Pictish language

Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language that was spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. No direct attestation of the language exists, aside from several tens of inscriptions in ogham and Latin alphabets; short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts. Such evidence, however, shows the language to be an Insular Celtic language – possibly a variant of the Brittonic language, once thought to be spoken in most of Great Britain, or a distinct branch, closely related to Brythonic, known as Pritenic.

The prevailing view in the second half of the 20th century was either that Pictish was a non-Indo-European language isolate, or that there coexisted not one but two Pictish languages: one Indo-European (Brittonic Celtic branch) and the other non-Indo-European.

Pictish was replaced by – or merged into – Gaelic in the latter centuries of the Pictish period. During the reign of Donald II of Scotland (889–900), outsiders began to refer to the region as the kingdom of Alba rather than the kingdom of the Picts. However, the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly. A process of Gaelicisation (which may have begun generations earlier) is thought to have been under way during the reigns of Donald II and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and the Pictish identity was forgotten.