Prehistory

Human settlement in Scotland began early for so northerly a territory. But although we may be able to say a great deal about the ecology and material conditions these prehistoric people encountered (including even domestic culture in sites such as Skara Brae in Orkney), we have little sense of what languages these early settlers spoke. No written documents (with the exception, perhaps, of some Pictish symbol stones (for a recent treatment, see Noble et al. 2019); these may not be fully linguistic, however) emanated from Scotland until the Early Historical period, beginning somewhat after the end of Roman rule in southern Britain. We are therefore to a considerable extent reliant up to that point on sources external to Scotland (indeed, Britain) to exemplify and analyse the country's earliest linguistic history. But the whole of the Atlantic Archipelago was only briefly and occasionally mentioned by the literate observers of the Mediterranean world; even then discussion was normally fragmentary and second-hand. Given its greater distance from major ‘civilised’ population centres, this was even more so with what became Scotland. All too often we are faced, therefore, with conjecture, regularly based upon evidence from placenames recorded now or in historical documents, sometimes triangulated with these contemporary external discussions.

Although some scholars make a case for non-Celtic (or even pre-Indo-European) place-names, such as, perhaps, Tay, being among those recorded before the Christianisation of northern Britain, the overwhelming majority are undoubtedly Celtic in origin, running from the orc- in what is now Orkney, possibly referring to the boar, a sacred animal in ‘Celtic’ Europe, through the Dee, found at least twice in Scotland as a river name, the river in the north-east originally recorded as deva ‘goddess’. Similar distribution patterns can still be observed across Scotland, albeit overlaid to a considerable extent by Gaelic and Germanic (both West and North) place-names, most of which date from the historical period. We therefore have some limited evidence, albeit contentious, for the prehistoric linguistic ecology of the country.