Celtic language decline in England

800: 472:

idea that the extensive change seen in the post-Roman period was simply the result of acculturation by a ruling class. In fact, many of the initial migrants seem to have been families, rather than warriors, with significant numbers of women taking part and elites not emerging until the sixth century. In light of that, the emerging consensus among historians, archaeologists and linguists is that the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was not a single event and thus cannot be explained by any one particular model. In the core areas of settlement in the south and east, for example, large-scale migration and population change seem to be the best explanations. In the peripheral areas to the northwest, on the other hand, a model of elite dominance may be the most fitting. In that view, therefore, the decline of Brittonic and British Latin in England can be explained by a combination of migration, displacement and acculturation in different contexts and areas.

295:

underwent around the 6th century were due to Latin-speakers switching language to Celtic, possibly as Latin-speakers moved away from encroaching Germanic-speaking settlers. It was thought likely that Latin was the language of most of the townspeople; the administration and the ruling class; the military and the church. Some scholars thought that British Celtic probably remained the language of the peasantry, which was the bulk of the population; the rural elite was probably bilingual. But others suggested that Latin became the prevalent language of lowland Britain, in which case the story of Celtic language death in what is now England begins with its extensive displacement by Latin.

120: 308: 30: 283: 1291: 468:. That would have led to a more dramatic reduction in the status and prestige of the Romanized culture in Britain and so the incoming Anglo-Saxons had little incentive to adopt British Celtic or Latin, and the local people were more likely to abandon their languages in favour of the now-higher-status language of the Anglo-Saxons. In those circumstances, it is plausible that Old English would borrow few words from the lower-status language(s). 187:. The language that emerged from the dialects they brought to Britain is today known as Old English. There is evidence for Britons moving westward and across the channel to form Brittany, but those who remained in what became England switched to speaking Old English until Celtic languages were no longer extensively spoken there. Celtic languages continued to be spoken in other parts of the British Isles, such as Wales, Scotland, Ireland and 832: 128: 757:

The sound changes in Old English bear no clear resemblance to any that occurred in Brittonic, and phenomena similar to 'breaking' have been found in Old Frisian and Old Norse. Other scholars have proposed that the changes were the result of dialect contact and levelling among Germanic speakers in the

714:

by adults, the learners' imperfect acquisition of the grammar and the pronunciation of the new language will affect it in some way. As yet, there is no consensus that such effects are visible in the surviving evidence in the case of English. Thus, one synthesis concluded that 'the evidence for Celtic

1011:

seem no more likely to survive than Roman names in England: 'clearly name loss was a Romano-British phenomenon, not just one associated with Anglo-Saxon incomers'. Therefore, other explanations for the replacement of Roman period place-names which allow for a less cataclysmic shift to English naming

471:

Critics of that model point out that in most cases, minority elite classes have not been able to impose their languages on a settled population. Furthermore, the archaeological and genetic evidence has cast doubt upon theories of expulsion and ethnic cleansing but also has tended not to support the

350:

and Bede, is that Old English became dominant primarily because Germanic-speaking invaders killed, chased away, and/or enslaved the previous inhabitants of the areas that they settled. A number of specialists maintained support for similar into the twenty-first century, and variations on this theme

1267:

Later evidence for place-names may not be as indicative of naming in the immediate post-Roman period as was once assumed. In names attested up to 731, 26% are etymologically partly non-English, and 31% have since fallen from use. Settlements and land tenure may have been relatively unstable in the

294:

As of around 2010 there was an ongoing discussion about the character of British Celtic and the extent of Latin-speaking in Roman Britain. Scholars agreed that British Latin was spoken as a native language in Roman Britain and that at least some of the dramatic changes that the Brittonic languages

250:

continued to thrive until the early modern period and retreated at only around 10 km per century. However, from about 1500, Cornish–English bilingualism became increasingly common, and Cornish retreated at closer to 30 km per century. Cornish fell out of use entirely during the 18th century though

772:

Syntactical features in English that resemble those found in modern Celtic languages did not become common until the Early Modern English period. It has been argued that is far too late of an appearance for substrate features and thus they are most likely internal developments, or possibly later

443:

Thus, a contrasting model of elite acculturation has been proposed in which a politically dominant but numerically insignificant number of Old English speakers drove large numbers of Britons to adopt Old English. In that theory, if Old English became the most prestigious language in a particular

748:

Syntax. Over centuries, English has gradually acquired syntactic features in common with Celtic languages (such as the use of 'periphrastic "do" '). Some scholars have argued that they reflect early Celtic influence, which, however, became visible in the textual record only later on. Substrate

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before the end of the Roman period. However, Oppenheimer's ideas have not been found helpful in explaining the known facts since there is no solid evidence for a well established Germanic language in Britain before the fifth century (among the Belgae or otherwise) and the idea contradicts the

