Scottish Gaelic and its European Cousins

This book examines where Gaelic stands within the family of European languages, tracing its roots to Indo-European languages and showing how firmly it is established within them, rather than being a strange, unrelated outlier. He uses his knowledge of several modern and ancient languages to show the links between them, and to demonstrate the roots of Gaelic in particular. This book will help anyone interested in the history of Scots Gaelic to understand its place within this family of languages, and will be of interest to both the learner and the more experienced reader.

George Robert McLennan (MA Hons, PhD) was born in 1945 and studied Classical Languages at St Andrews and McMaster Universities and Birkbeck College. In addition he obtained three post-doctoral posts at the Universities of Bonn, Urbino and Nsukka (Nigeria). After returning to Scotland, he studied Scottish Gaelic and settled in Argyll with his family. Through the encouragement of his students, he began writing and started a small publishing company and in total wrote six popular books on Scottish Gaelic, its history and its links to other languages. George McLennan died suddenly in 2021 and Scottish Gaelic and its European Cousins was his final work and is published posthumously.