Scottish Gaelic language

Scottish Gaelic language A form of Gaelic was brought to Scotland by Irish invaders about the 5th century, where it replaced an older Brythonic language, also of Celtic origin. Celtic tribes contacted there with Picts, a non-Indo-European nation who inhabited the British Isles before Indo-Europeans came. Picts left nothing in Scottish language except some geographical names and special herbs' terms.

Shetland Isles By the 15th century, with the accretion of Norse and English loanwords, the Scottish branch differed significantly enough from the Irish to warrant definition as a separate language. And nowadays these two languages, though have very much in common in dictionary and grammar, are different.

The alphabet of Irish and Scottish Gaelic is identical, consisting of 18 letters. Scottish Gaelic employs four cases of nouns: nominative, genitive, dative, and vocative (Irish uses three). Like Irish, the accent is ususally on the initial syllable.

Scottish Gaelic exists in two main dialects, Northern and Southern, roughly geographically determined by a line up the Firth of Lorne to the town of Ballachulish and then across to the Grampian Mountains, which it follows. The Southern dialect is more akin to Irish than is the Northern, and is more inflected. The main difference is the change of the Indo-European é sound, which is eu in Northern dialect and ia in Southern. Thus, the word for "grass" is pronounced feur in Northern and fiar in Southern. But most of linguists define much more varieties of the language each having its peculiarities. In fact, Scottish Gaelic is very endangered by permanent expansion of English and Scots. Nowadays only on the Shetland Isles people can be found who speaks only Gaelic. On the continent, everyone understands English, and slowly loses his native tongue.