Middle Irish language
Middle Irish is the name given by
historical philologists to the form of the
Irish language from the
10th to
16th centuries; it is therefore a contemporary of
Middle English. The modern
Goidelic languages Irish,
Scottish Gaelic, and
Manx are all descendants of Middle Irish.
At its height, Middle Irish was spoken throughout
Ireland and
Scotland; from
Munster to the
North Sea island of
Inchcolm. Its geographical range made it the most widespread of all Insular languages before the late
12th century, when Middle English began to make inroads into Ireland, and many of the Celtic regions of northern and western
Britain.
Few medieval European languages can rival the volume of literature extant in Middle Irish. Much of this survival is due to the tenacity of a few early modern Irish antiquarians, but the sheer volume of sagas, annals, hagiographies (etc) which survive shows how much confidence members of the medieval Gaelic learned orders had in their own
vernacular. Almost all survives from Ireland, and little from Scotland or
Man. This can be misleading though. In Scotland, the continentalization of the
Scottish monarchy and anglicization of the later medieval Scottish elite meant that Gaelic manuscripts would never be preserved there.
Thomas Owen Clancy has recently all but proven that the
Lebor Bretnach, the so-called "Irish Nennius," was written in Scotland, and probably at the
monastery in
Abernethy. Yet this text survives only from manuscripts preserved in Ireland.
A form of Middle Irish, known as 'Classical Gaelic', was used as a literary language in Ireland until the
17th century and in Scotland until the
18th century; the
Ethnologue gives the name "
Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" (and the
ISO/DIS 639-3 code
ghc) to this purely written language.
*Clancy, Thomas Owen, "Scotland, the ‘Nennian' recension of the Historia Brittonum, and the Lebor Bretnach," in Simon Taylor (ed.)
Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500-1297. (Dublin & Portland, 2000), pp. 87-107 ISBN 1851825169
*Müller, Nicole.
Agents in Early Welsh and Early Irish. Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0198235879
