Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Pictish was the language spoken in Britain north of the Forth-Clyde line during the period of the historical Picts. There is some slight evidence that this, the northern offshoot of * Brittonic , was already diverging from the British spoken further south by the time of our earliest evidence (1st c. BC) ( Koch 1983 : 216). To Bede, a Northumbrian writing at the beginning of the 8th c., Pictish was a separate language. From at least the 5th c., * Gaelic -speaking immigrants from Ireland occupied Argyll, on the western borders of Pictish territory. This colony expanded politically, culturally and linguistically, especially after the mid-9th c. when a Gaelic dynasty secured hegemony over former Pictland. There is scant evidence with which to chart the decline of Pictish in the face of Gaelic expansion, though it appears from the comments of a contemporary writer in England that the language had disappeared totally by the 12th c. Several important features of Modern * Scottish Gaelic syntax have been tentatively identified as the result of Pictish (‘British’) influence. The evidence for Pictish is almost entirely onomastic. For the early (Old Celtic) period there are the place-names and personal and ethnic names preserved in Classical texts; for the early medieval period (Neo-Celtic) there are names recorded in contemporary or near-contemporary writings from Ireland, Wales and Anglo-Saxon ... log in or subscribe to read full text