ABSTRACT
The Irish language is one of the Celtic sub-group of the Indo-european language family and is closely related to Scottish Gaelic, which only slowly broke away from it in the thousand years after Irish Gaelic speakers had set out to colonize south-west Scotland from around the fifth century A.D. Before that Gaelic seems to have been confined to Ireland, save for a few colonies in western mainland Britain, which was otherwise dominated by people speaking Brittonic languages from which modern Welsh and continental Breton are descended. In northern Britain the enigmatic Picts appear to have included Celts with Brittonic linguistic affinities and an older, more northerly group of different but pre-Indo-european speech, about which little is known and a great deal speculated.
