Editing Shelta (section)

==Origins and history==
[[Linguist]]s have been documenting Shelta since at least the 1870s. The first works were published in 1880 and 1882 by Charles Leland.<ref name="Queen's" /> [[Celtic studies|Celticist]] [[Kuno Meyer]] and [[Romani language|Romani]] expert [[John Sampson (linguist)|John Sampson]] both assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Meyer |first=Kuno |author-link=Kuno Meyer |date=1909 |title=The secret languages of Ireland |journal=[[Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society]] |series=New Series |volume=2 |pages=241–246}}</ref>

In the earliest but undocumented period, linguists surmise that the Traveller community was [[Irish language|Irish-speaking]] until a period of widespread [[bilingualism]] in Irish and [[Hiberno-English]], and [[Scots language]] in Scotland set in, leading to [[Creole language|creolisation]] (possibly with a trilingual stage).<ref name="Queen's" /> The resulting language is referred to as Old Shelta, and it is suspected that this stage of the language displayed distinctive features, such as non-English syntactic and morphological features, no longer found in Shelta.<ref name="Queen's" />

Within the [[diaspora]], various sub-branches of Shelta exist. Shelta in England is increasingly undergoing [[anglicisation]]. American Irish-Traveller's Cant, originally synonymous with Shelta, has by now been almost fully anglicised.<ref name="McArthur" />