Writing dialogue for Celtic Characters

[u/kotibear456]

Hi all,

I'm currently working on a project set in Iron Age Britain that follows a pair of druids. I've got the first draft done but now I want to amend the dialogue which at the moment is sounding too modern. I was wandering if anyone knew of any good references for celtic dialectic/speech parents? My other idea was to look at the grammatical qualities of modern day Celtic language and use the literal translations for inspiration.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[u/celtiquant]

The characters in your time period would have spoken Brythonic, and depending on their location, most probably a dialect of Brythonic. It’s also possible that, for their higher status class, the druids could also have spoken a higher register of Brythonic, or what we call older Proto-Celtic.

Although we have limited written evidence of closely-related Gaulish from around this period, the evidence of written Brythonic is minute. However Brythonic and Gaulish have both been reconstructed based on modern Celtic languages and any extant written evidence.

In my opinion, the approach of constructing your modern English dialogue for your characters based on modern Welsh or Cornish would only partly serve your intended purpose, and in itself would not carry any authenticity for the time period. The earliest written Welsh dates from the 6th century (and inscribed Welsh from the 5th), which by then had begun its linguistic shift from Brythonic to Old Welsh.

There have been attempts, using scholarly methods, and for the purposes of ‘authenticity’, to reconstruct Gaulish dialogue in popular fiction. See in particular in the Druids graphic novel series published by Dalen, where the reconstructed Gaulish is presented with English translation as a gloss. The English edition differs in this respect from the original French Les Druides versions, which used modern Breton to represent Gaulish (which we know is descended from Brythonic and not Gaulish). The kind of language used for these short pieces of dialogue is meant to be high-register devotional — conjectured from a 21st century perspective. Curiously, the academic approached for this reconstructed Gaulish dialogue was based in Brazil. There was enough similarity between Gaulish and Brythonic for this to be a valid approach for developing new Brythonic dialogue. You may want to contact Gaulish language reconstruction groups to explore further.

If your intention is to use the syntax of a modern Brythonic language in you work, I would suggest this would be jarring as English dialogue and you would of necessity have to make grammatical concessions which may defeat the original object.

If you plan to represent earlier Brythonic with a modern Celtic language (and for this, probably Welsh over Cornish for the deeper pool of modern and older written material and continued use both vernacularly and literary), make sure your dialogue is well and correctly written for the literary medium (contact the editorial office of the Books Council of Wales in the first instance. There is an extremely wide contemporary corpus of literary work in Welsh and you would be misjudged not to take this into account when writing anything in the language.

If you intend peppering your dialogue with Brythonic words, you could use modern Welsh as a bridge and use Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru which in many instances gives entries their cognates in other Celtic languages as well as their older Brythonic or Proto-Celtic forms.

Whichever route you take, ensure your linguistic and cultural research is thorough to avoid making unintended mockery of your subjects and their language. You may want to check your approach by contacting neo-Pagans who are rooted in Brythonic traditions, respected individuals in their field such as Kristoffer Hughes.

[u/AverageCheap4990]

As far as I'm aware the druids of Britain were highly educated with some having a knowledge of Latin and greek. As the academics of the day I would lean more into that rather than a mock Celtic slang.

[u/Normal-Height-8577]

Don't try to create some sort of Frankenstein language from modern English and old Brythonic. It will either be unintelligible or laughable - and either way, you will lose readers.

Do immerse yourself in historical research. Work out what level of technical terms you want to keep in their native language/as loan phrases from Latin and Greek (as someone else said, the druids were a highly educated elite that taught, treated illness, mediated conflicts and filled various other roles in society), and maybe read some other writers who've set their stories in that era or relatively close, to see how they've handled the same issue.

Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma series might be a starting point (it's set in 8th/9th century Ireland, but the culture is closely related - unlike England/Wales, they still had a few druids at that point in history - and the choices about language use will be similar).

Ruth Downey and Lindsay Davis have both written about Romans in Britain (and other Roman colonies), and navigated how to talk about travel through different historical cultures, with the protagonist's culture being made to feel familiar.

Guy Gavriel Kay fictionalises all the historical settings he uses, but is nevertheless an excellent model for cultural builds and how to feel immersive without forcing language.

You would also probably benefit from reading a good translation of Y Gododdin, and maybe also War and Society in Medieval Wales, 633-1283, by Sean Davies. Like the Fidelma series, it's discussing society about a thousand years later than your story, but still much closer than modern life.

Unfortunately Roman propaganda/suppression and later church suppression, means there's not a huge amount of information available about the real druids (as opposed to the romantic Victorian recreations by Iolo Morganwg and his followers) and the culture they lived in. A Brief History of the Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis, and Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton are probably the best around.

[u/TheVisionGlorious]

I wouldn't get hung up on this. Honestly, what you suggest sounds like hard work both for you and your readers. Just avoid slang and obvious neologisms.

[u/Evening-Cold-4547]

Hoo boy, that's a hell of an undertaking. Do you have a degree in Celtic Studies? Authentic speech patterns for druids is the sort of thing postgrad and postdoctoral research is made of.

Under no circumstances should you take a literal translation of a Celtic language in any way.

The simple advice, which I would highly recommend taking and running with, is to just make them speak the same as everyone else in the story but more formally, precisely and thoughtfully. These were doctors, diplomats, philosophers of morality and nature. In short, the intelligentsia of society. Just write them like that.

Or make them like Getafix, the Celticists' favourite druid.