Scottish Gaelic personal naming system

A formal Gaelic language name consists of a given name and a surname. First names are either native or nativized (i.e. borrowed and made to fit the Gaelic sound system). Surnames are generally patronymic, i.e. they refer to a historical ancestor. The form of a surname varies according to whether its bearer is male (e.g. MacDhòmhnaill "MacDonald") or female (e.g. NicDhòmhnaill "MacDonald") though for some surnames the adjectival form of a name such as Dòmhnallach (adjectival form of MacDonald) can be used for both men and women. However, when used in the female form the first letter is aspirated (if possible).

Gaelic first names chiefly hail from 5 linguistic layers, Goidelic and 4 others, coinciding with the main languages of contact: Latin, Norse, Anglo-Norman and Scots. Unusually, male first names outnumber female first names by about a factor of 2:1.

This layer can be broadly split into three main types:

The first two categories were no longer productive for the most part towards the end of the Old Irish period but the last type persisted, reinforced by the coinage of ecclesiastical names following Christianization.

Quite a number of names still common hail from the period of Norse contact:

Names from this layer include:

Scots names which have been borrowed into Gaelic include:

Names which were borrowed from Latin include:

A fair number of Gaelic names were borrowed into English at different periods (e.g. Kenneth, Duncan, Donald, Malcolm, Calum, Lachlan, Alasdair, Iain, Eilidh), although it can sometimes be difficult to tell if the donor language was Irish or Scottish Gaelic (e.g. Deirdre, Rory, Kennedy, Bridget/Bride, Aiden). On occasion, the same name was borrowed more than once due to misinterpretation of Gaelic morphology. For example, the names Hamish and Mhairi /vɑːri/ are derived from Gaelic Seumas ([ʃeːməs̪]) and Màiri ([maːɾʲɪ]) but rather than borrowing the root forms, the English forms are based on the Gaelic vocative case forms Sheumais ([heːmɪʃ] and Mhàiri ([vaːɾʲɪ]).

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