Gaelic, the original – and still surviving – language of the Scots

The origins of the Gaelic language, and the Kingdom of the Scots, are generally taken to lie in the movement of people from the north-east of Ireland in the fifth century AD and the relocation of the Kingdom of Dal Riata from present-day County Antrim into western Argyllshire in this period. Whether a Gaelic or closely related language was spoken in Scotland earlier than this is debatable. Such was the view of nineteenth-century writers such as Logan (1831, 1876, 1976:46–7), who certainly thought so – as also did Skene (1860–90, v1: 68 – cited in Watson 1926:45). Scholarship in the twentieth century (e.g. Bannerman 1974) regarded Gaelic as essentially arriving with the Dalriadan settlement, although the problem has been more recently debated (e.g. Forsyth 1997, Campbell 2001).

From the reign of Malcolm III ‘Ceannmòr’ (1054–96), Gaelic lost its pre-eminence at court and amongst the aristocracy to Norman French, and subsequently in the Lowlands through the establishment of English-speaking burghs in eastern and central Scotland to Scots. In the northern Highlands and Islands, Norse settlement brought the Norn language which survived through the Middle Ages in Caithness and the Northern Isles. By the eighteenth century Norn became extinct, but has influenced both the northern dialects and literary Scots, as well as Gaelic (Geipel 1971:74–5).