Standard Arabic and Scottish Gaelic: Shared typological features

Abstract

Although Celtic languages and Semitic languages belong to separate language families, they share numerous typological similarities that are common to Semitic languages but not shared by Standard Indo-European languages. The occurrence and the reasons for these similarities have been the focus of a whole research field, concerned with linguistic, historical, and anthropological hypotheses about possible reasons for said similarities, as well as with linguistic analyses and comparisons of specific Celtic and Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Welsh and Breton. This thesis aims to fill the knowledge gap concerning any similarities between Standard Arabic and Scottish Gaelic on the basis of existing reference grammars and academic research. An overview of the research background introduces the two languages and then accounts for a number of scholarly contributions concerned with the substrate hypothesis, or contact theory, as the reason for similar grammatical features shared by Semitic and Celtic languages. The methodological approach section presents the features to be examined as well as the sources employed for the investigation. Each feature is subsequently outlined descriptively and any similarities occurring in the two languages are thus highlighted. The results are then compared, where applicable, to the literature about Semitic/Celtic similarities that mention Arabic and/or Scottish Gaelic and discussed from a typological perspective. As a result, the similarities found between Standard Arabic and Scottish Gaelic are deemed as insufficient evidence for the validity of the substrate hypothesis.