- Language and Society among the Insular Celts AD 400-1000 -
distinctive skills, plain Old Irish is not enough. They have to elevate their language by
the devices I have already discussed. In other words, when they display their word-
craft, they distance themselves from ordinary Old Irish. In straightforwardly didactic
texts, however, such as homilies, in which a language immediately intelligible to the
audience was appropriate, ordinary Old Irish is the medium. The natural deduction is
that standard, non-dialectal Old Irish was the language of the social elite whether of
the des ddna or of the des trebtha. This language was itself not uniform: it has been
shown that even in the Wiirzburg and Milan glosses, the main contemporary sources
of Old Irish, forms characteristic of Middle Irish occur.^143 Yet even here there are no
clear signs of dialect. A natural interpretation is that the later forms were close to the
ordinary spoken language of the elite c.800, while the more standard forms represent
a higher and more conservative style, normal in written texts, but not always observed
in glosses,144 That Old Irish was the language of the nobility, and not just of church-
men, poets and judges, is also suggested by the close familial links between the
nobility and these more privileged elements in the des ddna.^145 Its uniformity must
reflect the ability of the des ddna to move around the country, but its grip on Irish
society as a whole suggests that the upper ranks of the des trebtha considered standard
Old Irish to be a mark of status. My suggestion, therefore, is that Old Irish as we have
it, namely in a standard form, with occasional non-dialectal variations, is the language
both of those elements in the des ddna whose skills were verbal and of the nobility.
Members of both these groups may well also have used their own local dialects, but in
any competitive context they would be much more likely to use the standard.146
An instructive contrast is offered by the fate of the numerous Britons who passed
under English rule in the post-Roman period. Of all the insular Celtic peoples in the
early medieval period, least is known about them; yet their fate was crucial for the
future shape of Britain. The British language of lowland Britain disappeared almost
without trace. True, there are some British place-names; but they are remarkably
few even as far west as Shropshire.^147 The British loan-words in English are even
143 K. McCone, 'The Wiirzburg and Milan glosses: our earliest sources of Mid Irish', Eriu 36
(1987): 85- 106.
144 I have modified McCone's conclusion according to which the later forms belonged to 'a
sub-literary register approximating to popular speech', ibid. 102. One would not expect
glosses to exhibit 'high style', but they still do not reveal dialect.
145 Compare L. Breatnach's discussion of the Uf Buirechan in his 'Canon law and secular law
in early Ireland', Peritia 3 (1984): 439-44, and the general rule discussed by T.M. Charles-
Edwards, 'The Corpus [uris Hibernici', Studia Hibernica 20 (1980): 161-2.
146 Note here P. Russell's suggestion, Celtic Word-Formation: the velar suffixes (Dublin,
1990), 109-10, that nouns in -oc occur only rarely in Old and Middle Irish because they
were formed according to 'a sub-literary derivational pattern'. Since -oc is best attested in
Old Irish as a way of creating hypocoristic forms of personal names, it is likely that its use
was in informal, non-competitive speech. One may compare the way in which Adomnan's
Columba, when speaking to peasants, uses an unusually high proportion of Latin diminu-
tive forms in -ul-, bocula, pauculus, uaccula (Vita S. Columbae, II.20, 21 (perhaps also
compare the misellus homuncio of 11.37).
147 M. Gelling and H.D.G. Foxall, The Place-Names of Shropshire, I (English Place-Name
Society, LXII/LXIII, 1990), xii-xvi.