Rate My Professor Rob O Maolalaigh

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.