Do the people of Orkney speak Gaelic?
No. Gaelic was never spoken in Orkney, unless the language of the Picts – the inhabitants of the islands before the Norsemen took them – was an early form of Gaelic. This is itself highly debatable. The Norse settled the isles from the 8th century onwards and brought with them their own language, Old Norse, which replaced the Pictish language. Old Norse adapted over the years into the language known as Norn, which remained the language of the rural Orcadians until finally dying out in the 18th century. Orkney s placenames are more or less completely derived from Old Norse with only handful of possible Gaelic “borrowed” words.
