Shelta language
Encyclopedia
Shelta is a language
spoken by travelling communities
, particularly in Ireland
, but also parts of Great Britain
. It is widely known as the Cant
, to its native speakers in Ireland as Gammon and to the linguistic community as Shelta. It was often used as a cryptolect to exclude outsiders from comprehending conversations between travellers, although this aspect is frequently over-emphasized. The exact number of native speakers is hard to determine due to sociolinguistic issues but Ethnologue
puts the number of speakers in Ireland at 6,000, and 86,000 worldwide.
Linguistically Shelta is today seen as a creole language
that stems from a community of travelling people in Ireland that was originally predominantly Irish Gaelic speaking which went through a period of widespread bilingualism that resulted in a language based heavily on Hiberno-English
with heavy influences from Irish and Gaelic. As different varieties of Shelta display different degrees of anglicization (see below), it is hard to determine the extent of the Irish/Gaelic substratum
but the Oxford Companion to the English Language puts it as 2,000–3,000 words.
. Speakers of the language also refer to it as (the) Cant, Gammon or Tarri. Amongst linguists, the name Shelta is the most commonly used term.
Variants of the above names and additional names include: Bog Latin, Caintíotar, Gammon, Sheldru, Shelter, Shelteroch Pavee, the Ould Thing, Tinker's Cant.
are convinced that Irish siúl ʃuːlʲ "to walk" is at the root, either via a term such as siúltóir ʃuːlˠt̪ˠoːrʲ "a walker" or the verbal adjective siúlta (cf an lucht siúil "the walking people" ənˠ lˠuxt̪ ʃuːlˠt̪ˠə, the traditional Irish term for Travellers). The 'Dictionary of Hiberno-English' cites it as possibly a corruption of the word "Celt".
and Romani
expert John Sampson
both assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.
In the earliest but undocumented period linguists surmise that the Traveller community was Irish speaking until a period of widespread bilingualism in Irish and Hiberno-English (or Scots in Scotland) set in, leading to creolisation
(possibly with a trilingual stage). 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.
Within the diaspora
, various sub-branches of Shelta exist. English Shelta is increasingly suffering from anglicization whereas American Irish-Traveller's Cant, originally also synonymous with Shelta, has by now been almost fully anglicized.
where sounds are transposed (for example gop "kiss" from Irish póg) or the addition of sounds (for example gather "father" from Irish athair). Other examples include lackeen "girl" from Irish cailín, and the word rodas "door" from Irish doras.
It also contains a certain number of lexical items from Romani such as the term gadje "non-Traveller" or "kushti" (from the Romanichal word for "good"), though the Travellers are not actually Romani and Romanichal would call Irish Travellers themselves gaje as they are not Romani in ethnicity.
in Shelta as it occurred a century ago, current Shelta, and modern English and Irish versions for comparison. The 19th century Shelta version shows a high Shelta lexical content while the Cant version shows a much lower Shelta lexical content. Both versions are adapted from Hancock who notes that the Cant reproduction is not exactly representative of actual speech in normal situations.
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
spoken by travelling communities
Irish Traveller
Irish Travellers are a traditionally nomadic people of ethnic Irish origin, who maintain a separate language and set of traditions. They live predominantly in the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States.-Etymology:...
, particularly in Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, but also parts of Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
. It is widely known as the Cant
Cant (language)
A Cant is the jargon or argot of a group, often implying its use to exclude or mislead people outside the group.-Derivation in Celtic linguistics:...
, to its native speakers in Ireland as Gammon and to the linguistic community as Shelta. It was often used as a cryptolect to exclude outsiders from comprehending conversations between travellers, although this aspect is frequently over-emphasized. The exact number of native speakers is hard to determine due to sociolinguistic issues but Ethnologue
Ethnologue
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...
puts the number of speakers in Ireland at 6,000, and 86,000 worldwide.
