Having been spoken in Ireland as far back as possibly 2600 BC, Goidelic – Gaeilge has a long historic legacy that is inseparable from the country’s identity, and thus it can still be found intertwined in the everyday lives of most Irish people, even if indirectly.
It is not known with any certainty when the Goidelic (or Q-Celtic) language developed in prehistoric Ireland, or how the Gaels came to be the dominant culture.
Bronze Age archaeological finds seem to indicate a strong continuity with native Bronze Age traditions in Ireland. No evidence of other large scale immigrations took place and many scholars deny Celtic speech originated solely from La Tene culture, whose migrations started at about 400 BC. Instead, those scholars propose Celtic languages evolved gradually and simultaneously over a large area by way of a common heritage and close social, political and religious links. Although controversial, the theory fits. According to its proponents the archaeological evidence provides little support for westward migrations of Celtic people .
Estimates of the arrival of proto-Gaelic in Ireland vary widely from the introduction of agriculture circa 7000-6000 BC to around the first few centuries BC. Little can be said with certainty, as the language now known as Old Irish, ancestral to modern Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, first began to be properly recorded with the Christianisation of Ireland in the 4th Century AD, with the introduction of the Roman script. Old Irish does appear in a specialized written form, using a unique script known as Ogham. The oldest examples of Ogham have survived in the form of memorial inscriptions or short epitaphs on pillar-like stone monuments.
This form of written Old Irish is thought to have been in use as early as 1000 BC.
The culture of Ireland is unique in many ways. Most notably in that Iron Age, Britain and Western Europe were swamped by the Latin/Roman culture. Thus Western European and British traditions of Early Iron Age, Bronze Age, and earlier cultures were lost. Not so in Ireland, which avoided being overrun by the Latin/Roman cultural steamroller.
