Every Native British and Irish Language

There are hundreds languages spoken in Britain and Ireland. However, only a handful are native languages, which have evolved in the region over hundreds of years.

For my full post mapping the history of languages in the region, click on the link below:

A Brief History of British and Irish Languages

I made this post to accompany those maps, and explain every different language in the region throughout history, including the minority ones that didn’t make it onto the maps.

Depending on your definitions, between 14 and 18 of these are still living languages, while about 10 are dead.

Here is a quick list, with dead languages (no living native speakers) in italics.

Romance Languages:

• British Latin
• Anglo-Norman
• Norman dialects/languages:
  Guernésiais, Jèrriais, Sercquiais, Auregnais

Brittonic Celtic Languages:

• Common Brittonic
• Cumbric
• Pictish
• Welsh (inc. Old Welsh, Middle Welsh, Early. Mod Welsh, Modern Welsh)
• Cornish (inc. Old Cornish, Middle Cornish, Early M. Cornish, Revived Cornish)

Goidelic Celtic languages:

• Irish (inc. Archaic Irish, Old Irish, Middle Irish, Early. Mod. Irish, Modern Irish)
• Scottish Gaelic (Inc. Early Scottish Gaelic and Galwegian Gaelic)
• Manx (revived)

Germanic Languages:

• English (inc. Old English, Middle English, Early Mod. English and Mod. English)
• Scots (inc. Early Scots)
• Northumbrian (usually considered a dialect of English, but like Scots, is unintelligible with Modern English in its stronger forms)
• Norn
  
• Yola and Fingalian (may be better defined as dialects of Middle English)

Mixed languages (Traveller languages)

• Anglo-Romani (a mix of Romani and English)
• Welsh Romani (dialect of Romani with many borrowed Welsh words)
• Shelta (in it’s older form it seems to be partially based on Irish but most words are of unknown origin. Its newer form has a major English influence.)
• Beurla Reagaird (based on Scottish Gaelic)
• Scottish Cant (Mix of Scots and Romani)

Signed Languages

• Old Kentish Sign (recorded in the 1600s)
• British sign language (origins uncertain, but precursors existed in the 1700s)
• Irish sign language (combines elements of French Sign and British Sign, with origins in the 1800s)
• Northern Irish Sign language (contains elements of British, Irish and American sign languages)

Here’s an image showing a timeline of the different spoken native languages, and how they are related:

A Quick Summary of Every Spoken Native Language

Where did they come from, where did they go?

Romance languages

British Latin was the dialect spoken by the Romans in the province of Britannia. They arrived in 43 AD, bringing the Latin Language with them. Roman rule ended in Britain around 400AD, and the British Latin gradually died away after that, replaced with Old English and Common Brittonic. 

Old Norman, is a language descended from Latin spoken in north-eastern France. The Normans were descendennts of Vikings, and so Old Norman had many Norse loan words. The Normans annexed the Channel islands in 911, and their language replaced the native Brittonic language spoken there. It has since evolved into 4 dialects:
Jèrriais, which has <1900 native speakers on the island of Jersey,  
Sercquiais with around 20 remaining native speakers on Sark,
Guernésiais with about 200 speakers on Guernsey, 
and Auregnais, which was spoken in Alderney, but died out by 1960.

When the Normans conquered Britain in 1066, they took with them their language, but also speakers of several other French languages. These combined to form a new language spoken by the ruling class of England (and later parts of Ireland), called Anglo-Norman. Anglo-Norman was never widely spoken outside of the nobility, and it’s hard to say when it died out as a native language. But by 1400 even the kings of England had stopped speaking Anglo-Norman as a first language, so it’s likely it died out shortly after this time. It continued to be used as a legal language for another for another 300 years or so.

Germanic Languages

Old English became a major language of Britain after the Roman rule ended. Throughout the 400s, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms spread across England and southeast Scotland, filling the power vacuum left by Rome, and replacing the native Brittonic languages. After the Norman invasion, English changed a lot, taking on many Anglo-Norman words to form Middle English. The next big change in English was the Great Vowel Shift, where the southern dialects of English gradually shifted pronunciation, forming Modern English. These new vowels then spread up the country, and many of the changes also affected northern dialects, although Cumbrian and Northumbrian dialects still retail a lot of pre-vowel shift pronunciations and older words.

