Middle Irish
Appearance
Language classification |
---|
Indo-European Celtic |
Middle Irish is the name given by historical philologists to the form of the Irish language from the 10th to 16th centuries; it is therefore a contemporary of Middle English. The modern Goidelic languages Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx are all descendants of Middle Irish.
A form of Middle Irish was used as a literary language in Ireland until the 17th century and in Scotland until the 18th century; the Ethnologue gives the name "Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" (and the ISO/DIS 639-3 code ghc
) to this purely written language.