File:Columba_at_Bridei's_fort.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
Key facts
- Region
- Scotland , north of the Forth - Clyde line
- Ethnicity
- Picts
- Extinct
- by c. 1200 AD
- Language family
- Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic Brittonic / Pritenic ? Pictish
- Writing system
- Some scattered instances of Ogham script, Some possible instances of Latin script , One possible instance of an unknown script
- Iso 639 3
- xpi
- Glottolog
- pict1238
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- historical language
- Subclass of
- Brythonic
- Country
- Kingdom of Scotland
Show 8 more facts
- number of speakers, writers, or signers
- 0
- writing system
- Ogham
- topic's main category
- Category:Pictish language
- indigenous to
- Picts
- end time
- 0900-00-00
- Commons category
- Pictish language
- dissolved, abolished or demolished date
- 0900-00-00
via Wikidata · CC0
~27 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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. The language is only attested in several tens of inscriptions in ogham and Latin alphabets, in addition to 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.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Pictish” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.