Celtic Studies is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to a Celtic people. This ranges from archaeology to history, the focus lying on the study of the various Celtic languages, living and extinct.

The primary areas of focus are the six Celtic languages which still survive, or have only recently become extinct: Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and on the continent, Breton. Many consider the Celtic languages to be the least studied surviving branch of the Indo-European language family.The field has at this time barely been surveyed; this is due to the small number of trained experts. Thus it is possible for relatively inexperienced scholars to make a significant contribution.

 Celtic Studies as an academic subject grew out of comparative and historical linguistics, which was itself established at the end of the 18th century. Long before this various authors, such as Julius Caesar. had commented on the Celtic languages. In the 16th century George Buchanan studied Gaelic, while around 1700 Edward Lhuyd compared the various Insular Celtic languages and published the English version of a study by Paul-Yves Pezron of Gaulish. In 1767 James Parsons published his study "The Remains of Japhet, being historical enquiries into the affinity and origins of the European languages". He compared a 1000 word lexicon of Irish and Welsh and concluded that they were originally the same, then comparing the numerals in many other languages.

The Englishman William Jones famously postulated that there existed some ancient connection between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in 1786. This would later be hailed as the discovery of the Indo-European language family, from which grew the field of Indo-European studies. The Celtic languages were definitively linked to the Indo-European family over the course of the 19th century.

Areas of Celtic Studies

• Archaeology
• (historical) Linguistics
• Ethnology
• History
• Literature
• Religious Studies
• Political Science
• Arts