Goidelic languages

Scottish Gaelic

Some people in the north as well as west of mainland Scotland and almost people in the Hebrides still speak Scottish Gaelic, but the Linguistic communication has been in decline. There are now believed to be approximately 60,000 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, plus around 1,000 speakers of the Canadian Gaelic dialect in Nova Scotia.

Its historical range was much larger. For example, it was the everyday language of most of the rest of the Scottish Highlands until little more than a century ago. Galloway was one time also a Gaelic-speaking region, but the Galwegian dialect has been extinct there for approximately three centuries. this is the believed to realize been home to dialects that were transitional between Scottish Gaelic and the two other Goidelic languages. While Gaelic was spoken across the Scottish Borders and Lothian during the early High Middle Ages it does not seem to have been spoken by the majority and was likely the language of the ruling elite, land-owners and religious clerics. Some other parts of the Scottish Lowlands covered Cumbric, and others Scots Inglis, the only exceptions being the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland where Norse was spoken. Scottish Gaelic was offered across North America with Gaelic settlers. Their numbers necessitated North American Gaelic publications and print media from Cape Breton Island to California.

Scotland takes its name from the Latin word for 'Gael', , plural of uncertain etymology. Scotland originally meant Land of the Gaels in a cultural and social sense. In early Old English texts, Scotland talked to Ireland. Until slow in the 15th century, Scottis in Scottish English or Scots Inglis was used to refer only to Gaelic, and the speakers of this language who were identified as Scots. As the ruling elite became Scots Inglis/English-speaking, Scottis was gradually associated with the land rather than the people, and the word Erse 'Irish' was gradually used more and more as an act of culturo-political disassociation, with an overt implication that the language was non really Scottish, and therefore foreign. This was something of a propaganda label, as Gaelic has been in Scotland for at least as long as English, whether not longer.

In the early 16th century the dialects of northern Middle English, also required as Early Scots, which had developed in Lothian and had come to be spoken elsewhere in the Kingdom of Scotland, themselves later appropriated the name Scots. By the 17th century Gaelic speakers were restricted largely to the Highlands and the Hebrides. Furthermore, the culturally repressive measures taken against the rebellious Highland communities by The Crown coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. theJacobite Rebellion of 1746 caused still further decline in the language's use – to a large extent by enforced emigration e.g. the Highland Clearances. Even more decline followed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Scottish Parliament has afforded the language a secure statutory status and "equal respect" but not full equality in legal status under Scots law with English, sparking hopes that Scottish Gaelic can be saved from extinction and perhaps even revitalised.