When it comes to the Gaelic language, many people are unaware of its origin. How Gaelic was once the language that dominated the majority of Scotland . Many wonder how it managed to go into decline over the years, but I hope that by writing about this subject it will enlighten, educate, and even encourage folk to learn more about this ancient Scottish language.

How did Gaelic become so dominant, how did it lose it's way; how did it become associated so closely with the highlands, and now with the Western Isles? When did it first reach here, and how did it change once it was here? When did various regions last have native speakers of Gaelic? This introduction tries to answer these questions and more.

Celtic Roots

It begins, according to tradition with that of the Gaels and the descent from Adam, and how Gaelic was spoken in the Garden of Eden. Jacob and his tribe emigrated to Thrace and eventually to Egypt , where they met a princess called Scota. Over many generations, the community moved to Carthage and eventually to Galicia in Spain , until they were dislodged after long and fierce campaigns with the Romans. They moved to Ireland , and through marriage became the high kings.

For at this time, prior to the 14th century, the Highlands did not exist as a concept , although the Gaelic language had displaced Pictish north of the Forth, until the late 15th century it was known in Inglis as Scottis Gaelic, a descendant of the Goidelic branch of Celtic and closely related to Irish, which is the traditional language of the Scotti or Gaels. The language became the historical language of the majority of Scotland after it replaced Cumbric, Pictish and Norse. It is not acurate just how long Gaelic had been spoken in what by now was known as Scotland, but It is believed that Gaelic was spoken in areas before Roman times, place name evidence shows that Gaelic was spoken in the Rhinns of Galloway by the 5th or 6th century. The culture of the Gaels spread throughout the country, and their language became the language of the king, court and most of the common people. James IV (1473-1513) was the last Scottish monarch to speak Gaelic.

In thinking about Gaelic in Scotland , we often think of it as in terminal decline from the time of Queen Margaret and her sons. Yet studies indicate that the 12th century was the time when the most ubiquitous Gaelic place-names, those employing the words baile �farm, settlement', and achadh �field', were coined. By the beginning of the 15th century, there was a highland-lowland line beginning to emerge, various circumstances would bring in the Highland-Lowland divide, now so familiar to us. This would further reduce the sway of Gaelic speech, which was already in decline in Scotland by the beginning of the 13th century .The status of Gaelic as the national language also went into decline as a result. Scottish Gaelic became more correctly known as Highland Gaelic to distinguish it from the now defunct Lowland Gaelic . Lowland Gaelic was spoken in the southern regions of Scotland prior to the introduction of Lowland Scots. There is, however, no evidence of a linguistic border following the topographical north-south differences. Similarly, there is no evidence from place names of significant linguistic differences between, for example, Argyll and Galloway . Dialects on both sides of the Straits of Moyle linking Scottish Gaelic with Irish are now extinct. For although the kings of Alba, the kings of the Scots, still boasted of their Gaelic and Irish ancestry, they were progressive Europeans as well, bringing in new religious structures and monastic orders from England and the Continent; opening up the central belt and east coast to trade through the establishment of urban enterprise zones - the burghs - and changing fundamentally the way land and lordship operated. The personnel who effected these changes in many areas - Clydesdale, for instance, or Fife - were largely drawn from furth of Scotland . In burghs and in the church, the majority language came to be, over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, the language we now know as lowland Scots, but which was then simply Inglis, English. Though burghs like Perth or Elgin must have had many Gaels working and living in them, most burghs did not. So too the great monasteries like Lindores or Arbroath were staffed largely by people who spoke the language which gave rise to Scots.

A map of burghs and new monasteries founded during this period is a telling one: the borders, the central belt, the east coast are dotted with new foundations, the western seaboard and the highlands on the whole are bare. Divergent cultures, as well as divergent speech zones, were emerging. From the 14th and 15th century, too, Inglis - Scots - was becoming an increasingly official language, and especially a language of law. By the 16th century, even those great Gaelic magnates who patronised, and indeed composed, Gaelic poetry used Scots for their correspondence, and for their tombstones.

