The Distinct Variety of Old Irish in the Milan Glosses: Dialect or Register?

The Milan glosses represent one of the canonical texts of Old Irish, alongside the glosses of Wűrzburg and St. Gall, and the relative uniformity amongst the Old Irish corpus as a whole has lead scholars to conclude that Old Irish represents a written standard of the language.

Yet, there are a few distinct ways in which Milan deviates both from expected Old Irish forms, but also from its contemporaries of Wűrzburg and St. Gall. These variations are enough to demostrate that the scribes of Milan were certainly not operating from the same variety of Old Irish as the other two corpora, though whether it be an issue of dialect or a competing standard remains to be seen.

This paper will discuss the variations present within Milan and the problems that surround identifyig them as diatopic markers, and will argue that, at the very least, Milan represents a separate standard of Old Irish that sets it apart from the other glosses with which it is so often compared.