Scottish Gaelic ( ; endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongside both Irish and Manx, developed out of Old Irish. It became a distinct spoken language sometime in the 13th century in the Middle Irish period, although a common literary language was shared by the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland until well into the 17th century. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language place names.
In the 2011 census of Scotland, 57,375 people (1.1% of the Scottish population, three years and older) reported being able to speak Gaelic, 1,275 fewer than in 2001. The highest percentages of Gaelic speakers were in the Outer Hebrides. Nevertheless, there is a language revival, and the number of speakers of the language under age 20 increased by 0.1% between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. In the 2022 census of Scotland, it was found that 2.5% of the Scottish population had some skills in Gaelic, or 130,161 persons. Of these, 69,701 people reported speaking the language, with a further 46,404 people reporting that they understood the language, but did not speak, read, or write in it.
Outside of Scotland, a dialect known as Canadian Gaelic has been spoken in Canada since the 18th century. In the 2021 census, 2,170 Canadian residents claimed knowledge of Scottish Gaelic, a decline from 3,980 speakers in the 2016 census. There exists a particular concentration of speakers in Nova Scotia, with historic communities in other parts of North America, including North Carolina and Glengarry County, Ontario, having largely disappeared.
Scottish Gaelic is classed as an indigenous language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which the UK Government has ratified, and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 established a language-development body, . With the passing of the Scottish Languages Act 2025, Gaelic, alongside Scots, became an official language of Scotland.
Name Aside from "Scottish Gaelic", the language may also be referred to simply as "Gaelic", pronounced in English. However, "Gaelic" also refers to the Irish language () and the Manx language ().
Scottish Gaelic is distinct from Scots, the Middle English–derived language which had come to be spoken in most of the Lowlands of Scotland by the early modern era. Prior to the 15th century, this language was known as ("English") by its own speakers, with Gaelic being called ("Scottish"). Beginning in the late 15th century, it became increasingly common for such speakers to refer to Scottish Gaelic as ("Irish") and the Lowland vernacular as .Transactions of the Philological Society , 1872, page 50 Today, Scottish Gaelic is recognised as a separate language from Irish, so the word in reference to Scottish Gaelic is no longer used.
History
Origins
Based on medieval traditional accounts and the apparent evidence from linguistic geography, Gaelic has been commonly believed to have been brought to Scotland in the 4th and 5th centuries CE by settlers from Ireland who founded the Gaelic kingdom of on Scotland's west coast, in what is present-day Argyll. An alternative view has been voiced by archaeologist Ewan Campbell, who has argued that the putative migration or takeover is not reflected in archaeological or placename data (as pointed out earlier by Leslie Alcock). Campbell has also questioned the age and reliability of the medieval historical sources speaking of a conquest. Instead, he has inferred that Argyll formed part of a common Q-Celtic-speaking area with Ireland, connected rather than divided by the sea, since the Iron Age. These arguments have been opposed by some scholars defending the early dating of the traditional accounts and arguing for other interpretations of the archaeological evidence.'... and they won land among the Picts by friendly treaty or the sword' . By Cormac McSparron and Brian Williams. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 141, 145–158
Regardless of how it came to be spoken in the region, Gaelic in Scotland was mostly confined to until the eighth century, when it began expanding into Pictish areas north of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. During the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda (Constantine II, 900–943), outsiders began to refer to the region as the kingdom of Alba rather than as the kingdom of the Picts. However, though the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly, a process of Gaelicisation (which may have begun generations earlier) was clearly under way during the reigns of and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and Pictish identity was forgotten.Broun, "Dunkeld", Broun, "National Identity", Forsyth, "Scotland to 1100", pp. 28–32, Woolf, "Constantine II"; cf. Bannerman, "Scottish Takeover", passim, representing the "traditional" view. Bilingualism in Pictish and Gaelic, prior to the former's extinction, led to the presence of Pictish loanwords in Scottish Gaelic and syntactic influence which could be considered to constitute a Pictish substrate.
In 1018, after the conquest of Lothian (theretofore part of England and inhabited predominantly by speakers of Northumbrian Old English) by the Kingdom of Scotland, Gaelic reached its social, cultural, political, and geographic zenith. Colloquial speech in Scotland had been developing independently of that in Ireland since the eighth century. For the first time, the entire region of modern-day Scotland was called in Latin, and Gaelic was the .
In southern Scotland, Gaelic was strong in Galloway, adjoining areas to the north and west, West Lothian, and parts of western Midlothian. It was spoken to a lesser degree in north Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, the Clyde Valley and eastern Dumfriesshire. In south-eastern Scotland, there is no evidence that Gaelic was ever widely spoken.