Linguistically Shelta is today seen as a creole language
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
that stems from a community of travelling people in Ireland that was originally predominantly Irish Gaelic speaking which went through a period of widespread bilingualism that resulted in a language based heavily on Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...
with heavy influences from Irish and Gaelic. As different varieties of Shelta display different degrees of anglicization (see below), it is hard to determine the extent of the Irish/Gaelic substratum
Substratum
In linguistics, a stratum or strate is a language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum is a language which has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum...
but the Oxford Companion to the English Language puts it as 2,000–3,000 words.
Names and etymology
The language is known by a large number of names. People outside the community often know the language as (the) Cant, the etymology of which is still a matter of debateCant (language)
A Cant is the jargon or argot of a group, often implying its use to exclude or mislead people outside the group.-Derivation in Celtic linguistics:...
. Speakers of the language also refer to it as (the) Cant, Gammon or Tarri. Amongst linguists, the name Shelta is the most commonly used term.
Variants of the above names and additional names include: Bog Latin, Caintíotar, Gammon, Sheldru, Shelter, Shelteroch Pavee, the Ould Thing, Tinker's Cant.
Etymology
The word Shelta appears in print for the first time 1882 in the book The Gypsies by the "gypsiologist" Charles Leland, who claimed to have discovered it as the "fifth Celtic tongue". The etymology of the word has long been a matter of debate but modern CelticistsCeltic Studies
Celtic studies is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to a Celtic people. This ranges from linguistics, literature and art history archaeology and history, the focus lying on the study of the various Celtic languages, living and extinct...
are convinced that Irish siúl ʃuːlʲ "to walk" is at the root, either via a term such as siúltóir ʃuːlˠt̪ˠoːrʲ "a walker" or the verbal adjective siúlta (cf an lucht siúil "the walking people" ənˠ lˠuxt̪ ʃuːlˠt̪ˠə, the traditional Irish term for Travellers). The 'Dictionary of Hiberno-English' cites it as possibly a corruption of the word "Celt".
Origins and history
Linguists have been documenting Shelta since at least the 1870s, with the first works published in 1880 and 1882 by Charles Leland. Celtic language expert Kuno MeyerKuno Meyer
Kuno Meyer was a German scholar, distinguished in the field of Celtic philology and literature. His pro-German stance at the start of World War I while traveling in the United States was a source of controversy.-Biography:...
and Romani
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....
expert John Sampson
John Sampson (linguist)
John Sampson was an Irish linguist. As a scholar he is best known for The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales , an authoritative grammar of the Welsh-Romany language. It was written with the collaboration of Edward Wood, who died in 1902...
both assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.
In the earliest but undocumented period linguists surmise that the Traveller community was Irish speaking until a period of widespread bilingualism in Irish and Hiberno-English (or Scots in Scotland) set in, leading to creolisation
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
(possibly with a trilingual stage). 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.
Within the diaspora
Diaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
, various sub-branches of Shelta exist. English Shelta is increasingly suffering from anglicization whereas American Irish-Traveller's Cant, originally also synonymous with Shelta, has by now been almost fully anglicized.
Linguistic features
Sociologist Sharon Gmelch describes the Travellers' language as follows:Lexicon
Many Shelta words have been disguised using techniques such as back slangBack slang
Back slang is an English coded language in which the written word is spoken phonemically backwards. It is thought to have originated in Victorian England, being used mainly by market sellers, such as butchers and greengrocers, to have private conversations behind their customers' backs and pass off...
where sounds are transposed (for example gop "kiss" from Irish póg) or the addition of sounds (for example gather "father" from Irish athair). Other examples include lackeen "girl" from Irish cailín, and the word rodas "door" from Irish doras.
It also contains a certain number of lexical items from Romani such as the term gadje "non-Traveller" or "kushti" (from the Romanichal word for "good"), though the Travellers are not actually Romani and Romanichal would call Irish Travellers themselves gaje as they are not Romani in ethnicity.
