Having worked for more than twenty years on a linguistic atlas of Gaelic dialects, Heinrich Wagner found that: “each major dialect and each minor subdialect of Gaelic is dependent on its geographical position, all the dialects forming a chain in which two neighbouring dialects always have certain features in common not shared by more distant dialects. The dialect of North Clare, for example, correctly defined as a Munster or southern dialect, has strong features in common with the dialects of South Galway, although Galway Irish on the whole belongs to the central Connaught dialect. The dialects of the old province of Ulster in the north are almost as close to the dialects of Southern Scotland (Arran, Kintyre, and also Rathlin Island) as they are to other Irish dialects.” The latter we may term Ulster Gaelic or Ulidian.
The earliest extant Scottish document which contained Gaelic matter is the Book of Deer in which Latin Gospels were accompanied by marginalia in Gaelic and Latin, the Gaelic being if the 12th century. Many other manuscripts however, of a later date belonged to the common Scots-Irish tradition and the most important of these was the Book of the Dean of Lismore, an anthology of verse compiled between 1512 and 1526 by Sir James McGregor in Argyllshire. This is thought to be the earliest extant anthology of heroic Gaelic ballads in either Scotland or Ireland. Later Gaelic prose concerned the hero Finn McCool and his war band, becoming part of the popular tales if the West Highlands and Islands although such stories are as much part of the heritage of those who returned to Ulster from Galloway and Carrick.
The 1961 census showed that there were still 80,978 Gaelic speakers in Scotland. In addition 3,702 Scottish Gaelic speakers were recorded in the 1961 Canadian census. The survival of Scottish Gaelic is therefore in many ways less in doubt than that of Gaelic in Ireland. This stems from the remarkable fact that the majority (80%) of Scottish Gaelic speakers are Protestants, who are accustomed to read the Bible and use it as a vernacular in their religious services. Indeed the first book to be printed in Irish Gaelic was a translation of the Calvinist Book of Common Order, commonly called John Knox’s Liturgy, published in Edinburgh in 1567 for the use of Presbyterians. Scottish Gaelic was not to become a literary language until the early 17th century.
The division between Ulster Gaelic and that of the rest of Ireland developed well before the arrival of English from the 17th century. T.F.O’Rahilly (1932) outlined a number of features which distinguished the two major Irish Gaelic languages and regarded the position of word stress as one of the most important of these. He believed that the Southern language reached south Co. Meath in the east. The boundary then ran west through Westmeath and Longford to South Galway. The Southern language was more homogenous than that of Ulster and more widespread, occupying at least three-quarters of the island. Ulster Gaelic was characterised by an increasing influence of Scottish Gaelic as one proceeded north and east, though some Scots influence was evident everywhere in Ulster. English was to take over the distribution patterns of the Gaelic language during and after the 17th century, thus perpetrating that ancient frontier between Ulster and the rest of Ireland evidenced also in the structure known as the Black Pig’s Dyke.
To be continued