This chapter considers the history, political context, and linguistic characteristics of Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic has been spoken in Scotland since approximately 400 CE and was a majority language of Scotland around 1000 CE. Today, Gaelic is a minority, endangered language undergoing revitalisation. Currently, there are around 58,000 speakers in Scotland, and 1,500 in Canada. Around half of speakers in Scotland live in the north-west Highlands and islands, but many also live in Lowland cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh due to migration and revitalisation policies. Gaelic’s linguistic features are substantially different from English and, along with other Celtic languages, are quite different from many other Indo-European languages. For example, Gaelic is a VSO language and retains morphological complexity such as case and gender. Phonological features include contrastive palatalisation, pre-aspiration, and some dialects have lexical pitch accents. In some morphophonological contexts, consonants undergo mutation. Recent sociolinguistic developments including language revitalisation have led to new linguistic structures emerging. This chapter outlines some of these developments such as new varieties of Gaelic in urban settings, and dialect levelling in traditional areas among Gaelic-immersion school pupils.

Gildas in the mid-sixth century writes a stinging attack on his fellow Britons for their pathetic behaviour after the withdrawal of the Romans and the coming of the Saxons, and for their sinfulness which he sees as responsible for their dramatic decline. His Latin is robust and complex, with references to the Bible and to earlier Latin literature, with neologisms and the occasional word drawn from English.

This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

This chapter discusses the evidence for the existence of an intermediate subgroup Proto-Italo-Celtic, the parent of Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic. The chapter also examines the connections between Italic and Celtic and the other northwest Indo-European subgroups.

Irish and Welsh have divergent literary beginnings. Irish, the first western vernacular to achieve literary status, produced hundreds of works by 1100, whereas Welsh literature is hard to quantify before then. Starting with the oldest vernacular manuscripts – Lebor na hUidre (late eleventh/early twelfth century) and the Black Book of Carmarthen (ca. 1250) – the chapter addresses the difficulties of reconstructing earlier literary activity. In Ireland, well-founded dating strategies reveal literature forming in the seventh century with legal and religious writing, and blossoming in the eighth with original narratives such as ‘The Voyage of Bran’. Church schools created a vernacular literary system closely modelled on Latin Christian learning, including a metatextual tradition which canonized Irish-language texts through commentary and glossing. This activity was promoted by professional users of the vernacular – lawyers, poets, historians – who entered into a close relationship with the church. In Wales the picture is far harder to discern. Some aspects of the Irish story – the professional orders, the church schools – are comparable, but chronology eludes us and by the time the literature becomes fully describable, in the twelfth century, it appears to be an amalgam of older traditions and Anglo-Norman influences.

Language contact studies and historical linguistics, i.e. the study of language change, are subfields of linguistics that have long been recognized as being mutually relevant. This chapter explores this relationship along two dimensions: first, with regard to the fields of study themselves, and second, and perhaps more importantly, with regard to those aspects of language contact and of influence external to a given linguistic system that are particularly relevant to understanding the basic subject matter of historical linguistics, i.e. what happens to languages as they pass through time. In terms of the fields of study, an overview of the historiography of the distinction between internally motivated and externally motivated change is offered. This survey is followed by a discussion of several case studies, in which language contact serves as an actuator of change as well as some in which it is an inhibitor of change. Finally, the interaction of language contact with another key issue in historical linguistics, namely language genealogy, is discussed, along with a consideration of the naturalness and pervasiveness of language contact.

Continuing the volume’s first thematic strand (Home and Away), this chapter is dedicated to eleventh-century England and the insular world. It begins by studying England, before analysing England’s connections with the territories and peoples of Wales and Ireland. This is followed by specific discussions of William the Conqueror’s dealings with the Welsh and the relationship between the Danelaw and northern England. The chapter then shifts its focus beyond Northumbria to investigate the history of the Normans in the north and their contacts with the Scots.

The discussion of occult feminism in Chapter 5 shifts the foundations of Decadent Ecology to a reality beyond the veil. The last chapter of this study returns to the turf from which it began with my ruminations on Holywell Cemetery. Chapter 6 examines works by George Egerton, Arthur Machen, and William Sharp, each of whom introduces a different form of paganism to their earthy decadent ecologies. The authors find in paganism scalar distortions and other forms of eco-excess that problematize distinctions between the spiritual, secular, and scientific. At the same time, while all are, today, recognized as part of the urbane, fin-de-siècle culture of Wilde and Beardsley, each, in fact, turns to the local and the rural as the site of their decadent intimacies. We hear in their often conflicted renderings of the pagan landscape voices for sexual, eco-spiritual, and regionalist politics.

This chapter traces the long history of the church in Wales. From the time of the so-called Celtic Church, it discusses the Age of the Saints and the distinctive character of Welsh Christianity, which predates that of English Christianity after the arrival of Augustine at Canterbury in 597. The Normans instituted a more formal diocesan structure which developed over the medieval period resulting in absorption of the Welsh dioceses into the Province of Canterbury. The Reformation saw the establishment of the Church of England in Wales and such developments as the translation of the Bible into Welsh. The Restoration affected the church in subtle ways after which followed a revival of Christianity and the rise of dissenting denominations eventually leading, in the Victorian age, to calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales.