Shelta

Shelta (/ˈʃɛltə/; Irish: Seiltis) is a language spoken by Irish Travellers (Mincéirí), particularly in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is also widely known as the Cant, known to its native speakers in Ireland as de Gammon or Tarri, and known to the academic or professional linguistic community as Shelta. Other terms for it include the Seldru, and Shelta Thari, among others (see below).

The exact number of native speakers is hard to determine due to sociolinguistic issues but Ethnologue puts the number of speakers at 30,000 in the UK, 6,000 in Ireland, and 50,000 in the US (the figure for at least the UK is dated to 1990; it is not clear if the other figures are from the same source).

Linguistically Shelta is today seen as a mixed language that stems from a community of travelling people in Ireland that was originally predominantly Irish-speaking. The community later went through a period of widespread bilingualism that resulted in a language based heavily on Hiberno-English with significant influences from Irish. As different varieties of Shelta display different degrees of anglicisation, it is hard to determine the extent of the Irish substratum. The Oxford Companion to the English Language puts it at 2,000–3,000 words.