Norman England invaded Ireland in the 1100 and spread both English and Anglo-Norman there, but they were largely wiped out by the Black Plague in the 1300s. Only 2 dialects of Middle English survived after this, Yola in Wexford, and Fingallian in Fingal, Dublin. These went extinct in the 1800s, replaced by Modern English.

After the Anglo-Saxons arrived, the north east of England was ruled by the kingdom of Northumbria, which spoke the Northumbrian dialect of old English. This dialect had more borrowed Norse words than other dialects of English. It spread up into Scotland, and eventually evolved into 2 languages: the Scots language in Scotland, and into modern Northumbrian in the North East of England. Both of these are considered dialects of English by some linguists, but since they are so different that they can’t be understood by standard English speakers, they do qualify as separate languages. Scots is now widely recognised as a language by the linguistics community, whereas Northumbrian remains classified as a dialect of English by most. Check out my post about where Northumbrian dialect words come from here.

The Vikings were a huge part of British history for the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, and left a big impact on the English language, and an even bigger one on Scots and Northumbrian. Only one Norse dialect survived into the modern era: Norn was spoken in the Shetland and Orkney islands north of Scotland until 1850.

Celtic Languages

When the Romans first arrived in Britain and Ireland nearly 2000 years ago, they found it inhabited by 2 major groups: the Britons in Britain and the Irish in (you guessed it (Ireland). At that time, the language of the Britons was Common Brittonic, and the languages in Ireland was Archaic Irish (often called “Primitive Irish”) . These are both Celtic languages, and came to the isles around 700BC. They may have already been separate when they arrived, or diverged after the languages reached the regions.

The first language to split off from Common Brittonic was Pictish, in northern Scotland. We know almost nothing about this language, so we really don’t know when it separated from Brittonic, but it seems to have been a fully separate language by around 700AD.  

Another mysterious language is Cumbric, spoken in the Celtic Kingdoms of Rheged and Strathclyde, which ruled the north west of England and south west of Scotland. Cumbric was probably a dialect of Brittonic, but after it was separated from Wales by the expanding Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, it seems to have changed a lot, and could have got as far as being a separate language before it died out around the 1100s. 

Further south we have the most famous Celtic region of Britain, and the only one that’s remained resiliently Celtic throughout history: Wales. 
Welsh has gone through many changes since the middle ages, and is now the by far the most widely spoken Celtic language. 

The other surviving Brittonic language in Britain is Cornish. It was once spoken across Cornwall and Devon in south west England, but was gradually pushed westward by English until the last native speaker died in 1777.  Language revival efforts have succeeded in bringing it back from the dead though, and is now spoken as a native language by a handful of Cornish children. 

Archaic Irish spread into Scotland, where it eventually formed Scottish Gaelic, and to the Isle of Man where it formed Manx. Back in Ireland however, the language continued to evolve until it became Modern Irish. Manx died out in 1974, but like Cornish, it has been revived, and it seems a handful of Manx children speak the language natively today

Traveller Languages

As well as all those, there are some languages that are often left out of lists like this. They are the languages used by the various travelling communities of Britain and Ireland. These people have been persecuted and excused throughout history, and so they have all kept a hold of their unique cultures, and retained or developed their own languages in order to communicate with out being understood by outsiders. All their languages are mixed, combining on aspects of 2 or more other languages.

The Romani people originate from northern India, and have since spread across Europe, reaching England and Wales in the 1400s. They traditionally speak the Romani language (closely related to Hindi), but in England, their language developed into Anglo-Romani. Angloromani began as a dialect of Romani with many borrowed English word and grammatical elements. However, over time it has become increasingly more like English, and now has almost identical grammar to the English language, although still contains many Romani words. It’s very difficult to say how many speakers it has, as the 90,000 or so Romani people of the UK speak Anglo-Romani on a sort of spectrum: some of them speak in a way that is impossible for standard English speakers to comprehend (and there for a separate language). Others speak with very Romani influenced dialects of English. All I can say for sure is that there are somewhere between 0 and 90,000 native Anglo-Romani speakers. Anglo-Romani has also given a lot of words to the regional dialects of English. My catalogue of Northumbrian dialect words contains 8 such words. Have a deeks at it here.

