Early Literacy and Multilingualism in Ireland and Britain

Abstract

Abstract At the beginning of the historical period, Celtic languages were spoken as the autochthonous languages of the western archipelago, British Celtic in Britain and Irish (or Goidelic) in Ireland. Their fates in the first millennum ce were very different. As a consequence of the annexation of southern Britain to the Roman Empire in the first century ce, British Celtic underwent profound structural and lexical influence from Latin. At the same time, the language lost ground first to Latin and, from the fifth century, was pushed to the west and north by the spread of Germanic languages. The dominance of Latin as a language of education was such that literacy in the vernacular languages remained marginal well into the Middle Ages. In contrast, Latin literacy arrived in Ireland through Christianization in the fourth and fifth centuries. It always remained a foreign language of religious ritual and higher education. This was conducive to the emergence of literacy in the Irish language. On the one hand, the model of the Latin alphabet led to the invention of the unique ogam script in the fourth century, a script that consists only of strokes and notches along an edge or baseline on stones or other three-dimensional objects. On the other hand, Latin manuscript culture led to the emergence of the manuscript-based Irish literary tradition in the Latin script from the seventh century onwards. Ultimately, the Latin script also replaced ogam in epigraphic use in Ireland.