Shelta

The language is known by various names. People outside the Irish Traveller community often refer to it as (the) Cant, the etymology of which is a matter of debate.[5] Speakers of the language refer to it as (the) Cant,[4] Gammon[4][5] or Tarri.[4] Amongst linguists, the name Shelta is the most commonly used term.[5]

Variants of the above names and additional names include Bog Latin,[4] Gammon,[7] Sheldru,[4] Shelter,[4] Shelteroch,[4] the Ould Thing,[4] and Tinker's Cant.[4]

Linguists have been documenting Shelta since at least the 1870s. The first works were published in 1880 and 1882 by Charles Leland.[5] Celticist Kuno Meyer and Romani expert John Sampson both assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.[10]

In the earliest but undocumented period linguists surmise that the Traveller community was Irish-speaking until a period of widespread bilingualism in Irish and Hiberno-English (or Scots in Scotland) set in, leading to creolisation (possibly with a trilingual stage).[5] The resulting language is referred to as Old Shelta and it is suspected that this stage of the language displayed distinctive features, such as non-English syntactic and morphological features, no longer found in Shelta.[5]

Within the diaspora, various sub-branches of Shelta exist. English Shelta is increasingly undergoing anglicisation, while American Irish-Traveller's Cant, originally also synonymous with Shelta, has by now been almost fully anglicised.[4]

Sociologist Sharon Gmelch describes the Irish Travellers' language as follows:[11]

Irish Travellers use a secret argot or cant known as Gammon. It is used primarily to conceal meaning from outsiders, especially during business transactions and in the presence of police. Most Gammon utterances are terse and spoken so quickly that a non-Traveler might conclude the words merely had been garbled. Most Gammon words were formed from Irish by applying four techniques: reversal, metathesis, affixing, and substitution. In the first, an Irish word is reversed to form a Gammon one – mac, or son, in Irish became kam in Gammon. In the second, consonants or consonant clusters were transposed. Thirdly, a sound or cluster of sounds were either prefixed or suffixed to an Irish word. Some of the more frequently prefixed sounds were s, gr, and g. For example, Obair, work or job, became gruber in Gammon. Lastly, many Gammon words were formed by substituting an arbitrary consonant or consonant cluster in an Irish word. In recent years, modern slang and Romani (the language of the gypsies) words have been incorporated. The grammar and syntax are English. The first vocabulary collected from Irish Travellers was published in 1808, indicating that Gammon dates at least back to the 1700s. But many early Celtic scholars who studied it, including Kuno Meyer, concluded it was much older.

Thus, by design, it is not mutually intelligible with either English or Irish.

Shelta is a secret language. Travellers do not like to share the language with outsiders, named "Buffers", or non-travellers. When speaking Shelta in front of Buffers, Travellers will disguise the structure so as to make it seem like they aren't speaking Shelta at all.[12]

Some Shelta words have been borrowed by mainstream English speakers, such as the word "bloke" meaning "a man" in the mid-19th century.[15]

There is no standard orthography. Broadly speaking, Shelta can either be written following an Irish-type orthography or an English-type orthography. For example, the word for "married" can either be spelled lósped or lohsped, a "woman" can either be spelled byohr or beoir.[5]

Below are reproductions of the Lord's Prayer in Shelta as it occurred a century ago, current Shelta, and modern English and Irish versions for comparison. The 19th century Shelta version shows a high Shelta lexical content while the Cant version shows a much lower Shelta lexical content. Both versions are adapted from Hancock[16] who notes that the Cant reproduction is not exactly representative of actual speech in normal situations.

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• Irish Travellers
• Beurla Reagaird
• Bungi Creole
• Polari

• R. A. Stewart Macalister (1937) The Secret Languages of Ireland: with special reference to the origin and nature of the Shelta language, partly based upon collections and manuscripts of the late John Sampson. Cambridge University Press (reissued by Craobh Rua Books, Armagh, 1997)

• Shelta lexicon and pronunciation guide