Almost all applications support Gaelic accents. Guidelines for typing and using accents are given below.
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About Gaelic
Gaelic vs. Scots
Scottish Gaelic is a Goedelic Celtic language poken in the Scottish Highlands. Gaelic is closely related to Irish and more distantly related to Welsh, Breton and Cornish. In fact, many words in Irish and Gaelic are identical, but spelled with differently angled accents.
Note that there is also a language called Scots (Lallans) which is NOT Celtic, but a close relative of English. See the Old English page for information about Scots.
Gaelic Links
Windows ALT Codes
In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code from the number keypad can be used to type a non-English character in any Windows application.
See the detailed instructions on the ALT Code How To for complete information on implementing the code. Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.
Note: Modern Gaelic spelling only uses the grave accent, but older spellings included é and ó.
Alt Codes for typing Gaelic Characters
Vwl | ALT Code |
---|---|
À | ALT+0192 |
È | ALT+0200 |
É | ALT+0201 |
Ì | ALT+0204 |
Ò | ALT+0210 |
Ó | ALT+0211 |
Ù | ALT+0217 |
Vwl | ALT Code |
---|---|
à | ALT+0224 |
è | ALT+0232 |
é | ALT+0233 |
ì | ALT+0236 |
ò | ALT+0242 |
ó | ALT+0243 |
ù | ALT+0249 |
Sym | ALT Code |
---|---|
£ | ALT+0163 |
€ | ALT+0128 |
Windows International Keyboard Codes
In order to use these codes you must activate the U.S. international keyboard. Once the U.S. International keyboard has been activated, you can use the codes below.
Character | Description |
---|---|
Grave (Backwards) Accent |
(`+V) – Type grave key (upper right), then the vowel. |
£ | Control+RightAlt+4 |
€ |
Control+RightAlt+5 |
Acute (Forwards) Accent |
(‘+V) – Type apostrophe (singe quote), then the vowel. |
Macintosh Accent Codes
Here are the basic Mac Option codes for Modern Irish accents.
Character | Description |
---|---|
Grave (Backwards) Accent |
Type Option+`, then then the vowel. For instance, to type à hold down Option+` then type lowercase A. To type À, hold down |
Acute (Forwards) Accent |
Type Option+E, then the vowel. |
£ |
Option+3 |
€ |
Shift+Control+2 (may not work for older System 9 fonts) |
HTML Accent Codes
Unicode Encoding
If you use long marks, Unicode (utf-8
) is the required encoding for Web sites. If the following encodings are used instead, you may encounter display problems:
Avoid These
-
iso-8859-1
(Latin 1), iso-8859-15
(Latin with euro (€) symbol)win-1252
(Windows 1)
Note: There is a "Celtic" Latin-8/Latin-14 standard (ISO-8859-14
), but it has been supplanted by Unicode. Few applications support this standard.
Language Tags
Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently.
Language Codes:
gd
(Scottish Gaelic)sga
(Old Irish/Sean Gaeilge)mga
(Middle Irish)
HTML Entity Codes
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you
want to type fàilte you would type fàilte;.
The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because à is number 192,
fÀilte can also be used to input fàilte. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
Entity Codes for typing Gaelic characters
Vwl | ALT Code | À | À (192) |
---|---|
È | È (200) |
É | É (201) |
Ì | Ì (204) |
Ò | Ò (210) |
Ó | Ó (211) |
Ù | Ù (217) |
Vwl | ALT Code |
---|---|
à | à (224) |
è | è (232) |
é | é(233) |
ì | ì(236) |
ò | ò (242) |
ó | ó (243) |
ù | ù (249) |
Sym | ALT Code | £ | £ (163) |
---|---|
€ | € |