• In the language itself: Gàidhlig
• ISO 639-3 standard: gla

• Indo-European → Celitic. See scot1245 at Glottolog for more information.

Gaelic is spoken mainly in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It is a Celtic language closely related to Irish and Manx, and more distantly related to Welsh, Breton and Cornish.

Map shows the proportion of respondents in the 2011 census aged 3 and above who stated that they can speak Scottish Gaelic. Map was created by SkateTier, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

• In 2011, about 158,000 Scots spoke Gaelic, compared to about 59,000 in 2001 ¹⁾.
• This corresponds to 1.13% of the Scottish population, compared to 1.20% in 2001.

Gaelic-medium primary education was first introduced in the traditional heartlands of the language in the mid 1970's, and soon followed in the wake of Gaels who had migrated to urban and Lowland areas. Due to strong support from Scottish parents for Gaelic medium education, additional Gaelic-medium schools were opened, and in 1999/2000, 59 Gaelic-medium schools existed throughout Scotland. ²⁾

Scottish Gaelic is covered under Part III of the Charter.

Download the latest Council of Europe report 2014 about the United Kingdom.

Gaelic Language Act 2005:

• names Gaelic an official language of Scotland;
• assigns to the Bòrd na Gàidhlig the responsibility to promote Gaelic, monitor its development, and to maintain a language plan.

According to the census from 2011, 2500 children will be learning Gaelic in 2012 and 2013, opposed to 24 children in 1985.³⁾. In 2007 MacCaluim (2007) estimated that about 700 learners obtained fluency.