Scottish Gaelic phonology and orthography


There is no standard variety of Scottish Gaelic; although statements below are about all or most dialects, the north-western dialects are discussed more than others as they represent the majority of speakers.
Gaelic phonology is characterised by:
Due to the geographic concentration of Gaelic speakers along the western seaboard with its numerous islands, Gaelic dialectologists tend to ascribe each island its own dialect. Harris, Uist and Barra are often grouped together as Southern Hebridean,, and likewise Islay, Jura, Colonsay, Gigha, Kintyre and Arran as South Argyll. On the mainland, no clear dialect boundaries have been established to date but the main areas are generally assumed to be Argyllshire, Perthshire, Moidart/Ardnamurchan, Wester Ross and Sutherland.

History of the discipline

Descriptions of the language have largely focused on the phonology. Welsh naturalist Edward Lhuyd published the earliest major work on Scottish Gaelic after collecting data in the Scottish Highlands between 1699 and 1700, in particular data on Argyll Gaelic and the now obsolete dialects of north-east Inverness-shire.
Following a significant gap, the middle to the end of the twentieth century saw a great flurry of dialect studies in particular by Scandinavian scholars, again focussing largely on phonology:
In the period between 1950 and 1963, fieldwork was carried out to document all then remaining Gaelic dialects, culminating in the publication of the five-volume Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1997. The survey collected data from informants as far south as Arran, Cowal, Brig o' Turk, east to Blairgowrie, Braemar and Grantown-on-Spey, north-east to Dunbeath and Portskerra and all areas west of these areas, including St Kilda.

Vowels

The following is a chart of the monophthong vowel phonemes that appear in most dialects of Scottish Gaelic:
Phonologically, behaves both as a front or back vowel depending on the geographical area and vowel length.

Diphthongs

The number of diphthongs in Scottish Gaelic depends to some extent on the dialect in question but most commonly, 9 or 10 are described:.

Orthography

Stressed vowels are written as follows:
The English equivalents given are approximate, and refer most closely to the Scottish pronunciation of Standard English. The vowel in English father is back in Southern English. The in English late in Scottish English is the pure vowel rather than the more general diphthong. The same is true for the in English boat, in Scottish English, instead of the diphthong.

Digraphs and trigraphs

The language uses many vowel combinations, which can be categorised into two types, depending on the status of one or more of the written vowels in the combinations.
Category 1: vowel plus glide vowels. In this category, vowels in digraphs/trigraphs that are next to a neighbouring consonant are for all intents and purposes part of the consonant, showing the broad or slender status of the consonant.
Category 2: 'diphthongs' and 'triphthongs'. In this category, vowels are written together to represent either a diphthong, or what was in Middle Irish a diphthong.
Category 2 digraphs can by followed by Category 1 glides, and thereby form trigraphs:

Consonants

Like the closely related languages Modern Irish and Manx, Scottish Gaelic contains what are traditionally referred to as "broad" and "slender" consonants. Historically, Primitive Irish consonants preceding the front vowels and developed a -like coarticulation similar to the palatalized consonants found in Russian while the consonants preceding the non-front vowels, and developed a velar coarticulation. While Irish distinguishes "broad" and "slender", in Scottish Gaelic velarisation is only present for. This means that consonants marked "broad" by the orthography are, for the most part, simply unmarked, while "slender" consonants are palatal or palatalised. In the modern languages, there is sometimes a stronger contrast from Old Gaelic in the assumed meaning of "broad" and "slender"; the phonetic distinction can be more complex than mere "velarisation"/"palatalisation". For instance, the Gaelic "slender s" is so palatalised that it has become postalveolar. The main exception to this contrast are the labials, which have lost their palatalised forms. The only trace of their original palatalisation is a glide found before a back vowel, e.g. beum vs beò .
Celtic linguists traditionally transcribe slender consonants with an apostrophe following the consonant and leave broad consonants unmarked.
The unaspirated stops in some dialects are voiced, as in Manx and Irish. In the Gaelic of Sutherland and the MacKay Country, this is the case, while in all other areas full voicing is allophonic with regional variation. Voicing additionally occurs in certain environments, such as within breath groups and following homorganic nasals. The variation suggests that the unaspirated stops at the underlying phonological level are voiced, with devoicing an allophonic variant that in some dialects has become the most common realisation. East Perthshire Gaelic reportedly lacks either a voicing or an aspiration distinction and has merged these stops. Irish dialects and Manx also have devoiced unaspirated consonants in certain environments.
Certain consonants are rare in initial position except as a result of lenition.

Phonetic variation

Gaelic phonemes may have various allophones as well as dialectal or variations in pronunciation not shown in the chart above. The more common ones are:
  • as or
  • may also be affricated:
  • *Area 1 without affrication
  • *Area 2 with strong affrication
  • *Area 3 with weak affrication
  • as in Outer Hebrides dialects, in southern Barra or or in Tiree
  • as

Velarised l

Velarised has 6 main realisations as shown on the map:
The Survey of Scottish Gaelic Dialects occasionally reports labialised forms such as or outside the area they predominantly appear in, for example in Harris and Wester Ross.

