The morphology of Pictish

Abstract

The linguistic affiliation of Pictish has long been disputed. Since the nineteenth century many investigators of Pictish have argued that it was a Celtic language. Yet the morphological behaviour recorded in the Ogam inscriptions associated with the Pictish kingdoms is not paralleled in Brythonic or in Old Irish, and much of the onomastic material recorded in ancient sources such as Ptolemy’s Geography also appears to preserve characteristics that are not found in comparable Celtic forms. The morphology of Pictish indicates that it may be an Indo-European dialect influenced by Brythonic, but that it cannot be considered a regular member of the Celtic family of languages.