World Language Map

Where is Scottish Gaelic spoken?

Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig na h-Alba) is an Indo-European language, spoken in the United Kingdom. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Scottish Gaelic is spoken

Scottish Gaelic is spoken in one country: the United Kingdom. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
United Kingdom0.1%75,305

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Scottish Gaelic is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Scottish Gaelic.

How many people speak Scottish Gaelic?

Wikidata gives about 60,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Scottish Gaelic sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Scottish Gaelic as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Celtic
  4. Nuclear Celtic
  5. Core Celtic
  6. Insular Celtic
  7. Goidelic
  8. Modern Goidelic
  9. Eastern Goidelic
  10. Scottish Gaelic

More about Scottish Gaelic

Codes: ISO 639-3 gla, Glottolog scot1245. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Scottish Gaelic

Where is Scottish Gaelic spoken?

Scottish Gaelic is spoken in the United Kingdom. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.1% of the population of United Kingdom, which is about 75,305 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Scottish Gaelic?

Wikidata gives about 60,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Scottish Gaelic in?

Glottolog places Scottish Gaelic in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Celtic, Nuclear Celtic, Core Celtic, Insular Celtic, Goidelic, Modern Goidelic and Eastern Goidelic.

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