The Boys' Brigade Mountaineering Club

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a reconstructed language that is believed to be the ancestor of many languages spoken throughout Europe, the Middle East and India.  It has many branches.  The ones that relate to mountain names in Britain are Proto-Germanic and Proto-Celtic.

Most of the commonly spoken European languages, including English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish, are believed to have a common ancestor in PIE. English and German are West Germanic languages that descended from PIE via Proto-Germanic, while languages like French, Italian and Spanish (not shown in the chart below as they do not impact on British and Irish mountain names) are Romance languages descended from Latin, which descended from PIE via Proto-Italo-Celtic and then Proto-Italic.

The chart below shows the relationships between the languages that can form parts of mountain names in Britain. Click on it to view a large PDF version of this chart in a new window for some furher more detailed notes about these languages (with dates and more history).

The Celtic languages (Cornish, Cumbric, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh) descended from PIE via Proto-Celtic and there may well have been a predecessor of both these Proto languages called Proto-Italo-Celtic. For more information about the historical spread of the languages of Britain and Ireland, see A Brief History of British and Irish Languages from Starkey Comics.

Please note that, on this website, we will often (for convenience) refer to Scottish Gaelic as just Gaelic. 

Proto-Germanic evolved into English via Proto-West-Germanic and Anglo-Frisian (all reconstructed languages). English then evolved from Anglo-Frisian though Old and Middle English. Old English that was spoken in the lowlands and east of Scotland evolved into Scots. Scots was also carried to Northern Ireland via Protestant migrations.

Proto-Germanic also evolved into Proto-Norse (another reconstructed language) and then into Old Norse, spoken originally in Scandinavia which evolved into Old East and Old West Norse.  The latter was was spread to many areas of Western Europe, Iceland and Greenland by the Vikings including Normandy, where it borrowed words from Old French and Gaulish (a Continental Celtic language) to become Norman French (which was spoken by the aristocracy in England following the Norman Conquest) and dramatically extended the vocabulary of Middle English.  Old West Norse also evolved into Norn in Caithness (the far North East of Scotland) and the Orkney and Sheltand Islands.

Proto-Celtic evolved into two branches (Continental Celtic on Mainland Europe and Insular Celtic in Britain and Ireland).  Continental Celtic languages (which were once spoken throughout Europe) are all now extinct everywhere, resulting in Britain and Ireland being the only parts of Europe where Celtic languages survived. Here Proto-Celtic evolved into Insular Celtic, which then evolved into 2 branches Common Brittonic in Great Britain and Primitive Irish in Ireland.  They are classified as P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languags because of the way they treat interrogative pronouns (who, where, when, what and how).  Irish and its descendant languages use words that start with a Q sound for these pronouns while Brittonic languages evolved to use a P sound.

Common Brittonic then evolved into Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric and very probably Pictish. Welsh evolved from Western Brittonic to become Old Welsh, and became Middle Welsh, when it started to borrow words from Middle English. Cumbric also evolved from Western Brittonic, until it became extinct under pressure from English in Cumbria and Gaelic in Scotland.

Primitive Southwestern Brittonic, spoken throughout South West England, became extinct in Dorset and Somerset, but evolved into Cornish in Cornwall and Devon. Primitive Southwestern Brittonic was also taken to Brittany and developed as Breton, after people from South West England colonised the Armorica area of what is now France.

Primitive Irish evolved into Old Irish and then was taken to Scotland and the Isle of Man via migration.  These languages then diverged from Old Irish into Scottish Gaelic and Manx.

Scottish Gaelic and Irish, both evolved from Middle Irish, while Scots and modern English evolved from Middle English. The other language that could appear in Scottish mountain names is Pictish, which is an extinct language spoken by Pictish people in North Scotland before Gaelic displaced it. Nobody is completely sure what type of language Pictish was, as there is almost no written evidence of it. It was earlier thought to be a non-Indo-European Iron Age language in existence in Britain before the arrival of the Celts, but it is now generally thought to have been an Insular Celtic language descended from Common Brittonic, from which Welsh and Cornish evolved.