It  is not uncommon in Aberdeenshire to hear a comment like, " Gaelic has nothing do with this part of the country". However, the slightest amount of research shows that the county - along with much of the rest of Scotland - abounds in Gaelic names  e.g. Tillydrone, Auchnagatt, Inverurie, Balmore and hundreds more!  These names were given, perhaps a thousand years ago, by people locally who spoke Gaelic

Gaelic was the language spoken in most of Scotland, including the north-east, following the union of the kindoms of Picts and Scots under Scottish King Kenneth MacAlpine in 843 A.D. An indication of the use of Gaelic in the North-East is seen from the Book of Deer, where, as well as the Gaelic notes, recognised as dating from the twelfth century, there is also use of Old Gaelic in the colophon at the end of the book, dated to the ninth century, indicating the use of Gaelic in Buchan at that time. 

However, the presence of Gaelic as a living language in Aberdeenshire is far more recent than that - Gaelic was still to be found as a living language in upper Deeside as recently as the 1950s, the last known native speaker being Mrs Jean Bain who died in 1984.  Much of the seminal work on Aberdeenshire Gaelic was done by F. C. Diack in the first half of the twentieth century at a time while the language was still alive. Diack's work has been the basis of further work by A.Watson  and R. D. Clement and by J. Grant.

The purpose of this web-site is to examine the distribution  and age structure of native Aberdeenshire Gaelic speakers towards the final stages of the demise of the local language.  This has been done by using Census data from 1891 (the first Census to record whether a person spoke Gaelic) and from 1911 (the most recent Census for which data is available).   Data was obtained for the following Parishes: (a)Crathie and Braemar: (b)Glen Gairn, Tulloch and Glen Muick: (c)Strathdon.