do all Scottish, Irish and Welsh speak English?

scottish Gaelic is not the indigeonous language of scotland ,the reason that scottish Gaelic is so similar to some Northern Irish dialects is that it was brought across in the sixth century by the scotti a tribal group from the north of ireland , and this is why it prevails mainly on the west coast because these are the areas settled by the Gaels,
north of the Forth were the Picts so pictish was the chief language there but there are no records of the language.
The laguage of southern scotland was welsh. the oldest written literature of these Islands was written in Stirling(southern Scotland ) and it was written in Welsh and it's to be seen in the British museum .Strathclyde gaelic form of Ystrad clud was welsh speaking into the thirteenth century ,every major city ,town or settlement has a welsh equivilant name as does practically every English one,south eastern scotland was settled by the angles.
so if any language needs to be revived/ reintroduced in Scotland it's pictish and welsh.

Adam : « The Wars of the Roses was an English civil war that took place between 1455 and 1485. (...) The Wars of the Roses were fought between two Royal Houses of the Plantagenet royal dynasty - the Lancastrians and the Yorkists - and was a victory for the Lancastrians. »

Tu voulais dire une guerre civile française ? La seconde Maison de Lancastre contre la branche cadette Plantagenêt...

As Bob points out, Irish is growing in Ireland as a whole. Where it's dying, oddly enough, is in most of the Gaeltachtaí, where it's ostensibly being actively preserved. Both trends are the result of Ireland's economic boom.

As a second language, Irish is becoming a status symbol with the well-to-do in urban and suburban areas. The economic and political affairs of the country, however, are primarily conducted in English. In the comparatively depressed Gaeltachtaí, the main industry is tourism, which necessitates dealing with people in English. Also, some Europeans and wealthier Irish with little or no command of the Irish language are moving into the Gaeltachtaí, while poorer Irish speakers are continuing to leave these areas for the cities where Irish is much more rarely spoken.

The net result is that a smaller percentage of the Gaeltachtaí are Irish speakers than ever before, while a greater percentage across the country are speaking it. This is both good and bad: the language is burgeoning, but it's becoming a choice, a luxury. What's suffering is not the language but the culture that (at least in the Gaeltachtaí) traditionally has come with language.

The Irish government is now considering new measures to bolster traditional life in the Gaeltachtaí, but basically a race is on. The race is between the linguistic "boom" of Galltachtaí and the linguistic "recession" of the Gaeltachtaí. They seem to be working at cross-purposes; will the former grow fast enough to safe the latter?

My personal POV is that we will see growth or creation of Gaeltachtaí in increasinly suburban areas like Ráth Cairn in Meath or An Rinn in Waterford, and in cities like Galway. These will become the new hearts of the Irish language, while the traditional Western Gaeltachtaí will be shadows of their former selves, unless Irish becomes the universal language of the country again. Which I guess is theoretically possible.

>>Point is Southerners don’t normally move north and start denigrating the people and the culture. Yankees move here and expect us to start speaking and acting like THEM (God forbid).<<

You say this so categorically, and it's not categorically true. A lot of Yankees who down here who *don't* denigrate the South or expect Southerners to act like Northerners. (Of course, a lot of others do.) And a lot of Southerners who go up North *do* in fact denigrate Northern people and culture, and won't shut up about how much better the South was. (Of course, a lot of others don't.)

As an American born in Tennessee, raised in Maine, and back living in Mississippi, I have seen both sides of this. These trends are not imagined, but they are significantly overblown.

Perhaps you could stop taking your bias intravenously? One glass at bedtime should be plenty.

>>"The English considered the Irish as beasts and subhuman, "

Well they were until the English civilised them and converted them to Christianity.<<
The English didn't convert the Irish to Christianity. The Church (mostly monks of French and Welsh ancestry) did. In fact, when the first missionaries were sent to Ireland by Pope Celestine I in the 430's, the Anglo-Saxons had not even arrived in Britain yet. The Danes and Normans, the two other groups whose blood made up the English people, would not arrive for approximately 370 years and 630 years, respectively.

In roughly 75% of your posts to this thread you make it appallingly clear that you haven't the foggiest idea what you are talking about. Intelligent people in such situations often find that the best course of action is to stop talking, so as not to draw attention to their ignorance.

>>When the English first went to Ireland many hundreds of years ago, the English missionaries found groups of hundreds of Irish men, women and children gnawing at bones.<<
This is apocryphal but I have no doubt that it's true. After all, anyone who has ever eaten a chicken wing has, in effect, gnawed on bones.

You're a real piece of work.

>>It is well known the <ll> in Welsh are pronounced as a voiceless lateral fricative, <<

I wish Adam was a voiceless lateral fricative.

>>As Bob points out, Irish is growing in Ireland as a whole. Where it's dying, oddly enough, is in most of the Gaeltachtaí, where it's ostensibly being actively preserved. Both trends are the result of Ireland's economic boom. <<

This brings up an interesting point, which is that I would argue that Irish is going to change a good deal as a language, somewhat similar to the situation of Modern Hebrew maintaining a lot of Yiddish substrates.

I've noticed, from Irish television and whatnot, that there's a fairly marked difference between native speakers and people who learned it as a second language. I pretty good giveaway is the use or an alveolar approximant for "r" instead of a tap. There's also much less of the strong velarised/palatised distinction as there is among people in the Gaeltachaí.

>>>>dewch ymlaen bois dweudwch pam yn ni casau yr season...<<<<

Dyw i ddim yn casau'r Saeson neu'r Cymry o gwbl. Er hynny nad oes eisiau arnaf weld yr hen iaith yn darfod. Dyna'r un pryder arnaf, ond gallai'r Cymry gyffeithio'r iaith heb gasineb o unrhyw fath tybiwn. Wrth gwrs, dim ond Americanwr o linach Gymreig ydw i - felly nad oes ots gan unrhyw un am fy marn yno. "Gwell cymydog yn agos na brawd ymhell"....a brawd ymhell iawn ydw i hefyd, dros sawl cenhedlaeth hyd yn oed. Pob llwyddiant i chi gyd - cedwch yr iaith yn fyw os gwelwch yn dda a gadewch i'r Saeson fod. Dyna'm awgrymiad am ei werth.

Gwent no longer exists as a local authority area, but the eastern part of Gwent/Monmouthshire is now called, wait for it, Monmouthshire/Sir Fynwy.

I can report that the welsh language is alive and well in both Monmouth Town and Caldicott and other areas, with local welsh language schools over-subscribed.

Of course it may never become the everyday langauge for most people in these areas, but there is a massive amount of goodwill from the local population towards the notion of this part of Wales becoming bilingual. Being a Son of Monmouth I have to agree with Siarl Davies, no one I know apart from recent 'immigrants' and a few exceeding posh people consider themselves English. Mind you my grandfather did, but then again he was from Hereford.

My nan was from Usk and she spoke Welsh fluently and had many neighbours who did, it's just they used to pretend they couldn't, as it was fashionable to be considered English if you were from the east of the county.

I just have to make a comment about franny the fanny. She needs to get some of her facts right
The Radar system used in the WW2 in fighter planes was invented by three people, one being a welsh man.
If England did vote Wales out of the auk then the people of Birmingham and Liverpool their own source of water.
The British Empire partially helped by the vast coal reserves of south Wales.
I think that Franny the fanny has some psychiatric issues perhaps she had a really bad child hood.

From Adam
"Welsh" isn't a Celtic word that means "foreigner" It's an Old English word that means "foreigner" and is what the Anglo-Saxons called the people who are now Welsh.

Actually it may be of celtic origin, there is some debate about this amongst linguists.This is due to the fact there was a celtic tribe living in southern germany,called the Volcae.The proto germanic form of the word was Walh,it eventualy came to mean anyone who is non german.
All the languages in europe except Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are Indo European.

You shouldn't forget the Sami languages and other Baltic-Finnic languages aside from Finnish and Estonian (such as Karelian, Veps, and Ludic) either, I should note. (Also note that one should properly speak of North Estonian and South Estonian, with Võro being the best-known and most standardized dialect of the latter; when people say "Estonian" they really mean North Estonian.)

From Josh Lalonde
<<'Welsh' comes from an I-E root meaning 'foreign',>>

Based on what evidence?

***"The name "Wales", however, comes from a Germanic root word meaning (ironically) "stranger" or "foreigner,"***

Ironically is indeed the operative word here. As far as the English, particularly, are concerned, the Welsh people have always been considered more "foreign" than have the other constituent member races of the entire British Isles, including what is now the people of the Republic of Ireland, who, technically, are really foreigners. Certainly we Scots have not been seen in quite the same light by the English as have the Welsh people as an entity.

I think that several factors are involved in this English perception of the Welsh as being "more foreign" - one being, of course, the survival of the Welsh Language, a Language seen as quite alien to English itself in so many ways. There are characteristics of Welsh that are more similar to some Continental Languages than there are to English. Bearing in mind the nature of the Welsh Language, you then have to consider the physical closeness of Wales to the main body of England geographically - ie the Midlands and Southern England generally, the areas most seen as the political powerhouse of England politically and culturally.

Here in Scotland we are considerably further away in distance from much of England (including London and the Home Counties) yet we are not seen as being as "foreign" as the Welsh as we do not have the "advantage" of a separate Language like they have.

Many English people feel a real sense of "difference" when crossing the border out of England and into Wales which they don't quite feel when driving out of England into Scotland. I think that is entirely due to the sudden change from Anglo Saxon place names in England to the "foreign" looking Welsh place names in Wales - not to mention the fact that all road signs immediately become bi-lingual, including road markings ie "Araf" "meaning "Slow" painted on the road surfaces. Each time I've driven over the English/Welsh border (four times now) I noticed that at first the English word took precedence above the Welsh word, but the further into Wales you go - ie further into the strongholds of the still surviving (and flourishing) Welsh Language the Welsh word takes precedence.

This simply doesn't happen when travelling back and forth over the Scottish / English border which I have done countless numbers of times - if I had a quid for each time I've crossed the border I'd have a bloody good holiday on one of the Greek islands....or take a cruise down the Nile..I'd love to go and take a peek at the newly resurrected King Tut. It's only when you get to the Gaelic speaking areas of Scotland (a very small part of the country in terms of area and population) that the issue of Language and bi-lingual signs comes into play. Anglo Saxon looking places names, by and large, persist along the highways and byways of the Southern Scottish roads once you cross over from England.

Because of this, Wales has always been seen as more "different" than up here in Scotland. Among the English, there has always been an attitude of hostility, to a certain degree, towards the Welsh people, much more so than towards us in Scotland. I think the reasons for this include the issues I've mentioned. Read through some of Shakespeare's plays which involve Welsh characeters (eg Fluellen in Henry V) and you will see a distinct disdain for the Welsh character as a whole, a sort of antipathy borne out of distrust and prejudice.

It's no accident that the English often used to recite, with relish, the words of a rhyme:

Taffy was a Welshman
Taffy was a thief
Taffy came to my house
And stole a side of beef

Taffy (or Taff) is the English slang word for a Welsh person.

It's also no accident that the Welsh people are much more well disposed to us Scots than they are to the English....speaking generally, of course. It's easy to understand the reasons why this is so. We are not seen as quite so "foreign" as are the English! :-)

From Josh Lalonde
<<IIRC means "if I recall correctly". I was going on memory. I looked it up, and I can only find it as a Germanic root, but it may go back to PIE as well. This is from Wikipedia:>>

That's what i thought as I tried to look in other I.E. languages.As for Wikipedia you should look at sceintifi journals to double check.