Scottish Gaelic ( ), is a Celtic language native to Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language placenames.
Origins to zenith
The traditional view is that Gaelic was brought to Scotland, probably in the 4th-5th centuries, by settlers from Ireland who founded the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata on Scotland's west coast in present-day Argyll. This view is based mostly on early medieval writings such as the 7th century Irish Senchus fer n-Alban or the 8th century Anglo-Saxon Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.. Close sea communications with Ireland and the substantial land barrier of the Scottish Highlands to the east contributed to Proto-Celtic in Dál Riata developing into Gaelic rather than into Pictish or Cumbric as it did east and south of the Highlands.
A revisionist theory popularized by the archeologist Ewan Campbell among others contends that Goidelic (the predecessor language of Scottish Gaelic) is instead native to Argyll as far back as the Iron Age. Based on archeological, historical, and linguistic evidence, he contends that Brittonic was never spoken in Argyll and that Dál Riata was based on a pre-existing Goidelic society that included lands on both sides of the North Channel. He argues that medieval accounts of an Irish conquest of Argyll were dynastic propaganda, an "origin legend" invented to bolster the ruling dynasty's claims to legitimacy.
Gaelic in Scotland was mostly confined to until the 8th century, when it began expanding into Pictish areas north of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. This was spurred by the intermarriage of Gaelic and Pictish aristocratic families, the political merger of the two kingdoms in the early 9th century, and the common threat of attack by Norse invaders. By 900, Pictish appears to have become extinct, completely replaced by Gaelic.Clarkson, pp. 238–244 An exception might be made for the Northern Isles, however, where Pictish was more likely supplanted by Norse rather than by Gaelic. During the reign of (900–943), outsiders began to refer to the region as the kingdom of Alba rather than as the kingdom of the Picts, but we do not know whether this was because a new kingdom was established or because "Alba" was simply a closer approximation of the Pictish name for the Picts. However, though the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly, a process of Gaelicisation (which may have begun generations earlier) was clearly under way during the reigns of and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and Pictish identity was forgotten.Broun, "Dunkeld", Broun, "National Identity", Forsyth, "Scotland to 1100", pp. 28–32, Woolf, "Constantine II"; cf. Bannerman, "Scottish Takeover", passim, representing the "traditional" view.
By the 10th century, Gaelic had become the dominant language throughout northern and western Scotland, the Gaelo-Pictic Kingdom of Alba. Its spread to southern Scotland was less even and less complete. Place name analysis suggests dense usage of Gaelic in Galloway and adjoining areas to the north and west, as well as in West Lothian and parts of western Midlothian. Much less dense usage is suggested for north Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, the Clyde Valley and eastern Dumfriesshire. This latter region is roughly the area of the old Kingdom of Strathclyde, which was annexed by the Kingdom of Alba in the early 11th century, but its inhabitants may have continued to speak Cumbric as late as the 12th century. In south-eastern Scotland, there is no evidence that Gaelic was ever widely spoken: the area shifted from Cumbric to Old English during its long incorporation into the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria. After the Lothians were conquered by Malcolm II at the Battle of Carham in 1018, the elites spoke Gaelic and continued to do so until about 1200. However commoners retained Old English.
With the incorporation of Strathclyde and the Lothians, Gaelic reached its social, cultural, political, and geographic zenith in Scotland. The language in Scotland had been developing independently of the language in Ireland at least as early as its crossing the ("Spine" or "ridge of Britain", its location is not known) into Pictland. The entire country was for the first time being referred to in Latin as , and Gaelic was recognised as the .Clarkson, p. 276Colm Ó Baoill, "The Scots–Gaelic interface", in Charles Jones, ed., The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, p. 554
The Eclipse of Gaelic in Scotland
Many historians mark the reign of King Malcolm Canmore (Malcolm III) as the beginning of Gaelic's eclipse in Scotland.Withers, p. 19 In either 1068 or 1070, the king married the exiled Princess Margaret of Wessex. This future Saint Margaret of Scotland was a member of the royal House of Wessex which had occupied the English throne from its founding until the Norman Conquest. Margaret was thoroughly Anglo-Saxon and is often credited (or blamed) for taking the first significant steps in anglicizing the Scottish court. She spoke no Gaelic, gave her children Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic names, and brought many English bishops, priests, and monastics to Scotland. Her family also served as a conduit for the entry of English nobles into Scotland. When both Malcolm and Margaret died just days apart in 1093, the Gaelic aristocracy rejected their anglicized sons and instead backed Malcolm's brother Donald as the next King of Scots. Known as Donald Bàn (“the Fair”), the new king had lived 17 years in Ireland as a young man and his power base as an adult was in the thoroughly Gaelic west of Scotland. Upon Donald's ascension to the throne, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "the Scots drove out all the English who had been with King Malcolm".Magnusson, p. 68. Malcolm's sons fled to the English court, but in 1097 returned with an Anglo-Norman army backing them. Donald was overthrown, blinded, and imprisoned for the remaining two years of his life. Because of the strong English ties of Malcolm's sons Edgar, Alexander, and David – each of whom became king in turn – Donald Bàn is sometimes called the ‘last Celtic King of Scotland’.MacArthur, Margaret (1874). History of Scotland. New York: Henry Holt and Company. p. 33. He was the last Scottish monarch to be buried on Iona, the one-time center of the Scottish Gaelic Church and the traditional burial place of the Gaelic Kings of Dàl Riada and the Kingdom of Alba.
