Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Of these, 63.3% said that they had a full range of language skills: speaking, understanding, reading and writing Gaelic. 40.2% of Scotland's Gaelic speakers said that they used Gaelic at home. To put this in context, the most common language spoken at home in Scotland after English and Scots is Polish, with about 1.1% of the population, or ...
The two comparatively "major" Gaelic nations in the modern era are Ireland (which had 71,968 "daily" Irish speakers and 1,873,997 people claiming "some ability of Irish", as of the 2022 census) [1] and Scotland (58,552 fluent "Gaelic speakers" and 92,400 with "some Gaelic language ability" in the 2001 census). [56]
The Goidelic language currently spoken in Scotland is Scottish Gaelic. It is widely spoken in the Outer Hebrides, and also in parts of the Inner Hebrides and Scottish Highlands, and by some people in other areas of Scotland. It was formerly spoken over a far wider area than today, even in the recent past, as evidenced by placenames.
Canadian Gaelic dialects of Scottish Gaelic are still spoken by Gaels in parts of Atlantic Canada, primarily on Cape Breton Island and nearby areas of Nova Scotia. In 2011, there were 1,275 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, [20] and 300 residents of the province considered a Gaelic language their "mother tongue." [21]
Map of the Gaelic-speaking world. The red area shows the maximum extent of Old Irish; the orange area shows places with Ogham inscriptions; and the green area are modern Gaelic-speaking areas. Although Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic are closely related as Goidelic (a.k.a. Gaelic) Celtic languages, they are different in
Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages , since Breton, the only living Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, is descended from the language of settlers from Britain.
Gaelic, by itself, is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic, especially in Scotland, and therefore is ambiguous.Irish and Manx are sometimes referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), but the use of the word Gaelic is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when used to denote languages, always refer to those languages.
The similar Irish language word Gaeltacht refers, however, solely to Irish-speaking areas. The term is also used to apply to areas of Nova Scotia and Glengarry County, Ontario where the distinctive Canadian dialects of Scottish Gaelic were or are still spoken.