The penultimate nail in the coffin for the Gaelic culture was when the Act called the� Statutes of Iona� was passed in 1609, the high point of Gaelic society and culture was coming to an end. This act prohibited many things normal to Gaelic culture. In particular the travelling of vagabonds. This was the name given by the Government to the Bards and Musicians who travelled freely between Ireland and Scotland , from one great house to another, praising the Chiefs who were the very substance of Gaelic society. The act also prohibited the bearing of arms, and drunken revelry. The Statutes also stated that the chief's oldest son should be educated in the Lowlands . This was most insidious, as it meant that the future Chiefs would be alien to their own culture, they would learn a different language, different ways, and different values.
Before this act was passed, Gaelic society and culture had been at its highest point for the last four hundred years.

With the growth of urban centres and the emergence of Scots as the language of the royal court in the 15th and 16th centuries, Gaelic began to lose its dominance. This was accelerated by the adoption in turn of English as the official language of the country following the 1707 Act of Union, which confirmed what had been the de facto position in the more populous Lowlands for several generations. Gaelic also suffered severely in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of the Government attack on all aspects of Highland culture following the defeat of the Jacobites in 1746, and from the effects of the Clearances, which destroyed many Gaelic-speaking communities throughout the Highlands . The kings of Scotland, based in Edinburgh, who by then spoke English rather than Gaelic, set about taming the Gaels through persecution of the language, then by massacre in 1746 and finally by dispersion in the 19th century.

In that period of a few hundred years, there was a stable system of rule. This was a time when the arts could flourish. The native education system provided training for poets, judges, historians, clerics, doctors and musicians. Although the lower echelons of Gaelic society had no formal education, and probably found the literary language of the professionals unintelligible, they had their own culture based on the vernacular form of the language. Traces of this 'low culture' survive, in Fenian ballads, and walking songs.

Since the first millennium BC, Scotland has been a place for visitors and raiders who have brought a multiple of languages and dialects and this tradition continues today. First, it was Pictish and British; then Gaelic, Norse and Scots came and today it's English, Scots and Gaelic. To think that nearly all of Scotland was once Gaelic speaking except Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, which had a variety of Norse until recent times and East Lothian that was settled by the Angles. Galloway had a Gaelic community which became separated from the Gaelic speaking Highlands and Gaelic was still in use until about the 17th century in Galloway . "Poets, scholars and writers in Lowland Scotland up until the 16th century readily acknowledged Gaelic to be the true and original Scottish language. For Walter Kennedy 'it suld be al trew Scottis mennis lede': ('Flyting with Dunbar ' c.1500)� section quoted from "Gaelic: a past and future prospect", Kenneth Mackinnon. Gaelic is a Celtic language, like Irish.

Gaelic is one of Scotland 's national languages. This status is marked on the map as much as on the mind. There are very few regions of Scotland that do not boast at least a smattering of places originally named by Gaelic speakers, from Balerno (baile airneach �hawthorn farm') in Midlothian to Baile Màrtainn in South Uist, from Craigentinny (creag an t-sionnaich �fox craig') in Edinburgh to Aultivullin (allt a' mhuilinn �mill burn') in the far north of Sutherland; from Drummore (druim mòr �big ridge') on the Mull of Galloway to Cairnbulg (càrn builg �gap cairn') near Fraserburgh. In many places where Gaelic is no longer spoken as a native tongue, such as Galloway, Fife , or Aberdeenshire, the landscape is still predominantly one named by Gaelic speakers.

Later successive defeats of movements and individuals who seemed tied to Gaelic culture produced a sense of unease for Gaels, and of disenfranchisement within the Scottish and British nations. The 18th century saw matters change in several dramatic ways at once. The defeat of Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden led to the targeting of images of Gaelic culture - the pipes, the tartan cloth - and thus their closer identification with that culture. The �discovery' of Ossian led to the elevation of Gaelic imagery within Scottish culture, and to the opening up of the highlands to tourism and the infection of the Scottish imagination with the fading relics of the Gaelic past. Gaelic culture became in the late 18th and through the 19th century ever more closely bound in to a wider Scottish identity, but it did so as a culture of the past, and through images more than through words.

