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SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of which four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are: the Goidelic languages ( Irish and Scottish Gaelic, both descended from Middle Irish) and the Brittonic languages ( Welsh and Breton, descended from Common Brittonic ). [4]
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- Continental Celtic
- Insular Celtic
- Common Celtic
Celtic languages, branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken throughout much of Western Europe in Roman and pre-Roman times and currently known chiefly in the British Isles and in the Brittany peninsula of northwestern France. On both geographic and chronological grounds, the languages fall into two divisions, usually known as Continental ...
Continental Celtic is the generic name for the languages spoken by the people known to classical writers as Keltoi and Galatae; at various times during a period of roughly 1,000 years (approximately 500 bc–ad 500), they occupied an area that stretched from Gaul to Iberia in the south and Galatia in the east. The great bulk of evidence for Continent...
Insular Celtic refers to the Celtic languages of the British Isles, together with Breton (spoken in Brittany, France). As the name Breton implies, it is an importation from Britain and is not a Continental Celtic dialect. Although there is some scanty evidence from classical sources—mainly place-names—and a small body of inscriptions in the Latin and ogham alphabets from the end of the 4th to the 8th century ad, the main sources of information on the early stages of these languages are manuscripts written from the 7th century onward in Irish and somewhat later in the British languages.
The Insular languages fall into two groups—Irish and British. Irish (often called Goidelic, from Old Irish Goídel “Irishman,” or Gaelic, from Gael, the modern form of the same word) was the only language spoken in Ireland in the 5th century, the time when historical knowledge of that island begins. The two other members of this group, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, arose from Irish colonizations that began about that time. There were also important Irish-speaking colonies in Wales, but no trace of their language survives apart from a few inscriptions.
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The reconstruction of Common Celtic (or Proto-Celtic)—the parent language that yielded the various tongues of Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic—is of necessity very tentative. Whereas Continental Celtic offers plenty of evidence for phonology (the sound system), its records are too scanty to help much with the grammar (morphology or syntax), for which the best available evidence is Old Irish, the most archaic of the Insular languages. The records provide a picture of a language of the same type as Latin or Common Germanic; that is, one that still maintains a considerable part of the structure of the ancestral Indo-European language and has not lost final or medial syllables. Its vowel system differs only slightly from that reconstructed for Indo-European by the French linguist Antoine Meillet. Differences include the occurrence of Celtic *ī for Indo-European *ē (e.g., Gaulish rix and Irish rí, “king”; compare Latin rex) and *ā in place of *ō. (An asterisk [*] before a letter or word indicates that the sound or word is not attested but is a hypothetical, reconstructed form.)
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The consonantal system, too, is conservative, although there are some striking features. Among them are the loss of *p (e.g., Irish athair “father”; cf. Latin pater) and the falling together of the aspirated and unaspirated voiced stops assumed for Indo-European. (A stop is a consonant made with complete momentary stoppage of the breath stream some place in the vocal tract; voiced stops are those produced with the vocal cords vibrating, such as b, d, g. An aspirated sound is accompanied by a puff of breath, often written as an h, as in bh, dh, gh; an unaspirated consonant lacks this accompanying puff of breath.) Thus, Old Irish dán “what is given” corresponds to Latin donum “gift” (from Indo-European *d), but Old Irish de-naid “sucks” corresponds to Latin fe- in fe-mina, fe-llare (from Indo-European *dh). This loss of distinctive aspiration occurs with three out of the four voiced stops, a situation close to that of Slavic.
Other considerations, however, show that Celtic belongs to the so-called southern group of the European branch of Indo-European languages, or in another classification, to the same centum group as Latin, whereas Slavic belongs to the satem group. (The centum and satem divisions of Indo-European languages are made according to the treatment of certain sounds, called palatals, that existed in the ancestral Indo-European language.)
The loss of *p in Celtic was very early; only the place-name Hercynia, preserved in Greek, shows that, in initial position, it became an h sound before disappearing. In most of the known Celtic languages, a new p sound has arisen as a reflex of the Indo-European *kw sound. Thus there is Gaulish pempe, Welsh pimp “five,” compared to Old Irish cóic and Latin quinque “five.” The Irish evidence shows that *kwenkwe must be reconstructed as the form in Common Celtic. The terms P-Celtic and Q-Celtic are sometimes used to describe assumed divisions of Common Celtic; to use one sound shift to distinguish dialects is, however, hardly justified, and the classification will not be used in this article.
The Celtic Languages are a language family In the Indo-European languages. There are six Celtic languages still spoken in the world today, in north-western Europe. They are divided into two groups, the Goidelic (or Gaelic) languages and the Brythonic (or British) languages.
- Indo-EuropeanCeltic
Learn about the six Celtic languages spoken today, their history, structure, cognates and features. Explore topics such as verbs, numbers, colours, kinship terms, weather, time expressions and more with examples and links to resources.
Jun 22, 2022 · Learn about the origins, development and diversity of the Celtic languages, a branch of the Indo-European family. Explore the sources, alphabets and systems of Proto-Celtic and its descendants, such as Lepontic, Gaulish and Insular Celtic.
May 21, 2020 · In any case, there are about 2 million speakers of Celtic languages, both native and non-native. Here are all six languages broken down, using figures from Ethnologue. Irish — 1,170,000; Welsh — 562,000; Breton — 206,000 Scottish Gaelic — 57,400; Manx — 1,660; Cornish — 600; How Similar Are the Celtic Languages? For the most part ...
Celtic languages, Branch of the Indo-European language family spoken across a broad area of western and central Europe by the Celt s in pre-Roman and Roman times, now confined to small coastal areas of northwestern Europe. Celtic can be divided into a continental group of languages (all extinct) and an insular group.
