech in Ireland has been suggested, but is not widely accepted.
-
Goidelic, including the extant Irish language, Manx language, and Scottish Gaelic.
Continental/Insular Celtic and P/Q-Celtic hypotheses
Scholarly handling of Celtic languages has been contentious owing to scarceness of primary source data. Some scholars (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) posit that the primary distinction is between Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brittonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages.
Other scholars (such as Schmidt 1988) make the primary distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages based on the replacement of initial Q by initial P in some words. Most of the Gallic and Brittonic languages are P-Celtic, while the Goidelic and Hispano-Celtic (or Celtiberian) languages are Q-Celtic. The P-Celtic languages (also called Gallo-Brittonic) are sometimes seen (for example by Koch 1992) as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. According to Ranko Matasović in the introduction to his 2009
Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic: "Celtiberian ... is almost certainly an independent branch on the Celtic genealogical tree, one that became separated from the others very early."
The Breton language is Brittonic, not Gaulish; though there may be some input from the latter,
The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray & Atkinson
There are legitimate scholarly arguments for both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. However, since the 1970s the division into Insular and Continental Celtic has become the more widely held view (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995), but in the middle of the 1980s, the P-/Q-Celtic theory found new supporters (Lambert 1994), because of the inscription on the Larzac piece of lead (1983), the analysis of which reveals another common phonetical innovation -nm- > -nu (Gaelic ainm / Gaulish anuana, Old Welsh enuein 'names'), that is less accidental than only one. The discovery of a third common innovation would allow the specialists to come to the conclusion of a Gallo-Brittonic dialect (Schmidt 1986; Fleuriot 1986).
The interpretation of this and further evidence is still quite contested, and the main argument for Insular Celtic is connected with the development of verbal morphology and the syntax in Irish and British Celtic, which Schumacher regards as convincing, while he considers the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic division unimportant and treats Gallo-Brittonic as an outdated theory.
When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendants, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brittonic".
How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used:
" Insular Celtic hypothesis"
-
Proto-Celtic
-
Continental Celtic
-
Insular Celtic
" P/Q-Celtic hypothesis"
-
Proto-Celtic
-
Q-Celtic
-
Celtiberian
-
Gallaecian
-
Goidelic
-
P-Celtic
Eska (2010)
Eska
[Joseph F. Eska (2010) "The emergence of the Celtic languages". In Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller (eds.), The Celtic languages. Routledge. ] evaluates the evidence as supporting the following tree, based on shared innovations, though it is not always clear that the innovations are not
. It seems likely that Celtiberian split off before Cisalpine Celtic, but the evidence for this is not robust. On the other hand, the unity of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic is reasonably secure. Schumacher (2004, p. 86) had already cautiously considered this grouping to be likely genetic, based, among others, on the shared reformation of the sentence-initial, fully inflecting relative pronoun
*i̯os, *i̯ā, *i̯od into an uninflected enclitic particle. Eska sees Cisalpine Gaulish as more akin to Lepontic than to Transalpine Gaulish.
-
Celtic
-
Hispano-Celtic
-
Nuclear Celtic
-
Cisalpine Celtic: Lepontic → Cisalpine Gaulish
-
Core Celtic (secure)
-
Transalpine Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic")
-
Insular Celtic
Eska considers a division of Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic into Transalpine and Insular Celtic to be most probable because of the greater number of innovations in Insular Celtic than in P-Celtic, and because the Insular Celtic languages were probably not in great enough contact for those innovations to spread as part of a sprachbund. However, if they have another explanation (such as an SOV substratum language), then it is possible that P-Celtic is a valid clade, and the top branching would be:
-
Core Celtic (P-Celtic hypothesis)
-
Goidelic
-
Gallo-Brittonic
-
Transalpine Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic")
-
Brittonic
Italo-Celtic
Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the
Italic languages in a common
Italo-Celtic subfamily. This hypothesis fell somewhat out of favour after reexamination by American linguist
Calvert Watkins in 1966.
[Calvert Watkins, "Italo-Celtic Revisited". In: ] Irrespectively, some scholars such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor and many others have argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic grouping in 21st century theses.
Characteristics
Although there are many differences between the individual Celtic languages, they do show many family resemblances.
-
consonant mutations (Insular Celtic only)
-
inflected prepositions (Insular Celtic only)
-
two grammatical genders (modern Insular Celtic only; Old Irish and the Continental languages had three genders, although Gaulish may have merged the neuter and masculine in its later forms)
-
a vigesimal number system (counting by twenties)
-
Cornish hwetek ha dew ugens "fifty-six" (literally "sixteen and two twenty")
-
verb–subject–object (VSO) word order (probably Insular Celtic only)
-
an interplay between the subjunctive, future, imperfect, and habitual, to the point that some tenses and moods have ousted others
-
an impersonal or autonomous verb form serving as a passive voice or intransitive
-
Welsh dysgaf "I teach" vs. dysgir "is taught, one teaches"
-
Irish múinim "I teach" vs. múintear "is taught, one teaches"
-
no , replaced by a quasi-nominal verb form called the verbal noun or verbnoun
-
frequent use of vowel mutation as a morphological device, e.g. formation of plurals, verbal stems, etc.