At the very same time, modern Gaels were on the move, changing their locations and their horizons, and in the process modernising their culture. Gaels from the Highlands became mainstays of the British Army, helping to forge the British Empire , whilst other Gaels were thrown by economic downturn, famine and rapacious landlordism onto the ebb-tide of emigration. Some of these émigrés made for other lands: North America, Australia , New Zealand . More migrated to Scotland 's emergent industrial cities in search of work. Dundee, Edinburgh , Glasgow , and also London , became hosts to large Gaelic communities. These communities were of the highlands yet modern too. Their songs and Gaelic Societies were often nostalgic for the homeland, but could also be feverishly patriotic or enthusiastic for the new, whether it be steamboats or electoral reform. They were increasingly literate, and fuelled a burgeoning Gaelic publishing industry of books and periodicals. If the twelfth century saw the greatest extent of Gaelic in Scotland , the 19th century saw the greatest numbers of speakers, and many of them, increasingly, lived in the lowlands, in towns and in cities.

But a language needs more than sheer numbers to survive. The final decades of the 19th century saw successful struggles by Gaels for land rights in the wake of savage clearances and brutal landlordism, but it also saw the end of the fragile experiments in Gaelic-medium education, as the Education Act of 1872 brought in English as the sole medium of teaching. Subsequent reforms to allow Gaelic as a subject did not address the fundamental problem. Excluded as a language of law, and now of education, Gaelic was increasingly confined to the family, the croft and the kirk. Gaels who might have become literate in the 19th century would have less opportunity to do so in the 20th. The Gaels who populated the regiments would also take their disproportionate toll on the killing fields of the Great War.

Gaelic has a rich oral (beul aithris) and written tradition, having been the language of the bardic culture of the Highland clans for several centuries, and the survival of Gaelic has been therefore a very important factor in Scottish politics. The language preserved knowledge of and adherence to pre-feudal (tribal) laws and customs (as represented, for example, by the expressions tuatha and dùthchas). Where the language survived, therefore, people were stubbornly resistant to the rule of a lowland-centred and English-speaking Scottish state. This stubbornness was not seriously overcome until after the Scottish state had become allied with England . The language suffered especially as Highlanders and their traditions were persecuted after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and during the Highland Clearances, but pre-feudal attitudes were still evident in the complaints and claims of the Highland Land League of the late 19th century: this political movement was successful in getting members elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom . The Land League was dissipated as a parliamentary force by the 1886 Crofters' Act.

Internationally renowned bands like Runrig and Capercaillie make Gaelic language and music interesting to a younger audience, and the fèisean (Gaelic tuitional festivals) and Mods (Gaelic competitive festivals) attract hundreds of young musicians. Gaelic writing is flourishing, and the National Gaelic Arts Project is involved in a wide range of cultural activities.

The new face of Gaelic music. Seattle based Gaelic punk band, Mill a h-Uile Rud write and sing entirely in Gaelic and use the language on their website

Yet perhaps the real success of this movement can be seen in the way in which Gaelic is gradually being reincorporated into public life for the first time in over 200 years. Until recently, the naming of official bodies in Gaelic was virtually unknown whereas there are now over a hundred bodies, including national organisations, local authorities, banks and commercial organisations who have adopted Gaelic name. There is also a new Gaelic development agency, Bord na Gaidhlig , and at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye , full-time vocational courses are taught through Gaelic in a Gaelic environment.

It is only since 1984 that Gaelic has re-emerged in Scottish life as a proud part of our heritage. Today it has once more become the medium of instruction in a number of schools at primary level.
Yet there is still much to be done to ensure that Gaelic is seen to belong not to the past but as having a central role to play in Scotland 's vibrant cultural future. The 2001 General Census of Scotland recorded 58,650 Gaelic speakers, most of who live in the Outer Hebrides, the Central belt and the northern Highlands, but there is an increase in the number of those learning and speaking Gaelic who stay out with the traditional heartland areas. In fact there has been a vast increase in Gaelic learning worldwide, not just with societies and institution being formed, but with the help of educational websites which teach the language online.

In 2003, the SNP MSP Michael Russell introduced a private member's bill in the Scottish Parliament which wanted to grant Gaelic full legal equality with English in public life and see it revitalised as a living entity in Scotland 's social, cultural and political life.

