Thanks Caoimhin. What is the situation with regards to dialects?. Is there one or more? What is used on the Media - radio, television, newspapers? or is there a standard written form similar to Ireland

I've split this off into a separate thread, because this is a separate question.

I'm not an expert in this area, so I hope NiallBeag will chime in (he knows much more). There was once basically a continuum of language differences running from the south of Ireland up through the north, and across the Isle of Man and up through Scotland, so exactly what was a separate dialect from the speech in one's own village or area would have been a flexible concept, depending on one's point of view and location. As Irish and Gaelic receded in their respective countries, stronger dialectical differences arose as separate sections of native speakers were more cut off from one another.

In Scotland, although some pockets of Gaelic hung on in the Lowlands until well into the 19th century (and there were once distinctly different dialects in some places), things basically receded into the Highlands and then to the western Highlands, so the remaining areas of native speakers are basically (though not entirely) along the west coast of the Highlands and in the Hebrides (the "Islands"). Perhaps since the remaining areas with native speakers are not so much cut off from one another geographically, my understanding is that there are not really separate dialects any more, although there are some pronunciation and word choice differences from place to place.

Until the 15th-16th centuries, even though there were already differences between Irish and Gaelic, there was no separate way to write Gaelic, and anything written in the native language was essentially written in Irish. From the Reformation on, apart from attention paid by Protestant ministers who wanted to evangelize the still-Catholic areas which remained Gaelic-speaking, Gaelic was essentially ignored by the powers-that-be in Scotland. Over time, it gradually developed its own spelling conventions which differed from Irish, largely in an attempt to capture the actual spoken language and what grammatical differences had arisen, although sometimes the spelling used is the same as forms once used in Ireland. This was all unofficial, however. Now there is active government support for the language (not always competent and sometimes sporadic, but then that's also true in Ireland). Spelling in particular is still a bit in flux, so there are variant spellings for some words (but, then, Irish also has variant forms of a lot of words).

In older materials, things often look a bit more like Irish (with the old spelling, rather than the reformed Irish spelling), and some dictionaries and grammars offer alternative ways of saying things, although sometimes one alternative has essentially disappeared from active speech. For example, one I have explains that the current form of greeting, "Ciamar a tha thu?" is an abbreviated form derived form the more formal (but basically no longer used) older form "Cad e mar a tha thu?, which is of course very close to what people say today in Ulster.

Wikipedia has a good article on the history of Gaelic in Scotland at this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic
and there is a separate article about Gaelic linguistics at this link, which while too technical for me, has some maps showing pronunciation differences which might interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_phonology
I notice that it says that linguists tend to call the Gaelic spoken on each island a separate dialect, but I think that's overstating the case, whatever differences there may be. Then again, I'm no expert.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.