Why the North Highlands speaks in so many voices

You can be looking at a Gaelic name on a Highland road sign, pass a farm with a Norse name and then stop in a Caithness shop where the conversation sounds different again. It gives us plenty to talk about on tour, especially after somebody has had a go at pronouncing what they’ve just seen on the sign. The names begin to make more sense once you know who has lived here, because each community has brought words to describe the land around it, and some have remained long after the people who first used them would have recognised the conversation.

Pictish takes us back to a Celtic language closely related to Welsh, which often comes as a surprise to guests expecting the Highlands to have been Gaelic for as long as anyone can remember. Gaelic became established in western Scotland through the connections between Ireland and Argyll, then spread as religious and political relationships carried it farther across the country. In time it replaced Pictish over much of the former Pictish world, although the way people spoke still depended on where they lived and whom they dealt with.

Along the northern coasts, settlement from Scandinavia brought Old Norse into the same landscape. People named their farms, bays and headlands in words they knew, which is why a journey through Caithness or parts of Sutherland can take us through so many Norse names. Scots later became important in trade, government and everyday conversation across many northern and eastern communities, while English gained ground through schooling, administration and contact with the wider world. Families could change the language they used while keeping familiar words and ways of saying things, so the speech you hear today carries more than its most recent history.

That is why I’m inclined to spend a little time over a name rather than simply tell guests how to pronounce it and move on. In the west we encounter Gaelic again and again, while along parts of the north and east, Norse names sit beside it and Scots remains part of local speech. We’ll explore those languages more closely in their own articles, because each gives us a different way into the history of the people here. For now, if a hill and the village beneath it seem to have names from different countries, there may be several centuries of settlement behind the few miles you’ve just driven.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.