Early period Though Gaulish personal names written by Gauls in
Greek script are attested from the region surrounding
Massalia by the 3rd century BC, the first true inscriptions in Gaulish appeared in the 2nd century BC. At least 13 references to Gaulish speech and Gaulish writing can be found in Greek and Latin writers of antiquity. The word "Gaulish" () as a language term is first explicitly used in the in a poem referring to Gaulish letters of the alphabet.
Julius Caesar says in his of 58 BC that the Celts/Gauls and their language are separated from the neighboring
Aquitani and
Belgae by the rivers
Garonne and
Seine/
Marne, respectively. Caesar relates that census accounts written in
Greek script were found among the
Helvetii. He also notes that as of 53 BC the Gaulish
druids used the Greek alphabet for private and public transactions, with the important exception of druidic doctrines, which could only be memorised and were not allowed to be written down. According to the
Recueil des inscriptions gauloises nearly three quarters of Gaulish inscriptions (disregarding coins) are in the Greek alphabet. Later inscriptions dating to
Roman Gaul are mostly in
Latin alphabet and have been found mainly in central France.
Roman period Latin was quickly adopted by the Gaulish aristocracy after the
Gallic Wars to maintain their elite power and influence, with trilingualism in southern Gaul being noted as early as the 1st century BC. Early references to Gaulish in Gaul tend to be made in the context of problems with Greek or Latin fluency until around AD 400, whereas after , Gaulish begins to be mentioned in contexts where Latin has replaced "Gaulish" or "Celtic" (whatever the authors meant by those terms), though at first these only concerned the upper classes. For
Galatia (Anatolia), there is no source explicitly indicating a 5th-century language replacement: • During the last quarter of the 2nd century,
Irenaeus,
bishop of Lugdunum (present-day
Lyon), apologises for his inadequate Greek, being "resident among the Keltae and accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect". • According to the ,
Symphorian of Augustodunum (present-day
Autun) was executed on 22 August 178 for his Christian faith. While he was being led to his execution, "his venerable mother admonished him from the wall assiduously and notable to all (?), saying in the Gaulish speech: Son, son, Symphorianus, think of your God!" (). The Gaulish sentence has been transmitted in a corrupt state in the various manuscripts; as it stands, it has been reconstructed by Thurneysen. According to David Stifter (2012), *mentobeto looks like a Proto-Romance verb derived from Latin 'mind' and 'to have', and it cannot be excluded that the whole utterance is an early variant of Romance, or a mixture of Romance and Gaulish, instead of being an instance of pure Gaulish. On the other hand, is attested in Gaulish (for example in
Endlicher's Glossary), and the author of the , whether or not fluent in Gaulish, evidently expects a non-Latin language to have been spoken at the time. • The Latin author
Aulus Gellius () mentions Gaulish alongside the
Etruscan language in one anecdote, indicating that his listeners had heard of these languages, but would not understand a word of either. • The
Roman History by
Cassius Dio (written AD 207–229) may imply that Cis- and Transalpine Gauls spoke the same language, as can be deduced from the following passages: (1) Book XIII mentions the principle that named tribes have a common government and a common speech, otherwise the population of a region is summarized by a geographic term, as in the case of the Spanish/Iberians. (2) In Books XII and XIV, Gauls between the Pyrenees and the River Po are stated to consider themselves kinsmen. (3) In Book XLVI, Cassius Dio explains that the defining difference between Cis- and Transalpine Gauls is the length of hair and the dress style (i.e., he does not mention any language difference), the Cisalpine Gauls having adopted shorter hair and the Roman toga at an early date (). Potentially in contrast, Caesar described the river Rhone as a frontier between the Celts and . • Writing at some point between and AD 395, Latin poet and scholar
Decimus Magnus Ausonius, from Burdigala (now
Bordeaux), characterizes his deceased father Iulius' ability to speak Latin as , "halting, not fluent"; in
Attic Greek, Iulius felt eloquent enough. This remark is sometimes taken as indicating that the first language of Iulius Ausonius (–378) was Gaulish, but may alternatively mean his first language was Greek. As a physician, he would have cultivated Greek as part of his professional proficiency. • In the Dialogi de Vita Martini I, 26 by
Sulpicius Severus (AD 363–425), one of the partners in the dialogue utters the rhetorical commonplace that his deficient Latin might insult the ears of his partners. One of them answers: 'speak Celtic or, if you prefer, Gaulish, as long as you speak about Martin'. • Saint
Jerome (writing in AD 386/387) remarked in a commentary on St. Paul's
Epistle to the Galatians that the Belgic
Treveri spoke almost the same language as the
Galatians, rather than Latin. This agrees with an earlier report in AD 180 by Lucian. • In an AD 474 letter to his brother-in-law,
Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont in Auvergne, says that in his younger years, "our nobles ... resolved to forsake the barbarous Celtic dialect", evidently in favour of eloquent Latin. •
Cassiodorus (ca. 490–585) cites in his book VIII, 12, 7 (dated 526) from a letter to king Athalaric: 'Finally you found Roman eloquence in regions that were not originally its own; and there the reading of Cicero rendered you eloquent where once the Gaulish language resounded' • In the 6th century,
Cyril of Scythopolis (AD 525–559) tells a story about a Galatian monk who was possessed by an evil spirit and was unable to speak, but if forced to, could speak only in Galatian. •
Gregory of Tours wrote in the 6th century (c. 560–575) that a shrine in
Auvergne which "is called Vasso Galatae in the Gallic tongue" was destroyed and burnt to the ground. This quote has been held by
historical linguistic scholarship to attest that Gaulish was indeed still spoken as late as the late 6th century in France.
Final demise Despite considerable Romanization of the local material culture, the Gaulish language is held to have survived and coexisted with spoken Latin during the centuries of Roman rule of Gaul. The exact year of the final
language death of Gaulish is unknown, but it is estimated to have been about the late sixth century AD. Bonnaud maintains that Latinization occurred earlier in Provence and in major urban centers, while Gaulish persisted longest, possibly as late as the tenth century with evidence for continued use according to Bonnaud continuing into the ninth century, in
Langres and the surrounding regions, the regions between
Clermont,
Argenton and
Bordeaux, and in
Armorica. Fleuriot, Falc'hun, and Gvozdanovic likewise maintained a late survival in Armorica and language contact of some form with the ascendant
Breton language; however, it has been noted that there is little uncontroversial evidence supporting a relatively late survival specifically in
Brittany whereas there is uncontroversial evidence that supports the relatively late survival of Gaulish in the
Swiss Alps and in regions in Central Gaul. Drawing from these data, which include the mapping of substrate vocabulary as evidence, Kerkhof argues that we may "tentatively" posit a survival of Gaulish speaking communities "at least into the sixth century" in pockets of mountainous regions of the
Central Massif, the
Jura, and the
Swiss Alps. ==Corpus==