[cavtrooper21]

Yes, the picts were sort of an odd bunch, what art work and "writting" the left behind, is very Celtic in style, bu has its own overtones. They were also different in the manner of village structure (arrangement) and building styles.
I have some friends that say the picts are still here, hiding up in the hills and waiting for all of us folk to go away...
Hope they packed a lunch!

[WoofDog123]

For me personally, as a person who studies archaeology and philology as a hobby only, the most convincing piece of the arguement that the picts spoke a p or q-celtic language is the lack of any comments on language deviations after the establishment of scotland as a single territory about a 1000 years ago. If the picts were speaking, say, the finno-ugric tongue that one researcher postulated and published, or an unrelated stone-age language, I would think they would have been speaking it up until the early modern era.

Displacing a language is HARD, from all indications, apparently requiring either strong control of the governing and educational system over some long period of time(cornish, also possibly examples from the continent's roman period like gaulish), or large scale (a) extermination (american indians), or (b) enslavement/dislocation by a large conquering group (p-celtic in what is now england by the angles, saxons, frisians, jutes et al)