During the reigns of the sons of Malcolm Canmore (1097-1153), Anglo-Norman names and practices spread throughout Scotland south of the Forth-Clyde line and along the northeastern coastal plain as far north as Moray. Norman French became dominant among the new feudal aristocracy, especially in southern Scotland, and completely displaced Gaelic at court. The establishment of royal burghs throughout the same area, particularly under David I, attracted large numbers of foreigners speaking ‘Inglis’, the language of the merchant class. This was the beginning of Gaelic's status as a predominantly rural language in Scotland.Withers, pp. 19-23 The country experienced significant population growth in the 1100s and 1200s in the expanding burghs and their nearby agricultural districts.Whyte, p. 57 These economic developments helped spread English as well.
Gaelic still retained some of its old prestige in medieval Scotland. At the coronation of King Alexander III in 1249, a traditional seanchaidh or story-teller recited the king's full genealogy in Gaelic all the way back to Fergus Mòr, the mythical progenitor of the Scots in Dál Riata, “in accordance with the custom which had grown up in the kingdom from antiquity right up to that time”.Walter Bower, Scotichronicon; http://digital.nls.uk/scotlandspages/timeline/1249.html Clan chiefs in the northern and western parts of Scotland continued to support Gaelic bards who remained a central feature of court life there. The semi-independent Lordship of the Isles in the Hebrides and western coastal mainland remained thoroughly Gaelic since the language's recovery there in the 12th century, providing a political foundation for cultural prestige down to the end of the 15th century.Ó Baoill, p. 553-6
That being said, it seems clear that Gaelic had ceased to be the language of Scotland by 1400 at the latest. It disappeared from the central lowlands by about 1350 and from the eastern coastal lowlands north of the Mounth not long afterwards. By the mid-1300s English in its Scottish form – what eventually came to be called Scots—emerged as the official language of government and law.Withers, 1988, p. 139 Scotland's emergent nationalism in the era following the conclusion of the Wars of Scottish Independence was organized around and through Scots as well. For example, the nation's great patriotic literature including John Barbour's The Brus (1375) and Blind Harry's The Wallace (before 1488) was written in Scots, not Gaelic. It was around this time that the very name of Gaelic began to change. Down through the 14th century, Gaelic was referred to in English as Scottis, i.e. the language of the Scots. By the end of the 15th century, however, the Scottish dialect of Northern English had absorbed that designation. English/Scots speakers referred to Gaelic instead as Yrisch or Erse, i.e. Irish.Withers, pp. 19–23. King James IV (died 1513) thought Gaelic important enough to learn and speak. However, he was the last Scottish monarch to do so.
Persecution, Retreat, and Dispersal
The historian Charles Withers argues that the geographic retreat of Gaelic in Scotland is the context for the establishment of the country's signature divide between the 'Lowlands' and the 'Highlands'. Before the late 1300s, there is no evidence that anyone thought of Scotland as divided into two geographic parts. From the 1380s onward, however, the country was increasingly understood to be the union of two distinct spaces and peoples: one inhabiting the low-lying south and the eastern seaboard speaking English/Scots; another inhabiting the mountainous north and west as well as the islands speaking Gaelic.Withers, 1984, pp. 22–27 What Gaelic remained in the Lowlands in the sixteenth century had disappeared completely by the eighteenth. Gaelic vanished from Fife by 1600, eastern Caithness by 1650, and Galloway by 1700.Withers, pp. 39–41, 63 At the same time the Scottish crown entered a determined period of state-building in which cultural, religious and linguistic unity was of the highest value. As Lowland Scots sought increasingly to 'civilise' their Highland brethren, Gaelic became an object of particular persecution. Combined with larger economic and social changes, Gaelic began a long and nearly terminal retreat.