The Celtic languages, members of the family of Indo-European Languages, disappeared from continental Europe in the late 5th century, but they are still spoken by many people in the British Isles and in Brittany. Continental Celtic, or Gaulish, is preserved mainly in brief inscriptions. Insular Celtic is divided into two branches--Goidelic (also called Gaelic), including Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx; and Brythonic (also called British), including Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Manx and Cornish are now extinct.
Among the phonological differences between Goidelic and Brythonic is the treatment of Indo-European k(w): Irish mac, "son," contrasts with Welsh map. These two branches, sometimes called q-Celtic and p-Celtic, underwent certain changes but with different results.
Stress became fixed on the first syllable in Irish and on the penultimate syllable in Welsh. Indo-European final syllables were lost, leading to the disappearance of a case system in Welsh.
Many words were further shortened through loss of certain interior vowels. A system of initial consonant mutations developed; for example, Old Irish cenn, "head," becomes a chenn in the phrase "his head."

Irish

Old Irish preserves five cases of the noun, three genders, and three numbers. The verbal system has developed new forms for expressing past action, an s-subjunctive, and an f-future for weak verbs. Dual number, the special number designating two, is lost in Middle Irish (900-1200), along with neuter gender, as in Welsh.
The use of pronouns inserted within verbs to serve as verbal objects gives way to the use of independent pronouns in Early Modern Irish (1200-1400).
The verbal system is gradually simplified--analytic forms develop; many strong verbs are treated as weak; compound verbs become simple, and verbs conjugated with deponent endings adopt undeponent endings.
Taught today in Irish schools, Modern Irish is spoken as a native language mainly on the western and southern coasts of Ireland and in a few inland communities.

Scottish Gaelic and Manx

Scottish Gaelic, which diverged significantly from Irish by the 16th century, today has roughly 81,000 speakers, excluding many Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, living mainly in the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland. In the present tense, a verbal noun construction replaces the old synthetic present, which itself acquires future meaning as the old future tense disappears.
In general, the inflection of both the noun and verb is greatly simplified, as it is in Manx, the extinct language of the Isle of Man, first written down early in the 17th century and differing sharply from Irish in its treatment of intervocalic consonants. Both Manx and Scottish Gaelic have absorbed many Norse loanwords.

Welsh, Cornish and Breton

In Welsh, which has some 656,000 speakers in Wales, the verbal system was greatly simplified by the Middle Welsh period (12th to 14th and 15th centuries), although early texts show many features, such as certain verb endings, that may be compared with Old Irish.
As in Scottish Gaelic, present-tense forms are used with future-tense meaning. Cornish, the extinct language of Cornwall, first recorded in the 10th-century Bodmin Gospels, differs phonologically from Welsh in several ways. For example, medial and final t and d become s or z;
and the structure of the language is generally closer to that of Breton, four main dialects of which are still widely spoken in Brittany. Breton differs notably from Welsh in its use of the subjunctive as a future and its heavy borrowing of words from French.

Bibliography

Greene, David, The Irish Language (1966)

Jackson, Kenneth, The Gaelic Languages (1978) and Language and History in Early Britain (1953)

O'Rahilly, T. F., Irish Dialects: Past and Present (1972)

Peake, Harold, The Bronze Age and the Celtic World (1922 repr. 1969)

Price, Glanville, The Present Position of Minority Languages in Western Europe: A Selective Bibliography (1969)

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