Pictish Language - Language Classification

Language Classification

The evidence of place names and personal names argues strongly that at some point at least some of the people in the Pictish area spoke Insular Celtic languages related to the more southerly Brythonic languages. Columba, a Gael, used an interpreter in Pictland according to Bede (however, more recent historians have suggested that Columba did not necessarily use an interpreter but had instead learned the language himself). Bede also stated that Pictish was a distinct language from that spoken by the Britons, the Irish, and the English.

Other suggestions hold that Pictish may have been more similar to Gaulish than the Brythonic languages,, that it may correspond to one or more surviving pre-Indo-European languages, descending from the language of the Bronze Age population of Scotland., or that it was an Eastern Iranian or Thracian language based on the medieval tradition that the Picts originally came from Thrace.