Welsh? Up here in the Highlands?

My grandmother could be a formidable woman, particularly when she was telling me off in Welsh. My mother comes from Wales but didn’t speak the language, so my encounters with it tend to bring back memories of a stern, stout woman making her displeasure very clear. Pretty intimidating, I can tell you. I wouldn’t have expected that childhood memory to find its way into conversations about the Picts, but explaining that their language was closely related to Welsh usually gets people’s attention, especially guests who have arrived in the Highlands expecting clans, castles and a few Vikings.

The connection needs a little explaining, because the Picts weren’t speaking the Welsh my grandmother used. Their language belonged to an older family spoken across much of Britain, from which Welsh survives today. Once you begin to picture that wider world, the connection with northern Scotland feels much less surprising. The borders on our maps can make Welsh seem to belong firmly in Wales, but the languages behind it once had a far greater reach. The Picts were part of that world, and their carved stones give us a chance to meet them long before the clans most visitors have come to hear about.

Then somebody will quite reasonably ask what happened to their language. The Vikings brought Old Norse into the north and changed the lives of the communities where they settled, but Gaelic was also spreading through religious and political connections. As the kingdom of Alba developed, Gaelic became increasingly important and gradually replaced Pictish across much of its former territory. You can lose a language without losing all the people who speak it, as families raise their children using different words and those children grow up to regard the new language as their own. Their grandparents might still have understood conversations that, a few generations later, nobody in the household could follow.

That is where I find the Picts frustratingly difficult to reach. Names give us clues, but we have no substantial body of Pictish writing that lets us hear somebody tell a story, make a joke or lose their temper. We can spend time looking at the figures on their stones and still know very little about what they would have said to one another. Remembering my grandmother makes that absence feel rather more personal. A language can tell you a good deal about somebody’s character, particularly when you’ve given them a reason to tell you off, and I’d love to know how a Pictish grandmother might have sounded under similar circumstances.

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