Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic (
Gàidhlig ( listen)), sometimes also called
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 a dialect of Primitive Irish, and presumably from a dialect close to Old Irish. Kenneth Jackson (1952) defended the traditional idea of Common Gaelic common to educated writers in Ireland and Scotland until the late middle ages. Now however, some disagree with this late common picture, Wilson McLeod writes: Linguists have disagreed as to how and when Scottish Gaelic came to diverge from Irish. The once widely accepted theory of ‘Common Gaelic’ asserted that significant divergence did not begin until c. 1300 (Jackson 1951); more recently, some scholars have challenged this model, arguing that differentiation probably began as soon as Gaelic speakers began to settle in Scotland (Ó Buachalla 2002, ). The 2011 census of Scotland showed that a total of 57,375 people (1.