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Published 01/10/24
Language Periods
The history of the Gaelic language is divided into several periods (see Ó Baoill 2010):
- Primitive Gaelic,
The terms Primitive Irish, Old Irish, Middle Irish, Early Irish and Early Modern Irish have often been used in the past.
c. 400–c. 700: a period defined by ogam inscriptions (Cox 2017, 2–3), most of them in Ireland. - Old Gaelic, c. 700–c. 900: a period defined especially by the explanatory glosses in manuscripts and written in a Latin alphabet developed by the clergy of the early Christian Church; this is the period in which lenition, apocope and syncope appear in the language.
- Middle Gaelic, c. 900–c. 1200: a period defined by the large growth in written literature and considerable changes in the language; in Scotland, it saw the development of eclipsis, innovation in the form of loan-words from Old Norse and the development of pre-aspiration in dialects in central and western Scotland.
- (The term Early Gaelic means the Gaelic language before c. 1200.)
- Early Modern Gaelic, c. 1200–c. 1600: a period defined by new rules for writing the language – rules that were adhered to closely especially among poets and the ruling class of Gaels – and a considerable shift in the morphology of the verb.
- Modern Gaelic, c. 1600 onwards: a period defined by a loosening and finally freeing of the strict rules in writing that distinguished the Early Gaelic period; which saw the translation of the Bible into Gaelic and the development, as a result, of a Gaelic readership and of writing that increasingly employed the vernacular or ordinary Gaelic language.
The history of the language of Norway is divided into several periods (Haugen 1976, 32–43, 89–94; 1984, 20–28):
- Proto-Scandinavian, until c. 550: a period for which there are only a few runic inscriptions consisting of a word or two.
- Common Scandinavian,
In Norwegian, urnordisk.
c. 550–c. 1050: a period defined by runic inscriptions and for the latter part of which (c. 800–c. 1050) the term Older Old Norse
In Norwegian, eldre norrønt.
is sometimes used, i.e. the language of the Viking Age, a period which came to an end with the arrival of Christianity. - Old Norse,
In Norwegian, norrønt.
c. 1050–c. 1350: a period which starts with the first manuscript documents and which can be divided into Old East Scandinavian and Old West Scandinavian. For the sake of simplicity, Old Norse or Norse is used for Old West Scandinavian in this work, except where a distinction between these two branches needs to be made. From Old East Scandinavian developed modern Danish and Swedish; from Old West Scandinavian developed Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Faroese and Old Norn, i.e. the language spoken in the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney); Norn itself did not survive beyond c. 1700 (Barnes 1991, 449–56).. For geographical reasons, the term Old West Norn is used in this work for the Old Norn spoken in Gaelic Scotland, i.e. where Gaelic is still or was once spoken in Scotland. - Middle Scandinavian, c. 1350–c. 1550: a period from which Middle Norwegian etc. derive.
The course of the history of the written language in Norway was driven for the most part by Danish, as the country was under the control of Denmark from 1397 to 1814; thereafter, Norway entered a dynastic union with Sweden until becoming independent in 1905. The result of this was that there are two written traditions in the country today: Bokmål (‘book-language’, earlier called Riksmål ‘language of the land or realm’), a legacy of those centuries during which Norway was under the control of Denmark; and Nynorsk (‘new Norwegian’, earlier called Landsmål ‘language of the nation’), a written tradition that developed from the middle of the 19th century and that was based upon the dialects of western and central Norway, those least affected by Danish.
The history of the Scots language is divided into several periods (Corbett, McClure and Stuart-Smith 2003, 4–15):
- Pre-literary Scots, before 1375: the origins of the language of this period lie with with the language spoken by the Anglian invaders of Bernicia, the kingdom which by c. 700 had expanded to include the Lothians.
- Early Scots, c. 1375–c. 1450: a period which begins with John Barbour’s narrative poem ‘Brus’.
- Middle Scots, c. 1450–c. 1700: a period which sees further differentiation from its sister language in the north of England.
- Modern Scots, c. 1700 onwards: a period in which English becomes the official language throughout the country as a result of the Treaty of Union in 1707, and in which Scots gradually becomes more restricted in use and scope.