Following a consultation period, in which the government received many submissions, the majority of which asked that the bill be strengthened, a revised bill was published with the main improvement that the guidance of the Bòrd is now statutory (rather than advisory).

In the committee stages in the Scottish Parliament, there was much debate over whether Gaelic should be given 'equal validity' with English. Due to Executive concerns about resourcing implications if this wording was used, the Education Committee settled on the concept of equal respect. It is still not clear if the ambiguity of this wording will provide sufficient legal force to backup the demands of Gaelic speakers against the whims of local councils.

The Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament unanimously, with support from all sectors of the Scottish political spectrum on the 21st of April 2005.

The Education Act of 1872, which completely ignored Gaelic, and led to generations of Gaels being forbidden to speak their native language in the classroom, is now recognised as having deal the education system with a major blow to in restoring the language. People still living can recall being beaten for speaking Gaelic in school.

As well as being taught in schools, including some in which it is the medium of instruction, it is also used by the local council in the Western Isles, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar . The BBC also operates a Gaelic language radio station Radio nan Gàidheal (which regularly transmits joint broadcasts with its Republic of Ireland counterpart Raidió na Gaeltachta ), and there are also television programmes in the language on the BBC and on the independent commercial channels, usually subtitled in English. The ITV franchisee in the north of Scotland , Grampian Television, has a studio in Stornoway. Viewers of Freeview a non-subscription digital TV service can receive channel, TeleG , which broadcasts for an hour every evening.

A full Gaelic language TV service, however, similar to S4C in Wales and TG4 in Ireland , has been under consideration. As in Wales , the showing of programmes in the language as opt-outs on the main channels has been regarded as inadequate for the 58,552 who speak it, and as an annoyance to some of the English or Scots speaking 5,003,459 who do not. In fact, this annoyance may be largely assumed: the evidence is that at least one Gaelic television programme produced by the BBC attains viewing figures in excess of the number of Gaelic speakers that could view it in Scotland . No complaints are being received by the BBC about Gaelic-language television programmes on BBC TV channels, perhaps because subtitling them in English makes them equally accessible to non-Gaelic speakers.

Bilingual road signs (in both Gaelic and English) are gradually being introduced throughout the Gaelic-speaking regions in the Highlands and elsewhere across the nation. In many cases, this has simply meant re-adopting the traditional spelling of a name.

The Ordnance Survey has acted in recent years to correct many of the mistakes that appear on maps. They announced in 2004 that they intended to make amends for a century of Gaelic ignorance and set up a committee to determine the correct forms of Gaelic place names for their maps.

Historically, Gaelic has not received the same degree of official recognition from the UK Government as Welsh. With the advent of devolution, however, Scottish matters have finally begun to receive greater attention, and the Gaelic Language ( Scotland ) Act was confirmed by the Scottish Parliament on 21 April 2005

The key provisions of the Act are:

• Recognising in legislation Gaelic as an official language of Scotland with 'equal respect' to English.
• Establishing the Gaelic development body, Bòrd na Gàidhlig , on a statutory basis to promote the use and understanding of Gaelic.
• Requiring Bòrd na Gàidhlig to prepare a National Gaelic Language Plan for approval by Scottish Ministers.
• Requiring Bòrd na Gàidhlig to produce guidance on Gaelic Education for education authorities.
• Requiring public bodies in Scotland , both Scottish public bodies and cross border public bodies insofar as they carry out devolved functions, to consider the need for a Gaelic language plan in relation to the services they offer.

That is how they feel about Scottish Gaelic. We have to fight for it again. A tremendous blow was inflicted on the Gaelic language and culture at Culloden and the Highland Clearances. The language and culture were devastated. It is a miracle the language survived at all! Now we have to fight again the war to recover Gaelic. This time it will be a war without guns. The ink of the pen is worth far more than the blood of the martyrs. The potential power of the word has a magic of its own that can weave many a spell.

They presented some other reasons for learning Scottish Gaelic.

Scottish Gaelic is a special language. It is a unique spiritual gift. We, of the Scottish Gaelic society in Moscow are learning Gaelic not for profit, prestige or power but to preserve a profound spiritual legacy. Unless we make a tremendous effort to learn Scottish Gaelic then this language will die. A priceless treasure will be lost forever. It will remain no more than a historical curiosity for academics. We certainly will not let this happen.