The other Romani language of Britain is the recently extinct Welsh-Romani, which contained many Welsh words.

But there are several travelling groups (mostly) unrelated to the Romani, all with their own languages:

Shelta is a language used by the Irish traveller communities of Ireland. It is a “cant”: a language specifically designed to be impossible to understand by outsiders. It was first documented in the 1800s, but some exerts think it could go back as far as the 1200s. It is based on Irish, but has been mixed around and changed so much that it cannot be understood by Irish speakers. Many words have even been reversed: “mac” (Irish for son) has become “kam” in Shelta. More recently it has taken on a lot of English grammar and vocabulary, as well as some Romani. 

Scottish travellers also speak in cants. Two of them, in fact: 
Beurla Reagaird is the secret Scottish Gaelic based cant, once used by many travellers in the Scottish highlands, that is now on the verge of becoming extinct. I can’t really fine anything about it online, unfortunately. 

More widely used by Scottish travellers is Scottish Cant, which is based on Scots, but takes many loan words from Romani. It may be that this language evolved from Romani spoken in Scotland, or that it borrowed many Romani words as a result of intermarrying with Romani  Like Shelta, it has been designed specifically to be impossible for outsiders to understand.

Others

Here I think have listed all the known languages spoken natively, in Britain and Ireland, but of course there are other languages in the region.

There are many immigrant languages spoken all over Britain and Ireland, and, as time goes on, they may evolve into distinct dialects or even languages spoken in Britain and no-where else. At that point, they might earn a place on this list. Ango-Urdo or Scot-Polish would certainly be interesting variations! But until then these migrant languages can’t be called native to the region, and belong in another post, not this one.

I’ve actually heard of an example of a recent immigrant language that seems to have evolved its own form in Britain: Scots-Yiddish! This fascinating language mixes elements of both Scots and Yiddish, and is reportedly used by the some members of the Jewish community in Scotland. I’d love to learn more about this, so if anyone knows more, please let me know!

These is also another fascinating couple of languages I left out of this post, because they were probably never used as anyone’s first language. These both cants, languages invented and used by people on the outskirts of society to communicate without outsiders understanding:

The first is Thieves; Cant, which was used by thieves and beggars in historic England. Supposedly it arose in the 1500s, and for centuries was used by outcasts and criminals to communicate in a way that others (such as the police) couldn’t understand. This is kind of reminiscent of Cockney rhyming slang, a construction originally used by people in London to speak about their shady activities without being understood.

Another fascinating example that deserves a mention here is Polari. This was a cant used by some actors, fairground performers, sailors, criminals, prostitutes, and (most famously) the gay subculture of England. It took elements of other slangs and languages (such as Romani), as well as many seemingly invented words, and used them to speak without risk of being overheard. It seems to have died out in the 1960s and 70s, perhaps as homosexuality was finally made legal, and the gay-subculture of England could come out of the shadows somewhat. The origins of Polari are a mystery, but some suggest that it could be descended from that Elizabethan Thieves’ cant I discussed above.
Here’s a great podcast episode about Polari if you want to learn more.

Outside Britain and Ireland

Many of these languages have spread outside Britain and Ireland. The most obvious is English, which is one of the most widely spoken languages on Earth, and has dialects on every continent, as well as having fused with other languages around the world to form dozens of creole languages.

But several of the Celtic language also have descendents abroad:

Many Welsh people travelled to Argentina in the 1800s, and a dialect of Welsh is still spoken by about 1500-5000 people there, called Patagonian Welsh.

Breton, a Celtic language descended from Cornish, has around 200,000 native speakers, making it the most widely spoken Celtic language.

Canadian Gaelic is spoken by over 1000 Canadians in Atlantic Canada.

There was also an Irish dialect, Newfoundland Irish, spoken in Newfoundland until the early 1900s.

And Shelta is spoken by more Irish Travellers in America than in the UK and Ireland combined.

And lastly is possibly the strangest Celtic language: Bungi Creole.
It combined Scottish English, the Orcadian dialect of Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and the native Canadian language of Cree, and Ojibwe. This language was discriminated against so much that it is now probably extinct now, although a weak, more English form of the Creole may still be spoken by some elderly people in Manitoba.

Remember to check out my other post, A Brief history of British and Irish Languages