7/28/2015 Gaelic in Disney » celticlifeintl.com http://www.celticlifeintl.com/gaelic-in-disney/ 1/3 HOME MAGAZINE ONLINE COMMUNITY WORLD PEACE TARTAN CONTACT ADVERTISE SUBSCRIBE! GAELIC IN DISNEY When Disney and Pixar launched the computer-animated film Brave in June 2012, the film was praised for its strong flame-haired heroine and its lush landscapes inspired by the Scottish Highlands. This also marked the first time the “Disney treatment” was given to Celtic culture. Dr. Emily McEwan-Fujita explains. The Scottish Gaelic language, a foundation of Scotland’s Celtic culture, appears here and there in the film. To help you make sense of it, I’ll review the use of Gaelic in Brave from my perspective as both a linguistic anthropologist and a Gaelic speaker. The movie is set in ancient Celtic Scotland; we know this because there are bears, which became extinct in Scotland well over a thousand years ago. But Brave, like most Hollywood movies, lacks historical accuracy when it comes to language. The characters in the film speak Scottish English and some Scots. Scots and English belong to the Germanic family of languages, not the Celtic family. The Scots language emerged in Scotland in the 1200s-1500s, and Scottish English in the 1600s, much later than the Celtic languages which have been spoken in Scotland and the rest of Britain since the Iron Age.