Yet another example of how different Gaelic is from English can be defined by the word Ceilidh. The word can be simultaneously defined as both visit a highland gathering and where people gather to entertain themselves by telling stories, poems and singing music. In contrast to a society where people prefer to watch TV and play computer games, the people assume an active role in their entertainment. In some Highland villages, every house was thought to contain a fiddle!

Ideas from Russian philosophy can strongly inspire Scots to revive their lost traditions of hospitality, care for others and reawaken a spiritual sense of community. Learning Scottish Gaelic helps to recover our sense of society.

It is amazing to think that a society from a foreign land feels the need to uphold a Scottish tradition so passionately when people in our own country fail to do so!

"1   By learning Scottish Gaelic you are undertaking something special. You are helping to preserve just one of the languages still under threat of perishing. You might also be inspiring native Indian people to defend their own languages. This is important because the World might lose as many as 3000 languages by 2010 unless it takes radical action.

"2   If you love history, then Scottish Gaelic is necessary. You can be transported back into another bygone age. The speaker of Gaelic embraces modern times, the Middle Ages and antiquity and his mental horizon is radically enlarged. If Americans seriously seek to affirm their roots then donning a kilt and tracing their ancestral roots is not an answer; learn Scottish Gaelic. This act not only more fully affirms an almost lost identity but practically supports Scottish culture. (Incidentally, the fact that so many Russians and Americans think the 'kilt', an English invention a symbol of Scottish, demonstrates how people continue to cling to a highly impoverished reinvention of the Scottish identity.)

"3  If you are a serious writer or poet, Scottish Gaelic can inspire creativity. Is it any wonder that we are at present witnessing a renaissance in Scottish writing when some Scots speak Lallans, Gaelic and English! The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, thought that learning ancient languages was far better for creativity than mastering modern languages as 'learning an ancient language offers more ideas than mastery of modern languages.

"4     If you are unhappy with your old identity and feel profoundly estranged and alienated from your own then join us. There is no harm in becoming Scottish. You do not have to be born in Scotland to embrace a Scottish identity. Learn the language than be born in Scotland .

"5    Learning Gaelic offers an insight into Irish culture. 75 % of words from Irish are identical with Gaelic. So you befriend not only the Scots but also the Irish. Learning Scottish Gaelic will get you far more respect from the Scots than learning English. It is one of the best complements you can pay Scotland .

There are many education institutions, which offer courses, and there are pockets in cities such as Glasgow and Aberdeen where Gaelic is spoken. Around 60,000 people in Scotland are fluent in Gaelic. There are also several thousand who have a basic grasp of the language. Out with Scotland , there are clusters of Gaelic speakers, especially in locations such as Nova Scotia in Canada that received many emigrants from Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries

In Nova Scotia there are somewhere between 500 and 1,000 native speakers, most of them now elderly. In May 2004 the Provincial government announced the funding of an initiative to support the language and its culture within the province.

In Prince Edward Island , the Colonel Gray High School is now offering two courses in Gaelic, an introductory and an advanced course, both language and history are taught in these classes. This is the first recorded time that Gaelic has ever been taught as an official course on Prince Edward Island .

The UK government has ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect of Gaelic.

The Columba Initiative, also known as Iomairt Cholm Cille , is a body that seeks to promote links between speakers of Scottish Gaelic and Irish.

Scottish Gaelic spelling can initially seem complicated. However, it is more regular than English, so you can often tell how a word should be pronounced once you are familiar with the spelling system. There are eighteen letters in the Gaelic alphabet; the letters j, k, q, v, w, x, y, and z are not used, except in recent words "loaned" from other languages. Acute and grave accents are used to indicate short and long vowels. For example, é is pronounced like 'ay' in 'say', while è is pronounced like 'ai' in 'fair'. The acute accent é is used far less frequently than the grave accent.

