Academics have suggested that Irish travellers may in fact be the descendants of a pre-Celtic culture in Ireland.
    Linguists, historians and anthropologists gathering for the world's first symposium on the travellers' mysterious history at the University of Limerick will hear that their distinctive language "Cant" or "Gammon" may derive from a now lost language in Ireland. If this is the case, it would perhaps suggest that the language was pre-Celtic.
    Dr Alice Binchy, an Irish socio-linguist, said "A partially pre-Celtic origin would have substantial implications for the way we look not only at traveller history, but at early Irish history as a whole."

Source: The Independent (27 March 2005)