"Gaelic was never spoken here!"

The primary myth that gets banded about with regards to Gaelic in the Lowlands. Leaving aside the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland that were not acquired by the Kingdom of Scotland until late in the 15th century, its a myth that is not really applicable to anywhere in Scotland. 

Tied in with this myth is often a misunderstanding of both Scotland's origins as a nation as well as a misunderstanding of the role each language has played in Scotland's long, and very multilingual, history.

Opponents of Gaelic in the North East of Scotland often cite the existence of the Pictish language as a counterweight to Gaelic. Let's put aside the fact that the Pictish language is long since extinct and so few examples of it survive that scholars are unable to reach a consensus as to what kind of language it may have been.

This assertion ignores the linguistic decline of the Pictish language in the time of the Picts themselves. By the time the Gaels of Dalriada and the Picts united their kingdoms to form the Kingdom of Alba it is widely held that the Picts themselves had long since adopted the language of their compatriots to be. 

This very fact alone illustrates the importance of Gaelic to Scotland. Without Gaelic, there simply would have been no Scotland. The language was simply the very essence of the creation of the nation.

The new kingdom's boundaries North of the Forth and the Clyde were not to last too long and the Kingdom expanded, swallowing up the former territories of the Britons and the Angles to the South.

With the acquisition of new territories came the acquisition of new subjects speaking their own languages. The Angles in the South East of Scotland, in what is now Lothian and the Borders, were a Germanic people who spoke the Anglic language, or Old English. This is the language from which Modern English descends and, through its Northern variety as spoken in Scotland, from which the Scots language descends.

The Britons in the South West were a Celtic people who spoke the Cumbric language, which shares a common ancestor with Modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton in the Brythonic language. Theses languages are of the P-Celtic branch, as opposed to Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Manx which belong to the Q-Celtic branch.

As the map shows, by 1000 AD Cumbric was already in retreat under heavy pressure from Gaelic, to which it would eventually succumb. The legacy of the Cumbric Language in Scotland can be seen through the wealth of place-names of Cumbric origin in the South of Scotland. 

Anglic would prove to be more resilient than Cumbric. From its South Eastern base, it would eventually spread across the Lowlands, even into certain parts of the Highlands, and would supplant Gaelic as the language of the Scottish Court. However, before its almighty march to prominence and subsequent fall from grace post-1707, the Scots language was, for a long time, a minority language in predominantly Gaelic speaking nation.

During this time, Gaelic was the language of the court and the language of officialdom. Perceptions from the modern Anglosphere can often lead to a distorted view that monolingualism is the norm. Just as it is not the norm now, neither was it then. While Anglic, which itself had earlier supplanted Brythonic from the South East, may have been the language of the people, it operated in a Gaelic world. Multilingualism would very much have been a fact of life and therefore Gaelic very much had relevance. 

The other minority language that was spoke in Scotland at this time was the Norse language, the ancestor language to modern Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. The language was brought to the islands and coastal of the North and West by colonising Norsemen. It would supplant the native Gaelic of these areas before eventually being supplanted itself by Gaelic.

The Norse language leaves us a vast legacy through a wealth of place names and loan words, many of which are commonly used in Gaelic today. Even the accent and pronunciation of many dialects of Scottish Gaelic still exhibit the influence of the Norse language today. The descendant of the Old Norse language, Norn, was formerly spoken in Orkney, Shetland and Caithness. The language lingered on until the at least the mid 19th century 

Opponents of Gaelic in Caithness often use the area's Norse heritage as a counterweight to the Gaelic language. While the acknowledgement of, and celebration of this Norse heritage is admirable, it need not be at the expense of the areas Gaelic heritage. This illustrates a key misunderstanding of Scotland's origins. The country was forged together with many different peoples and languages, Gaelic being at the heart of that. If Scotland's beginnings were in a multilingual, multicultural mix, why shouldn't her future be?

Embracing Scotland's Gaelic heritage need not be to the expense of other heritage and cultures of what ever part of Scotland you might hail. In fact, it only adds to the richness of it. However, to deny the Gaelic heritage of Scotland is to deny her very essence. It's time the Lowlands woke up to this.

My next series of articles will focus on Scotland's Southern Gàidhealtachd of Galloway and Carrick where I'll be looking at the legacy this has left us and what the language might have been like.