Lenition is an important aspect of Scottish Gaelic. This is where certain consonants (b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s and t) can be made 'softer' by adding an 'h' after them. For example, lenition changes p to an f sound that is spelt ph. Lenition is usually caused by a preceding word. For example:

• A cat : Her cat
• A chat : His cat
• A cù: Her dog
• A chù: His dog

Scottish Gaelic is best learnt in both spoken and written form at the same time. Whilst there are a large variety of books available, when used on their own, these have the disadvantage that learners cannot hear the pronunciation. It is far easier to learn accurate pronunciation of words and phrases if you listen to a genuine Gaelic speaker.

An additional complication is that travellers in Gaelic-speaking places may notice slight variations in spellings and pronunciations of places and some words. This is partially due to a standardisation of the language in the 1970s, but it is also due to regional and localised evolution.

Lineage and ancestry are extremely important in the Outer Hebrides - to the extent that a Hebridean family history forms part of his Gaelic name.

For example, the name of one of the residents of Berneray is, in English, Fred MacLeod. In Gaelic, his name is: mac Dhomhnaill Thormoid Dhomhnaill Mhoir .

Mac means "son of", beag means "small", and mhoir means "big". Therefore, Fred's name translates as Fred, son of Donald, son of Norman, son of big Donald. Therefore, encapsulated in his name is the generational history of Fred going back to a great-grandparent, and including an adjective to differentiate the great-grandparent from other Donald's of the time.

Thus, when two people of Outer Hebridean lineage meet, one may ask, "To whom do you belong?" (Basically, the same as "What is your name?"). The answer can often provide enough detail for the listener to work out where, in the ancestral network, the person is connected.

Personal names

Gaelic has a number of personal names, such as Ailean, Aonghas, Dòmhnall, Donnchadh, Coinneach, Murchadh, for which there are traditional forms in English (Alan, Angus, Donald, Duncan, Kenneth, Murdo). There are also distinctly Scottish Gaelic forms of names that belong to the common European stock of given names, such as: Iain (John), Alasdair (Alexander), Uilleam (William), Caitrìona (Catherine), Cairistìona (Christina), Anna (Ann), Màiri (Mary), Seamus (James). Some names have come into Gaelic from Old Norse, for example: Somhairle ( < Somarliðr), Tormod (< Þórmóðr), Torcuil (< Þórkell, Þórketill), Ìomhair (Ívarr). These are conventionally rendered in English as Sorley (or, historically, Somerled), Norman, Torquil, and Iver (or Evander). There are other, traditional, Gaelic names which have no direct equivalents in English: Oighrig, which is normally rendered as Euphemia (Effie) or Henrietta (Etta) (formerly also as Henny or even as Harriet), or, Diorbhal, which is "matched" with Dorothy, simply on the basis of a certain similarity in spelling; Gormul, for which there is nothing similar in English, and it is rendered as 'Gormelia' or even 'Dorothy'; Beathag, which is "matched" with Becky (> Rebecca) and even Betsy, or Sophie.

Many of these are now regarded as old-fashioned, and are no longer used (which is, of course, a feature common to many cultures: names go out of fashion). As there is only a relatively small pool of traditional Gaelic names from which to choose, some families within the Gaelic-speaking communities have in recent years made a conscious decision when naming their children to seek out names that are used within the wider English-speaking world. These names do not, of course, have an equivalent in Gaelic. What effect that practice (if it becomes popular) might have on the language remains to be seen. At this stage (2005), it is clear that some native Gaelic-speakers are willing to break with tradition. Opinion on this practice is divided; whilst some would argue that they are thereby weakening their link with their linguistic and cultural heritage, others take the opposing view that Gaelic, as with any other language, must retain a degree of flexibility and adaptability if it is to survive in the modern world at all.

The well-known name Hamish , and the recently established Mhairi (pronounced [va:ri] ) come from the Gaelic for, respectively, James, and Mary, but derive from the form of the names as they appear in the vocative case Seumas (James) (nom.) ? Sheumais (voc.), and, Màiri (Mary) (nom.) ? Mhàiri (voc.).

The most common class of Gaelic surnames are, of course, those beginning with mac (Gaelic for son ), such as MacGillEathain (MacLean). The female form is nic (Gaelic for daughter ), so Catherine MacPhee is properly called in Gaelic, Caitrìona Nic a' Phì .

Several colours give rise to common Scottish surnames: bàn (Bain - white), ruadh ( Roy - red), dubh (Dow - black), donn (Dunn - brown), buidhe ( Bowie - yellow).

