Scottish Women - The Ethnic Groups of Scotland

The Ethnic Groups of Scotland

Further information: Genetic history of the British Isles and Prehistoric settlement of Great Britain and Ireland

In the Early Middle Ages, Scotland had several ethnic or cultural groups labelled as such in contemporary sources, namely the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, with the Angles settling in the southeast of the country. Culturally, these peoples are grouped according to language. Most of Scotland until the 13th century spoke Celtic languages and these included, at least initially, the Britons, as well as the Gaels and the Picts. Germanic peoples included the Angles of Northumbria, who settled in south-eastern Scotland in the region between the Firth of Forth to the north and the River Tweed to the south. They also occupied the south-west of Scotland up to and including the Plain of Kyle and their language, Old English, was the earliest form of the language which eventually became known as Scots. Later the Norse arrived in the north and west in quite significant numbers, recently discovered to have left about thirty percent of men in the Outer Hebrides with a distinct, Norse marker in their DNA. The evidence in the Northern Isles is higher.

Use of the Gaelic language spread throughout nearly the whole of Scotland by the 9th century, reaching a peak in the 11th to 13th centuries, but was never the language of the south-east of the country.

After the division of Northumbria between Scotland and England by King Edgar (or after the later Battle of Carham; it is uncertain, but most medieval historians now accept the earlier 'gift' by Edgar) the Scottish kingdom encompassed a great number of English people, with larger numbers quite possibly arriving after the Norman invasion of England (Contemporary populations cannot be estimated so we cannot tell which population thenceforth formed the majority). South-east of the Firth of Forth then in Lothian and the Borders (OE: Loðene), a northern variety of Old English, also known as Early Scots, was spoken.

The Northern Isles and some parts of Caithness were Norn-speaking (the west of Caithness was Gaelic-speaking into the 20th Century, as were some small communities in parts of the Central Highlands). From 1200 to 1500 the Early Scots language spread across the lowland parts of Scotland between Galloway and the Highland line, being used by Barbour in his historical epic, 'The Brus' in the late 1300s in Aberdeen.

From 1500 until recent years, Scotland was commonly divided by language into two groups of people, Gaelic-speaking (formerly called Scottis by English speakers and known by many Lowlanders in the eighteenth century as 'Irish') "Highlanders" and the Inglis-speaking, later to be called, Scots-speaking, and later still, English-speaking "Lowlanders". Today, immigrants have brought other languages, but almost every adult throughout Scotland is fluent in the English language.