Aspiration

The fortis stops are voiceless and aspirated; this aspiration occurs as postaspiration in initial position and, in most dialects, as [|preaspiration] in medial position after stressed vowels. Similar to the manifestation of aspiration, the slender consonants have a palatal offglide when initial and a palatal onglide when medial or final.
Preaspiration
Preaspiration varies in strength and can manifest as glottal or can vary depending on the place of articulation of the preaspirated consonant; being before "slender" segments and before "broad" ones. The occurrence of preaspiration follows a hierarchy of c > t > p; i.e. if a dialect has preaspiration with, it will also have it in the other places of articulation. Preaspiration manifests itself as follows:
  • Area 1 as and
  • Area 2 as and
  • Area 3 as and
  • Area 4 as
  • Area 5 as and
  • Area 6 no preaspiration
Lack of preaspiration coincides with full voicing of the unaspirated stops. Area 6 dialects in effect largely retain the Middle Irish stops, as has Manx and Irish.

Nasalisation

In some Gaelic dialects, stops at the beginning of a stressed syllable become voiced when they follow nasal consonants of the definite article, for example: taigh is but an taigh is ; cf. also tombaca . In such dialects, the lenis stops tend to be completely nasalised, thus doras is, but an doras is. This is similar to eclipsis in Classical Gaelic and Irish, but not identical as it only occurs when a nasal is phonetically present whereas eclipsis in Classical Gaelic and Irish may occur in positions following a historic nasal.
The voicing of voiceless aspirated stops and the nasalisation of the unaspirated stops occurs after the preposition an/am, an/am, the interrogative particle an and a few other such particles and occasionally, after any word ending in a nasal e.g. a bheil thu a' faighinn cus? as rather than.
In southern Hebridean dialects, the nasal optionally drops out entirely before a consonant, including plosives.

Lenition and spelling

The lenited consonants have special pronunciations.
The is not lenited when it appears before. Lenition may be blocked when homorganic consonants clash with grammatical lenition rules. Some of these rules are active, others have become fossilised. For example, blocked lenition in the surname Caimbeul is an incident of fossilised blocked lenition; blocked lenition in air an taigh salach "on the dirty house" is an example of the productive lenition blocking rule.

Stress

Stress is usually on the first syllable: for example drochaid . Words where stress falls on another syllable are generally indicated by hyphens: these include certain adverbs such as an-diugh and an-còmhnaidh . In loanwords, a long vowel outside the first syllable is also indicative of stress shift, for example buntàta . Stress shift may also occur in close compound nouns or nouns with prefixes, though the stress patterns here are less predictable, for instance in beul-aithris can be both or.

Epenthesis

A distinctive characteristic of Gaelic pronunciation is the insertion of epenthetic vowels between certain adjacent consonants. This affects orthographic l n r when followed by orthographic b bh ch g gh m mh; and orthographic m followed by l r s ch.
Occasionally, there are irregular occurrences of the epenthetic vowel, for example in Glaschu .
There are often wide variations in vowel quality in epenthetic vowels, as illustrated by a map showing the pronunciations of dearbh.
  • Area 1
  • Area 2 with the appearing in the northwestern region but not the southeastern
  • Area 3
  • Area 4 with vocalization of the
  • Area 5 with reduction of the epenthetic vowel as in Irish

Elision

A schwa at the end of a word is dropped when followed by a word beginning with a vowel. For example:

Tones

Of all the Celtic languages, lexical tones only exist in the dialects of Lewis and Sutherland in the extreme north of the Gaelic-speaking area. Phonetically and historically, these resemble the tones of Norway, Sweden and southwestern Denmark; these languages have tonal contours typical for monosyllabic words and those for disyllabic words. In Lewis Gaelic, it is difficult to find minimal pairs. Among the rare examples are: bodh vs. bò, and fitheach vs. fiach . Another example is the tonal difference between ainm and anam, the latter of which has the tonal contour appropriate to a disyllable. These tonal differences are not to be found in Ireland or elsewhere in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd. Furthermore, they are disappearing entirely among younger speakers even in Lewis.

Morphophonology

Morphophonological variation

The regular verbal noun suffix, written, has several pronunciations.
  • Area 1:
  • Area 2:
  • Area 3:
  • Area 4: no suffix
  • Area 5:
  • Area 6 is characterized by a high level of variation both between words and adjacent informants
For some words it is possible to resolve the indeterminate area, for example with the verb sgrìobadh :
  • Area 1:
  • Area 2:
  • Area 3:
  • Area 4: no suffix
  • Area 5:
  • Area 6: