Linguistic Background to Pictish and the Pictish Symbols Writing System

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

16/3/26

This note is about some of the sources that review the evidence for the nature and affiliation of the language referred to as Pictish, the most likely candidate for the language of the ancient Pictish Symbols writing system (e.g. Forsyth 1997a). With this in mind, what is known about Pictish, and how can we learn more?

First, Pictish became extinct about a millennium ago, and very little in the way of attestations has survived to date. As Kenneth Jackson (1955:133) explained, there are five kinds of evidence: “(1) direct or indirect statements on Pictish by medieval writers while the language was still alive; (2) northern Scottish names in classical sources; (3) the [Ogham and Roman] inscriptions of Pictland; (4) names in medieval works such as Adamnan’s Life of St Columba, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and the Pictish Chronicle; and (5) the modern place-names of the Pictish area.” While this sounds like plenty of material to work with, basically every type of evidence is problematic in some way or another. The most direct type of evidence, the Pictish inscriptions in Ogham script, Jackson notes, “constitute a problem so thorny that many writers who have discussed the Pictish question, however confident they may have been, have carefully avoided attempting to deal with them” (1955:138).

Based on these various types of information, some have suggested that the Picts may have spoken a non-Indo-European language, a non-Celtic Indo-European language, a Brittonic Celtic language, a Goidelic Celtic language, a Celtic language (“Pritenic”) perhaps more closely affiliated with Transalpine Celtic/Gaulish than with either Brittonic or Goidelic, or perhaps two different languages combining two of the options just described. What is clear is that there were multiple languages in contact during the time of the Pictish Symbol Stones writing system, namely Brittonic, Goidelic, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon, and also that by the ninth and tenth centuries the Picts were shifting toward the use of a Goidelic variety, a process completed not long —a century or two— thereafter.

The Pictish Ogham and Roman inscriptions do not make it easier, but in fact, more complicated: there is evidence of influence from Latin and Goidelic, which as K. Jackson (1955:141–142) has explained, should be no surprise due to the influence of Christianity, for one, and the fact that Ogham scribal practices originated with Goidelic speakers, so their spread and that of Goidelic simply went hand-in-hand (along with the likely practice of “Gaelicising” Pictish names written in Ogham script), for another. Also, such inscriptions may bear evidence of Indo-European traits that have not been preserved in the Brittonic and Goidelic languages, such as the apparent presence of a singular genitive -s, according to authors like Rodway (2020) and Mees (2023a). However, their proposed singular genitive -s is not always present in what should be names in genitive case (e.g. those following the <MAQQ>/<MEQQ> ‘son’ expression in parentage formulas), which could suggest that the -s endings have a different function, or perhaps a variety of functions.

The Pictish Oghams also bear what seems like tentative evidence of verb-second word order, which Mees (2023a) analyzes as countering the notion that Pictish would have been a verb-initial language like Brittonic and Goidelic (Insular Celtic). Nevertheless, it would seem that this is not inconsistent, for as Eska (2017:1242) notes, “In the Middle phase of the Brittonic languages, however, the unmarked configuration is verb-second, with the initial constituent generally indicating topicality.”

For now, enough evidence exists from personal and place-names pointing to Celtic etymologies to support the hypothesis of Pictish as a Celtic language to follow the seemingly grown consensus that Pictish was Celtic, and most likely Brittonic (e.g. Forsyth 1996, 1997; Rhys 2015, 2020). Given this, and the evidence that Pictish was a P-Celtic language, that is, a language that experienced the shift of proto-Indo-European *kw > p, a shift no longer believed to be indicative of shared innovations and therefore diagnostic in subgrouping, but likely the result of independent innovations, I will assume three possible models, illustrated in Figures 1A-1C. The first involves a Gallo-Brittonic subgroup as a sibling to Goidelic within Core Celtic (cf. Koch 1992). The second, perhaps the more commonly assumed model, posits that Transapline Celtic and Insular Celtic are sibling subgroups within Core Celtic. The third proposes that Transalpine Celtic is really part of a Continental Celtic continuum, and also assumes an Insular Celtic subgroup (Eska 2024).

 

 

My goal moving forward will be to apply a more generalized linguistic framework, seen in Table 1, based on morphological and syntactic typology, elaborated through the comparison of Celtic languages. Eska (2017) and Stüber (2017) will constitute the foundation for such a framework, along with Fife’s (2009[1993]) characterization of diagnostic Celtic traits, and Stifter’s (2008:9–19) re-evaluation of such traits.

 

 

Table 1 suggests that, if Pictish is in fact an Insular Celtic language, and perhaps more narrowly a Brittonic language, then several of the traits should correlate with the head-complement order of V-initial clause structure (VSO). Identifying several of these morphosyntactic traits, occurring in tandem, especially those considered particularly diagnostic by Fife (2009), could offer strong evidence for the Celtic and perhaps even Insular Celtic nature of the Pictish Oghams and Pictish Symbols. For instance, if evidence of VSO clause structures (1), Bifurcated Demonstrative (Determiner + Noun + Demonstrative) phrases (2), and Confirming/Supplementary Pronouns constructions (3), were all attested, in combination, it could go a long way to confirming the Insular Celtic nature of such texts. Moreover, these are traits that might be identifiable, at least in part, through contextual and syntax-level structural analyses before the accomplishment of an actual decipherment.

 

(1) OLD WELSH (Eska 2017:1242), VSO

prinnit                      hinnoid             .iiii.             aues

buy.3.SG.PRES    DISTAL             four           birds

‘That buys four birds’

 

(2) MIDDLE WELSH (Eska 2017:1226), Bifurcated Demonstrative

y                pryd                 hwnnw

DEF         creature        DISTAL

‘that creature (lit. the creature there)’

 

(3) MODERN WELSH (Fife 2009:17), Confirming/Supplementary Pronouns

Dyma      fy        llyfr       i

here         my      book    I

‘Here is my book’

 

Additional sources are provided below that were not mentioned in this note, but which offer important background to the problem. Clearly the most important direct source on Pictish is made up of the corpus of Pictish Oghams, so future work on their decipherment should resolve at least some of the current controversies and offer a more constrained approach to the study of the Pictish Symbols as well.

 

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Joseph Eska for his comments,  suggestions, and corrections regarding Celtic historical linguistics over the past few weeks (January–March of 2026). Any remaining errors are entirely my own.

 

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