Notes On The Gaelic Dialects of ST Kilda

Notes on the Gaelic dialects of St Kilda – part one
Seumas MacAlasdair and the St Kilda Gaelic Project, September 2020.
Reconstructed St Kilda Gaelic is written in a version of the Gaelic Dialect Alphabet, created
and developed by Ruairí Ó Conghaile for writing Goidelic languages with their native
pronunciation. This is more likely to reflect the more ‘indigenous’ qualities of Gaelic, if we
assume that the modern and classical languages use the Old Irish based spelling as a defined
reference form upon which to ground the dialects in written language. Unfortunately standard
Gaelic spelling does not allow for finely defined phonemes and their interplay in the
phonology and grammar to be represented. Rather than Gaelic actually evolving from Old
Irish, me and my colleagues are considering an alternative approach, which we can call the
‘theory of assimilation’. This means that Gaelic was likely originally a group of indigenous
languages that are pre-Celtic, but then these indigenous language elements became gradually
incorporated into a Celtic IE formulaic system, initially through Primitive Irish.
Of these ancient linguistic elements of the St Kilda dialects, we find the so-called W-
language. The W-language is the name we use to describe a possible area of visible substrate
influence upon Gaelic dialects where the broad l can often become /w/. L becoming W is not
altogether unusual across languages, Polish, Estuary English and Cumbric are such examples.
X But in Scottish Gaelic these sound changes and others, suggest to us that original
inhabitants of western Scotland had quite a different system of liquid and nasal sounds to
those represented by Gaelic. In addition, some of these sounds are unique to Scottish Gaelic.
St Kilda has been inhabited for a long time. This L to /w/ change is seen from St Kilda to
Harris, to the small isles and to Lochaber and parts of Argyll. This roughly corresponds to an
area of Mesolithic activity, especially around the island of Rhum, which in the Mesolithic
time seems to have been well known for its sacred rocks. Even during the formation of
Scotland, this particular area remained neither under Norse or Gaelic control. As much as this
area is a part of Gaelic, this demonstrates perhaps that the people of this area also kept a pre-
Gaelic identity and language to some degree.
St Kilda’s indigenous history survived until recent times, with Christianity and thus the
organisation of the indigenous languages into Gaelic, not taking place fully. Macauley (1764)
says that there were five druidic alters on the island! Of course calling these alters druidic
relates to the assumption that the indigenous Gaels were descended from the historical
continental Celts and their druidism, but as we will explore in later articles, these Celtic
elements only make up quite a small number of the traditions, it is rather that some of these
traditions in common created the people we know as the Celts, but the traditions themselves
are older. There is no evidence of a Mesolithic presence in St Kilda thus far, but that’s
perhaps because the islands’ history and our understanding of them have sadly vanished from
our current consciousness. We do hope that we can gain back some of that ancestral wisdom
and knowledge.
To firstly describe the Gaelic, the quality of vowels and guttural consonants is the common
set found in Scottish Gaelic, from Perthshire to the Outer Hebrides. So in a lot of ways, a
word on St Kilda doesn’t sound so different to a word on Harris or Uist. But there are major
differences in the way that the indigenous people of St Kilda said certain sounds. We have
already talked about the broad l becoming /w/. This can be demonstrated using the following
sounds. Some notes on the dialect spelling are as follows.
.Slender consonants are written with a bar above them, the ꬷ is like the Spanish ll, ꝛ is a St
Kilda form of the slender r, the ụ is like the ‘u’ in ‘put’, and ẹ is a schwa or unstressed vowel,
and ꝋ́ is the typical long ao sound found in much of Scotland.
làidir – ‘strong’ becomes wᴀ́d̍iꬷ or ụᴀ́g̍ịꝛ in our reconstructed examples. As is visible, not
only does the broad l become a w, but the slender r changes to a ‘ll’ sound, and the slender d
can become a slender g. Another example is ịg̍ịr or id̍iꬷ for idir.
Other examples of the broad l to w change include the word làmh for a hand, which on St
Kilda becomes wᴀ̰́́v or ụᴀ̰́́v. The word laogh for a calf becomes wꝋ́gh or ụꝋ́gh.
Example: hᴀ ė wᴀ́d̍iꬷ written in the standard as tha e làidir – he is strong.
This is only a small introduction to our project. We hope to work on other Gaelic dialects in
Scotland, and to find out more about St Kilda’s indigenous heritage, in the hope that we can
bring it back in some way. Our research was done with the help of native Gaelic speakers
who have some knowledge of St Kilda Gaelic, and through consulting the following two
sources:
Notes on the past of the Gaelic Dialect of St Kilda – Richard Coates 1988
Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland, questionnaire materials collected for the Linguistic
Survey of Scotland, edited by Cathair Ó Dochartaigh.
These resources are helping us to reconstruct the St Kilda Gaelic language and they are both
incredibly useful, but the forms we use are often reconstructed differently to the data
available because of reverting the sounds to their natural St Kilda form, or through correction
and giving examples.
Other works that employ the Gaelic dialect alphabet:
The Gaelic of Arran and Galloway by Cormac Ó Shuileabháin
The Gaelic dialect alphabet -with special attention to Munster Irish by Ruairí Ó Conghaile.

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Notes on the Gaelic dialects of St Kilda – part one

Seumas MacAlasdair and the St Kilda Gaelic Project, September 2020.

Example: hᴀ ė wᴀ́d̍iꬷ written in the standard as tha e làidir – he is strong.

Other works that employ the Gaelic dialect alphabet:

The Gaelic of Arran and Galloway by Cormac Ó Shuileabháin

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