Decline Many historians mark the reign of King Malcolm Canmore (Malcolm III) between 1058 and 1093 as the beginning of Gaelic's eclipse in Scotland. His wife Margaret of Wessex spoke no Gaelic, gave her children Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic names, and brought many English bishops, priests, and monastics to Scotland. During the reigns of Malcolm Canmore's sons, Edgar, Alexander I and David I (their successive reigns lasting 1097–1153), Anglo-Norman names and practices spread throughout Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde line and along the northeastern coastal plain as far north as Moray. Norman French completely displaced Gaelic at court. The establishment of royal burghs throughout the same area, particularly under David I, attracted large numbers of foreigners speaking Old English. This was the beginning of Gaelic's status as a predominantly rural language in Scotland.
Clan chiefs in the northern and western parts of Scotland continued to support Gaelic bards who remained a central feature of court life there. The semi-independent Lordship of the Isles in the Hebrides and western coastal mainland remained thoroughly Gaelic since the language's recovery there in the 12th century, providing a political foundation for cultural prestige down to the end of the 15th century.
By the mid-14th century what eventually came to be called Scots (at that time termed Inglis) emerged as the official language of government and law. Scotland's emergent nationalism in the era following the conclusion of the Wars of Scottish Independence was organized using Scots as well. For example, the nation's great patriotic literature including John Barbour's The Brus (1375) and Blind Harry's The Wallace (before 1488) was written in Scots, not Gaelic. By the end of the 15th century, English/Scots speakers referred to Gaelic instead as 'Yrisch' or 'Erse', i.e. Irish and their own language as 'Scottis'.
Modern era
A steady shift away from Scottish Gaelic continued into and through the modern era. Some of this was driven by policy decisions by government or other organisations, while some originated from social changes. In the last quarter of the 20th century, efforts began to encourage use of the language.
The Statutes of Iona, enacted by James VI in 1609, was one piece of legislation that addressed, among other things, the Gaelic language. It required the heirs of clan chiefs to be educated in lowland, Protestant, English-speaking schools. James VI took several such measures to impose his rule on the Highland and Island region. In 1616, the Privy Council proclaimed that schools teaching in English should be established. Gaelic was seen, at this time, as one of the causes of the instability of the region. It was also associated with Catholicism.
The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was founded in 1709. They met in 1716, immediately after the failed Jacobite rising of 1715, to consider the reform and civilisation of the Highlands, which they sought to achieve by teaching English and the Protestant religion. Initially, their teaching was entirely in English, but soon the impracticality of educating Gaelic-speaking children in this way gave rise to a modest concession: in 1723, teachers were allowed to translate English words in the Bible into Gaelic to aid comprehension, but there was no further permitted use. Other less prominent schools worked in the Highlands at the same time, also teaching in English. This process of anglicisation paused when evangelical preachers arrived in the Highlands, convinced that people should be able to read religious texts in their own language. The first well known translation of the Bible into Scottish Gaelic was made in 1767, when James Stuart of Killin and Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch produced a translation of the New Testament. In 1798, four tracts in Gaelic were published by the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home, with 5,000 copies of each printed. Other publications followed, with a full Gaelic Bible in 1801. The influential and effective Gaelic Schools Society was founded in 1811. Their purpose was to teach Gaels to read the Bible in their own language. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the SSPCK (despite their anti-Gaelic attitude in prior years) and the British and Foreign Bible Society distributed 60,000 Gaelic Bibles and 80,000 New Testaments. It is estimated that this overall schooling and publishing effort gave about 300,000 people in the Highlands some basic literacy. Very few European languages have made the transition to a modern literary language without an early modern translation of the Bible; the lack of a well known translation may have contributed to the decline of Scottish Gaelic.
Counterintuitively, access to schooling in Gaelic increased knowledge of English. In 1829, the Gaelic Schools Society reported that parents were unconcerned about their children learning Gaelic, but were anxious to have them taught English. The SSPCK also found Highlanders to have significant prejudice against Gaelic. T. M. Devine attributes this to an association between English and the prosperity of employment: the Highland economy relied greatly on seasonal migrant workers travelling outside the . In 1863, an observer sympathetic to Gaelic stated that "knowledge of English is indispensable to any poor islander who wishes to learn a trade or to earn his bread beyond the limits of his native Isle". Generally, rather than Gaelic speakers, it was Celtic societies in the cities and professors of Celtic from universities who sought to preserve the language.