The Indo-European family of languages: Celtic

The Celtic languages formed at one time one of the most extensive groups in the IndoEuropean family. At the beginning of the Christian era the Celts were found in Gaul and Spain, in Great Britain, in western Germany, and northern Italy—indeed, they covered the greater part of Western Europe. A few centuries earlier their triumphal progress had extended even into Greece and Asia Minor. The steady retreat of Celtic before advancing Italic and Germanic tongues is one of the surprising phenomena of history. Today Celtic languages are found only in the far corners of France and the British Isles; in the areas in which they were once dominant they have left but little trace of their presence.

The language of the Celts in Gaul who were conquered by Caesar is known as Gallic. Since it was early replaced by Latin we know next to nothing about it. A few inscriptions, some proper names (cf. Orgetorix), one fragmentary text, and a small number of words preserved in modern French are all that survive. With respect to the Celtic languages in Britain we are better off, although the many contradictory theories of Celticists

 make it impossible to say with any confidence how the Celts came to England. The older view, which is now questioned, holds that the first to come were Goidelic or Gaelic Celts. Some of these may have been driven to Ireland by the later invaders and from there may have spread into Scotland and the Isle of Man. Their language is represented in modern times by Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. The later Brythonic Celts, after occupying for some centuries what is now England, were in turn driven westward by Germanic invaders in the fifth century. Some of the fugitives crossed over into Brittany. The modern representatives of the Brythonic division are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.The remnants of this one-time extensive group of languages are everywhere losing ground at the present day. Spoken by minorities in France and the British Isles, these languages are faced with the competition of two languages of wider communication, and some seem destined not to survive this competition. Cornish became extinct in the eighteenth century, and Manx, once spoken by all the native inhabitants of the Isle of Man, has died out since World War II. In Scotland Gaelic is found only in the Highlands. It is spoken by 75,000 people, of whom fewer than 5,000 do not know English as well.

Welsh is still spoken by about one-quarter of the people, but the spread of English among them is indicated by the fact that the number of those who speak only Welsh had dropped from 30 percent in 1891 to 2 percent in 1950 and is still slowly decreasing. Irish is spoken by about 500,000 people, most of whom are bilingual. Whether nationalist sentiment will succeed in arresting the declining trend that has been observable here as in the other Celtic territory remains to be seen. If language planning efforts fail, it seems inevitable that eventually another branch of the Indo-European family of languages will disappear.