The majority of Scottish Gaelic's vocabulary is native Celtic There are a large number of borrowings from Latin ( muinntir , Didòmhnaich ), ancient Greek , especially in the religious domain ( eaglais , Bìoball from Ekklesia and Biblia ), Norse ( eilean , sgeir ), Hebrew ( Sàbaid , Aba ) and Lowland Scots ( briogais , aidh ).

In common with other Indo-European languages, the neologisms which are coined for modern concepts are typically based on Greek or Latin, although written in Gaelic orthography; television , for instance, becomes telebhisean ( cian-dhealbh could also be used), and computer becomes coimpiùtar ( aireamhadair , bocsa-fiosa or bocsa-sgrìobhaidh could also be used). Although native speakers frequently use an English word for which there is a perfectly good Gaelic equivalent, they will, without thinking, simply adopt the English word and use it, applying the rules of Gaelic grammar, as the situation requires. With verbs, for instance, they will simply add the verbal suffix (-eadh, or, in Lewis, -igeadh, as in, Tha mi a' watch eadh (Lewis, watch igeadh) an telly (I am watching the television) (instead of "Tha mi a' coimhead air a' chian-dhealbh "). This was remarked upon by the minister who compiled the account covering the parish of Stornoway in the New Statistical Account of Scotland , published over 170 years ago. However, as Gaelic medium education grows in popularity, a newer generation of literate Gaels is becoming more familiar with modern Gaelic vocabulary.

Going in the other direction, Scottish Gaelic has influenced the Scots language (gob) and English, particularly Scottish Standard English. Loanwords include: whisky, slogan, brogue, jilt, clan, strontium (from Strontian , trousers, as well as familiar elements of Scottish geography like ben ( beinn ), glen ( gleann ) and loch. Irish Gaelic has also influenced Lowland Scots and English in Scotland , but it is not always easy to distinguish its influence from that of the Scottish variety.

Go dté mar atá sibh (Ulster Irish), Conas

Sibh Leinster/Standard Irish)

Ma is é bhfuir thoil é

Slán leat

If your heart is set on a Highland wedding, why not set the seal on the occasion by reciting your marriage vows in Gaelic? Do not worry if you don't know any of the language - the phonetic pronunciation for the following vows is shown in italic, with the English translation at the end.

Am fear (groom)

Tha mise a-nis 'gad ghabhail-sa gu bhith 'nam chéile phòsda.

Ha meesh-u (groom's name) a-neesh 'gat gaval-sa (bride's name) goo vee num chay-lu fawsda.

Ann am fianais Dhé 's na tha seo de fhianaisean tha mise a' gealltainn a bhith 'nam fhear pòsda dìleas gràdhach agus tairis dhuitsa, cho fad's a bhios an dìthis againn beò.

Owe-n um fee-an-nish Yay's na ha shaw jay ee-yan-i-shan ha meesh-u a gee-yall-ting a vee num er pawsda jee-lus grag-uch ag-us tar-ish goot-sa, cho fat's a veese un jee-ish ack-een bee-yaw.

I, [groom's name] now take you [bride's name] to be my wife.

In the presence of God and before these witnesses I promise to be a loving, faithful and loyal husband to you, for as long as we both shall live.

A' bhean (bride)

Tha mise a-nis 'gad ghabhail-sa gu bhith 'nam chéile pòsda.

Ha meesh-u (bride's name) a-neesh 'gat gaval-sa (groom's name) goo vee num chay-lu fawsda.

Ann am fianais Dhé 's na tha seo de fhianaisean tha mise a' gealltainn a bhith 'nam bhean phòsda dhìleas ghràdhach agus thairis dhuitsa, cho fad's a bhios an dìthis againn beò.

Owe-n um fee-an-nish Yay's na ha shaw jay ee-yan-i-shan ha meesh-u a gee-yall-ting a vee num ven pawsda jee-lus grag-uch ag-us tar-ish goot-sa cho fat's a veese un jee-ish ack-een bee-yaw.

I, now take you to be my husband. In the presence of God and before these witnesses I promise to be a loving, faithful and loyal wife to you, for as long as we both shall live.