Grammar
Shelta shares its main syntactic features with Hiberno-English and the majority of its morphological features such as -s plurals and past tense markers. Compare:| Shelta | English |
|---|---|
| the gawlya beeged the greid | the child stole the money |
| glingy | bra |
Vowels
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
N.-front Near-front vowel A near-front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as in a front vowel, but slightly further back in the mouth. The near-front vowels identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:*... |
Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | u | ||
| Near-close Near-close vowel A near-close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted. Near-close vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully close vowels... |
ɪ | |||
| Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel... |
e | o | ||
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
ə | |||
| Open-Mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel... |
ɛ | ɔ | ||
| Near-open Near-open vowel A near-open vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-open vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to an open vowel, but slightly more constricted. Near-open vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully open vowels... |
æ | |||
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
ɑ ɒ |
Loanwords
Some Shelta words have been borrowed by mainstream English speakers, such as the word "bloke" meaning "a man" in the mid-19th century, originally likely to have been derived from the Irish word buachaill "boy".Orthography
There is no standard orthography. Broadly speaking, Shelta can either be written following an Irish-type orthography or an English-type orthography. For example, the word for "married" can either be spelled lósped or lohsped, a "woman" can either be spelled byohr or beoir.Comparison texts
Below are reproductions of the Lord's PrayerLord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
in Shelta as it occurred a century ago, current Shelta, and modern English and Irish versions for comparison. The 19th century Shelta version shows a high Shelta lexical content while the Cant version shows a much lower Shelta lexical content. Both versions are adapted from Hancock who notes that the Cant reproduction is not exactly representative of actual speech in normal situations.
| Shelta (old) | Shelta (current) | English English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria... |
Irish Irish language Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mwilsha's gater, swart a manyath, | Our gathra, who cradgies in the manyak-norch, | Our Father, who is in heaven, | Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh, |
| Manyi graw a kradji dilsha's manik. | We turry kerrath about your moniker. | Hallowed be your name. | Go naofar d'ainm, |
| Graw bi greydid, sheydi laadu | Let's turry to the norch where your jeel cradgies, | Your kingdom come, your will be done, | Go dtaga do ríocht, Go ndéantar do thoil |
| Az aswart in manyath. | And let your jeel shans get greydied nosher same as it is where you cradgie. | On earth as it is in heaven. | ar an talamh, mar a dhéantar ar neamh. |
| Bag mwilsha talosk minyart goshta dura. | Bug us eynik to lush this thullis, | Give us today our daily bread. | Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu, |
| Geychel aur shaaku areyk mwilsha | And turri us you're nijesh sharrig for the gammy eyniks we greydied | And forgive us our sins, | Agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha |
| Geychas needjas greydi gyamyath mwilsha. | Just like we ain't sharrig at the gammi needies that greydi the same to us. | As we forgive those who sin against us. | Mar a mhaithimidne dár bhféichiúna féin |
| Nijesh solk mwil start gyamyath, | Nijesh let us soonie eyniks that'll make us greydi gammy eyniks, | Save us from the time of trial, | Ach ná lig sinn i gcathú |
| Bat bog mwilsha ahim gyamyath. | But solk us away from the taddy. | and deliver us from evil. | saor sinn ó olc. |
| Diyil the sridag, taajirath an manyath | For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, | Mar is leatsa an ríocht, an chumhacht, agus an ghlóir | |
| Gradum a gradum. | now and forever. | Trí shaol na saol. | |
| Amen. | Amen. |
Sample Phrases
| Shelta | English |
|---|---|
| Grāltʹa | Hello |
| Slum hawrum | Good Morning |
| Slum dorahōg | Good Evening |
| Lʹesk mwīlša a hu? | How are you? |
| Mwī’lin topa, munʹia du hu | I'm doing well, thank you |
| Yoordjeele's soonee-in munya | It's good to see you |
| Muni kon | Good night |
| Dhalyōn munʹia | God Bless You |
| Stafa tapa hu | Long life to you! |
| Bin lar't ang lart | Good Health |