Insular Celts

The Insular Celts are the speakers of Insular Celtic languages; they comprise all living Celtic languages, and all of the modern Celtic nations, but the term is mostly used in reference to the peoples of the British Iron Age prior to the Roman conquest. According to older theories, the Insular Celtic languages spread throughout the British Isles in the course of the British Iron Age. But this is now doubted by most scholars, who see the languages as already present, and possibly dominant, in the British Bronze Age, and perhaps earlier. At some point the languages split into the two major groups, Goidelic in Ireland and Brittonic in Great Britain, corresponding to the population groups of the Goidels (Gaels) on one hand and the Britons and the Picts on the other. The extent to which these peoples ever formed a distinct ethnic group remains unclear. While there are early records of the Continental Celtic languages, allowing a comparatively confident reconstruction of Proto-Celtic, Insular Celtic languages become attested in connected texts only at the end of the Dark Ages, from around the 7th century AD, by which time they had become mutually incomprehensible.

Celts

The Celts (/ˈkɛlts/, occasionally /ˈsɛlts/, see pronunciation of Celtic) were people in Iron Age and Medieval Europe who spoke Celtic languages and had cultural similarities, although the relationship between ethnic, linguistic and cultural factors in the Celtic world remains uncertain and controversial. The exact geographic spread of the ancient Celts is also disputed; in particular, the ways in which the Iron Age inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland should be regarded as Celts has become a subject of controversy.

The history of pre-Celtic Europe remains very uncertain. According to one theory, the common root of the Celtic languages, a language known as Proto-Celtic, arose in the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of Central Europe, which flourished from around 1200 BC. In addition, according to a theory proposed in the 19th century, the first people to adopt cultural characteristics regarded as Celtic were the people of the Iron Age Hallstatt culture in central Europe (c. 800–450 BC), named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria. Thus this area is sometimes called the 'Celtic homeland'. By or during the later La Tène period (c. 450 BC up to the Roman conquest), this Celtic culture was supposed to have expanded by diffusion or migration to the British Isles (Insular Celts), France and The Low Countries (Gauls), Bohemia, Poland and much of Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula (Celtiberians, Celtici, Lusitanians and Gallaeci) and northern Italy (Golaseccans and Cisalpine Gauls) and, following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC, as far east as central Anatolia (Galatians).

Names of the Celts

The various names used since classical times for the people known today as the Celts are of disparate origins.

The name Κελτοί Keltoi and Celtae is used in Greek and Latin, respectively, as the name of a people of the La Tène horizon in the region of the upper Rhine and Danube during the 6th to 1st centuries BC in Greco-Roman ethnography. The etymology of this name and that of the Gauls Γαλάται Galatai / Galli is of uncertain etymology. The name of the Welsh, on the other hand, is taken from the designator used by the Germanic peoples for Celtic- and Latin-speaking peoples, *walha-, meaning foreign.

The linguistic sense of the name Celts, grouping all speakers of Celtic languages, is modern. In particular, aside from a 1st-century literary genealogy of Celtus the grandson of Bretannos by Heracles, there is no record of the term "Celt" being used in connection with the Insular Celts, the inhabitants of the British Isles during the Iron Age, prior to the 17th century.

Celts, Celtae

Celts (modern)

A modern Celtic identity emerged in Western Europe following the identification of the native peoples of the Atlantic fringe as Celts by Edward Lhuyd in the 18th century. Lhuyd and others equated the Celts described by Greco-Roman writers with the ancestors of the pre-Roman peoples of France, Great Britain and Ireland. The Irish and ancient British languages were thus Celtic languages. The descendants of these languages were the Brittonic (Breton, Cornish and Welsh variants) and Gaelic (Irish, Manx and Scottish variants) languages. These peoples were therefore modern Celts. Attempts were made to link their distinctive cultures to those of the ancient Celtic peoples.

The concept of modern Celtic identity evolved during the course of the 19th-century into the Celtic Revival. By the late 19th century it often took the form of ethnic nationalism, particularly within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, where the Irish Home Rule Movement resulted in the secession of the Irish Free State in 1922. There were also significant Welsh, Scottish and Breton nationalist movements, giving rise to the concept of Celtic nations. After World War II, the focus of the Celticity movement shifted to linguistic revival and protectionism, e.g. with the foundation of the Celtic League in 1961, dedicated to preserving the surviving Celtic languages.