Editing Pictish language (section)

{{Short description|Extinct language spoken by the Picts}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{Infobox language
| name             = Pictish
| region           = [[Scotland]], north of the [[Firth of Forth|Forth]]-[[Firth of Clyde|Clyde]] line
| ethnicity        = [[Picts]]
| era              = {{circa|4th}} to 10th century, extinct by {{circa|1100 AD}}
| familycolor      = Indo-European
| fam1             = [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]]
| fam2             = [[Celtic languages|Celtic]]
| fam3             = [[Insular Celtic]]
| fam4             = [[Brittonic languages|Brittonic]]
| script           = Some scattered instances of [[Ogham]] script<br />
Some possible instances of [[Latin]] script<ref name="xpi19" />
| iso3             = xpi
| linglist         = xpi
| glotto           = pict1238
| glottorefname    = Pictish
| extinct          = by {{circa|1100 AD}}
}}

'''Pictish''' is an [[extinct language|extinct]] [[Brittonic languages|Brittonic Celtic]] language spoken by the [[Picts]], the people of eastern and northern [[Scotland]] from [[late antiquity]] to the [[Early Middle Ages]]. Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of [[toponymy|geographical]] and [[anthroponymy|personal names]] found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the [[Picts#Kings and kingdoms|kingdoms of the Picts]]. Such evidence, however, shows the language to be an [[Insular Celtic language]] – probably a variant of the [[Common Brittonic|Brittonic language]] once spoken in most of Great Britain.<ref name="cpns">{{cite book |last1=Watson |first1=W. J. |last2=Taylor |first2=Simon |title=The Celtic Place-names of Scotland |date=2011 |publisher=Birlinn |isbn=9781906566357}}</ref>

The prevailing view in the second half of the 20th century was that Pictish was a non-[[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] [[language isolate]], or that a non-Indo-European Pictish and Brittonic Pictish language coexisted.

Pictish was replaced by – or subsumed into – [[Middle Irish|Gaelic]] in the latter centuries of the Pictish period. During the reign of [[Donald II of Scotland]] (889–900), outsiders began to refer to the region as the [[kingdom of Alba]] rather than the [[kingdom of the Picts]]. However, the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly. A process of [[Gaelicisation]] (which may have begun generations earlier) was clearly under way during the reigns of Donald II and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and the Pictish identity was forgotten.<ref>{{harvnb|Broun|1997}}; {{harvnb|Broun|2001}}; {{harvnb|Forsyth|2005|pp=28–32}}; {{harvnb|Woolf|2001}}; cf. {{harvnb|Bannerman|1999}}, {{lang|la|passim}}, representing the "traditional" view.</ref>