Celtic languages are most commonly spoken on the western fringe of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the peninsula of Brittany in France, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man, and can be found spoken on Cape Breton Island (Canada) and in Patagonia (Argentina and Chile). Some people speak Celtic languages in the other Celtic diaspora areas of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In all these areas, the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities though there are continuing efforts to support them and increase speaker numbers.

During the 1st millennium BCE, they were spoken across Europe, from the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea, up the Rhine and down the Danube to the Black Sea and the Upper Balkan Peninsula, and into Asia Minor (Galatia). The spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. Celtic languages were spoken in Australia before federation in 1901.

Living languages

The other two, Cornish and Manx, were spoken into modern times but later died as spoken community languages. For both these languages, however, revitalization movements have led to the adoption of these languages by adults and children and produced some native speakers.

Taken together, there were roughly one million native speakers of Celtic languages as of the 2000s.

Demographics

Classifications

Gaulish and its close relatives Lepontic, Noric, and Galatian. Lepontic, the oldest attested Celtic language (from the 6th century BC), is treated as a primary branch by some researchers, including Schumacher, perhaps even the first language to diverge from Proto-Celtic. These languages were once spoken in a wide arc from France to Turkey and from Belgium to northern Italy. They are now all extinct. Hispano-Celtic; also extinct:

Scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to lack of much primary source data. Some scholars (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) distinguish Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the Goidelic and Brythonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars (such as Schmidt 1988) distinguish between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, putting most of the Gaulish and Brythonic languages in the former group and the Goidelic and Celtiberian languages in the latter. The P-Celtic languages (also called Gallo-Brittonic) are sometimes seen (for example by Koch 1992) as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages.

The Breton language is Brythonic, not Gaulish, though there may be some input from the latter. When the Anglo-Saxons moved into Great Britain, several waves of the native Britons crossed the English Channel and landed in Brittany. They brought with them their Brythonic language, which evolved into Breton – still partially intelligible by modern Welsh and Cornish speakers.

In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic. It has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brythonic languages (see Schmidt). In the Insular/Continental classification schema, the split of the former into Gaelic and Brythonic is seen as being late.

The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray and Atkinson but, because of estimation uncertainty, it could be any time between 1200 and 800 BC. However, they only considered Gaelic and Brythonic. The controversial paper by Forster and Toth included Gaulish and put the break-up much earlier at 3200 BC ± 1500 years. They support the Insular Celtic hypothesis. The early Celts were commonly associated with the archaeological Urnfield culture, the Hallstatt culture, and the La Tène culture, though the earlier assumption of association between language and culture is now considered to be less strong.

There are two main competing schemata of categorization. The older schema, argued for by Schmidt (1988) among others, links Gaulish with Brythonic in a P-Celtic node, originally leaving just Goidelic as Q-Celtic. The difference between P and Q languages is the treatment of Proto-Celtic *''kʷ'', which became *''p'' in the P-Celtic languages but *''k'' in Goidelic. An example is the Proto-Celtic verb root *''kʷrin-'' "to buy", which became ''pryn-'' in Welsh but ''cren-'' in Old Irish. However, a classification based on a single feature is seen as risky by its critics, particularly as the sound change occurs in other language groups (especially the Osco-Umbrian and Greek).

The other schema, defended for example by McCone (1996), links Goidelic and Brythonic together as an Insular Celtic branch, while Gaulish and Celtiberian are referred to as Continental Celtic. According to this theory, the "P-Celtic" sound change of to occurred independently or areally. The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis point to other shared innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected prepositions, VSO word order, and the lenition of intervocalic to , a nasalised voiced bilabial fricative (an extremely rare sound). There is, however, no assumption that the Continental Celtic languages descend from a common "Proto-Continental Celtic" ancestor. Rather, in the Insular/Continental schema, Celtiberian is usually considered to be the first branch to split from Proto-Celtic, and the remaining group would later have split into Gaulish and Insular Celtic.

There are legitimate scholarly arguments in favour of both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. However, since the 1970s the division into Insular and Continental Celtic has become the more widely held view (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995), but in the middle of the 1980s, the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic hypothesis found new supporters (Lambert 1994), because of the inscription on the Larzac piece of lead (1983), the analysis of which reveals another common phonetical innovation ''-nm-'' > ''-nu'' (Gaelic ''ainm'' / Gaulish ''anuana'', Old Welsh ''enuein'' "names"), that is less accidental than only one. The discovery of a third common innovation, would allow the specialists to come to the conclusion of a Gallo-Brythonic dialect (Schmidt 1986; Fleuriot 1986).

It must be noted that the interpretation of this and further evidence is still quite contested, and the main argument in favour of Insular Celtic is connected with the development of the verbal morphology and the syntax in Irish and British Celtic, which Schumacher regards as convincing, while he considers the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic division unimportant and treats Gallo-Brittonic as an outdated hypothesis.

When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendants, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brythonic".

Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily, a hypothesis that is now largely discarded, in favour of the assumption of language contact between pre-Celtic and pre-Italic communities.

How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used: Insular/Continental hypothesis

Characteristics of Celtic languages

Examples: (Irish) ''Ná bac le mac an bhacaigh is ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat.'' (Literal translation) Don't bother with son the beggar's and not will-bother son the beggar's with-you.

(Welsh) ''pedwar ar bymtheg a phedwar ugain'' (literally) four on fifteen and four twenties

Comparison table

Examples

''All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.''

Notes

See also

References

External links

Category:Indo-European languages