Gaelic and Indo-European Languages
Although Celtic languages and cultures were similar to one another, they were by no means identical; there were a vast number of physical types and cultural traditions that fell under the heading Celtic. The Celts who settled in France became known as Gauls. The ones in Britain became the Bretons and the Welsh.
Many people think of the Irish people as having red hair, green eyes, and freckles. This is something of a stereotype — only a small percentage of the Irish actually look like this — but it does match ancient descriptions of some Celts. The Romans and Greeks also described many of them as blond-haired and blue-eyed.
The Celts who arrived in Ireland sometime around 350 B.C.E. didn't belong to the same group as the Celts in Britain. Most of the ancestors of the Irish Celts came from Spain. Language is the clue to their origin.
The Indo-European Group
Linguists classify languages into families of related tongues. Almost all European languages — including French, German, English, and Irish — are grouped into a giant family called Indo-European, which also includes such ancient languages as Latin, Sanskrit, and Hittite. (Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, and Estonian are exceptions — they are European but do not belong in the Indo-European group.) All Indo-European languages show basic similarities in vocabulary and grammar that suggest they might have come from a single language — proto-Indo-European.
It is believed that proto-Indo-European may have been spoken many thousands of years ago somewhere north of the Black Sea. The people who spoke this language apparently traveled extensively in Central Asia and Europe, and forms of their language took root throughout these regions. One of the major language groups to develop this way was the Celtic family.
The Latin word for the Irish was Scotti. In the early centuries of the Common Era, many “Scots” from Ireland migrated to the Hebrides and Argyll, just a short boat ride from Antrim. That territory became known as Scotia, which later turned into Scotland.
What About Irish Celtic?
There were many Celtic languages, and the Irish language is just one of them. Irish comes from the Celtic branch called Goidelic, which also includes Scots Gaelic. The term Goidelic comes from the Irish Celts' name for themselves, Goídil, which gives us the modern word Gaelic. Irish is not very closely related to the languages spoken nearby, particularly Welsh and Breton (spoken in Brittany, France), but instead had its roots in Spain; hence, scholars think the ancestors of the Irish came from Spain.