-
use of preverbal particles to signal either subordination or illocutionary force of the following clause
-
mutation-distinguished subordinators/relativisers
-
particles for negation, interrogation, and occasionally for affirmative declarations
-
pronouns positioned between particles and verbs
-
lack of simple verb for the imperfective "have" process, with possession conveyed by a composite structure, usually BE + preposition
-
Cornish Yma kath dhymm "I have a cat", literally "there is a cat to me"
-
Welsh Mae cath gyda fi "I have a cat", literally "a cat is with me"
-
Irish Tá cat agam "I have a cat", literally "there is a cat at me"
-
use of periphrasis constructions to express verbal tense, voice, or aspectual distinctions
-
distinction by function of the two versions of BE verbs traditionally labelled substantive (or existential) and copula
-
bifurcated demonstrative structure
-
suffixed pronominal supplements, called confirming or supplementary pronouns
-
use of singulars or special forms of counted nouns, and use of a singulative suffix to make singular forms from plurals, where older singulars have disappeared
Examples:
- (Literal translation) Do not bother with son the beggar's and not will-bother son the beggar's with-you.
- * bhacaigh is the genitive of bacach. The igh the result of affection; the is the lenited form of .
- * leat is the second person singular inflected form of the preposition le.
- * The order is verb–subject–object (VSO) in the second half. Compare this to English or French (and possibly Continental Celtic) which are normally subject–verb–object in word order.
- (Literally) four on fifteen and four twenties
- * bymtheg is a mutated form of pymtheg, which is pump ("five") plus deg ("ten"). Likewise, phedwar is a mutated form of pedwar.
- * The multiples of ten are deg, ugain, deg ar hugain, deugain, hanner cant, trigain, deg a thrigain, pedwar ugain, deg a phedwar ugain, cant.
Comparison table
The lexical similarity between the different Celtic languages is apparent in their
Swadesh list, especially in terms of actual pronunciation. Moreover, the
phonetics differences between languages are often the product of regular
sound change (i.e.
lenition of into or Ø).
The table below has words in the modern languages that were inherited direct from Proto-Celtic, as well as a few old loanword from Latin that made their way into all the daughter languages. There is often a closer match between Welsh, Breton and Cornish on the one hand and Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx on the other. For a fuller list of comparisons, see the .
|
|
| beach | seillean | shellan |
| mór | mòr | mooar |
madra, gadhar
(cú "hound") | cù | coo |
| iasc | iasg | yeeast |
| lán | làn | lane |
| gabhar | gobhar | goayr |
| teach, tigh | taigh | thie |
| liopa, beol | bile | meill |
| inbhear | inbhir | inver |
| ceathair, cheithre | ceithir | kiare |
| oíche | oidhche | oie |
| uimhir | àireamh | earroo |
| trí | trì | tree |
| bainne, leacht | bainne, leachd | bainney |
| tú, thú | thu, tu | oo |
| réalta | reult, rionnag | rollage |
| inniu | an-diugh | jiu |
| fiacail, déad | fiacaill, deud | feeackle |
| tit(im) | tuit(eam) | tuitt(ym) |
| caith(eamh) tobac | smocadh | toghtaney, smookal |
| feadáil | fead | fed |
| aimsir | aimsir | emshyr |
|
† Borrowings from Latin
Examples
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Possible members of the family
Several poorly-documented languages may have been Celtic.
-
Ancient Belgian
-
Camunic language is an extinct language spoken in the first millennium BC in the Val Camonica and Valtellina valleys of the Central Alps. It has recently been proposed that it was a Celtic language.
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Ivernic has been suggested to be Celtic by T. F. O'Rahilly,
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Ligurian, on the Northern Mediterranean Coast straddling the southeast French and northwest Italian coasts, including parts of Tuscany, Elba and Corsica. Xavier Delamarre argues that Ligurian was a Celtic language similar to Gaulish.
-
Lusitanian, spoken in the area between the Douro and Tagus rivers of western Iberia (a region straddling the present border of Portugal and Spain). Known from only five inscriptions and various place names.
[ Unity in Diversity, Volume 2: Cultural and Linguistic Markers of the Concept Editors: Sabine Asmus and Barbara Braid. Google Books.] Other scholars see greater linguistic affinities between Lusitanian, Old Gallo-Italic (particularly with Ligurian) and Old European.[ The inscription of Cabeço das Fráguas revisited. Lusitanian and Alteuropäisch populations in the West of the Iberian Peninsula Transactions of the Philological Society vol. 97 (2003)] Prominent modern linguists such as Ellis Evans, believe Gallaecian-Lusitanian was in fact one same language (not separate languages) of the "P" Celtic variant.
-
Rhaetic, spoken in central Switzerland, Tyrol in Austria, and the Alpine regions of northeast Italy. Documented by a limited number of short inscriptions (found through Northern Italy and Western Austria) in two variants of the Etruscan alphabet. Its linguistic categorisation is not clearly established, and it presents a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements. Howard Hayes Scullard argues that Rhaetian was also a Celtic language.
-
Tartessian, spoken in the southwest of the Iberia Peninsula (mainly southern Portugal and southwest Spain).
See also
Notes
-
Ball, Martin J. & James Fife (ed.) (1993). The Celtic Languages. London: Routledge. .
-
Borsley, Robert D. & Ian Roberts (ed.) (1996). The Syntax of the Celtic Languages: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
-
-
Celtic Linguistics, 1700–1850 (2000). London; New York: Routledge. 8 vols comprising 15 texts originally published between 1706 and 1844.
-
-
Lewis, Henry & Holger Pedersen (1989). A Concise Comparative Celtic Grammar. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. .
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Further reading
External links
