Rate My Professor Rob O Maolalaigh

Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh is Professor of Gaelic in the Celtic & Gaelic subject area of the School of Humanities, College of Arts & Humanities, at the University of Glasgow. Born in Dublin and educated at St Peter’s National School and Drimnagh Castle Secondary School, he earned a BA Honours degree in Irish and Mathematics from University College Dublin, followed by a postgraduate Masters degree in the Gaelic languages and literatures of Ireland and Scotland. He received a Postgraduate Travelling Studentship from the National University of Ireland and completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh on a thesis concerning Gaelic historical phonology. His career began as a Lecturer in the Department of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1993, where he established the Ionad na Gaeilge / Centre for Irish Studies. In 2001, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He joined the University of Glasgow in 2005 with a personal chair in Gaelic, becoming the first holder of the established Chair of Gaelic in 2010. He served as Head of Department (2007–2011), Deputy Head of School (2010–2012), Head of the School of Humanities (2012–2014), and Vice Principal and Head of the College of Arts (2015–2022). Additionally, he acted as the University’s LGBT Equality Champion. In 2011, he won a prize for the ‘Most Organised Course’ in the inaugural Prizes for Excellent Teacher Awards.

Professor Ó Maolalaigh’s research focuses on linguistic variation and change in the Gaelic-speaking world, encompassing phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. His interests include Gaelic dialectology across Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Manx; historical linguistics such as phonology, morphology, and the divergence between these languages; onomastics; linguistic contact; and the editing of Gaelic texts, particularly those from the eighteenth century like the Rev. James McLagan’s collections. He has advanced digital humanities through projects like the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG, 2016) and corpus planning initiatives such as LEACAN and Dlùth is Inneach. Key publications include ‘Ossianic informants named by the Rev. Dr Alexander Irvine (1773–1824)’ (Scottish Studies, 2026), ‘The origin of Munster Irish cathain "when?"’ (2025), ‘Lost MacNicol and Irvine Gaelic manuscripts discovered’ (Aiste, 2024), ‘An Old Gaelic conjunction rediscovered: Old Gaelic ceni, Scottish Gaelic gar an’ (North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 2023), ‘Scottish Gaelic’ (Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2021), and ‘Gaelic personal names and name elements in Scottish charters 1093–1286’ (2019). In 2022, he discovered 56 lost 18th- and 19th-century Gaelic manuscripts from the collections of Rev. Dr Donald MacNicol and Rev. Dr Alexander Irvine, now housed at the National Library of Scotland, significantly enriching Gaelic scholarship.