2622:

Poussa, Patricia. 1990. 'A Contact-Universals Origin for Periphrastic Do, with Special Consideration of OE-Celtic Contact'. In Papers from the Fifth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Vivien Law, Nigel Vincent, and Susan Wright, 407–34. Amsterdam:

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from later Viking influence), which demonstrates the dominance of English across post-Roman England. That is often seen as evidence for a cataclysmic cultural and demographic shift at the end of the Roman period in which not only the Brittonic and Latin languages but also Brittonic and Latin

298:

Thomas Toon has suggested that if the population of Roman Lowland Britain was bilingual in both Brittonic and Latin, such a multilingual society might adapt to the use of a third language, such as that spoken by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, more readily than would a monoglot population.

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In addition, several plausibly Brittonic place- and river-names in Northern and Midland England appear to have their naming elements at least partly replaced by Old English, Old Norse and French ones, and in some cases, the older forms appear on historical record. Such names include

174:

There is little direct evidence for the linguistic situation in Britain for the next few centuries. However, by the 8th century, when extensive evidence for the language situation in England is next available, it is clear that the dominant language was what is today known as

1278:

Thus, place-names are important for showing the swift spread of English across England and also provide important glimpses into details of the history of Brittonic and Latin in the region, but they do not demand a single or simple model for explaining the spread of English.

744:

period. That would be characteristic of influence by an adult-learner population. Some simplifications that become visible only in Middle English may have entered low-status varieties of Old English earlier but appeared in higher-status written varieties only at the late

198:

Because the main evidence for events in Britain during the crucial period (400–700) is archaeological and seldom reveals linguistic information, and written evidence even after 700 remains patchy, the precise chronology of the spread of Old English is uncertain. However,

768:

It has been argued that the geographical patterns of morphological simplification make little sense when they are viewed as a Brittonic influence but match perfectly with areas of Viking settlement, which made contact with Old Norse be the more likely reason for the

343:. Latin loanwords into early Old English were more numerous; since they were part of a continuous process of borrowing from Latin into Germanic languages, it is hard to be sure how many belong to the early Old English period, but they number in the tens or hundreds. 1591:

Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Brittonic Languages, First to Twelfth Century A.D., Edinburgh University Publications, Language and Literature, 4 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953), p.

1271:

Archaeological evidence suggests that, during the immediate post-Roman period of the 5th century, Iron Age and Roman era fortifications were usually not kept in use south of Hadrian's Wall, which may be associated with many Roman-era fort names falling out of

899:, has complicated that picture. More names in England and southern Scotland have Brittonic or occasionally Latin etymologies than was once thought. Earlier scholars often did not notice that because they were unfamiliar with Celtic languages. For example, 1037:

only because that earlier name is one of relatively few Roman British place-names that were recorded. Otherwise, we would have assumed that the Old English name was coined from scratch. (Likewise, the Old English name was, in turn, adapted into Norse as

1499:

452:). The collapse of Britain's Roman economy seems to have left Britons living in a society technologically similar to that of their Anglo-Saxon neighbours, which made it unlikely that Anglo-Saxons would need to borrow words for unfamiliar concepts. 179:. There is no serious doubt that Old English was brought to Britain primarily during the 5th and 6th centuries by settlers from what is now the Netherlands, north-western Germany, and southern Denmark who spoke various dialects of 780:

Coates has concluded that the strongest candidates for potential substrate features can be seen in regional dialects in the north and the west of England (roughly corresponding to Area III in Jackson's chronology), such as the

2286: 1137:

In addition, several toponyms are still known by both Celtic and English names, such as Blencathra/Saddleback and Catlowdy/Lairdstown. Other non-Celtic place-names with recorded Medieval era British Celtic forms include

1268:

post-Roman period, which led to a high natural rate of place-name replacement and enabled names coined in the increasingly-dominant English language to replace names inherited from the Roman period relatively swiftly.

370:

suggest that a complete demographic change is unlikely to have taken place in 5th-century Britain. Textual sources hint that people who are portrayed as ethnically Anglo-Saxon actually had British connections: the

933:. Even so, it is clear that Brittonic and Latin place-names in the eastern half of England are extremely rare; although they are noticeably more common in the western half, they are still a tiny minority: 2% in 799: 2498:

Hickey, Raymond. Early English and the Celtic hypothesis. in Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford 2012: Oxford University Press:

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Robert McColl Millar, "At the Forefront of Linguistic Change: the Morphology of Late Northumbrian Texts and the History of the English Language, with Particular Reference to the Lindisfarne Gospels"

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might have been at least partially Germanic-speaking. In her view, their tribal name and some of the personal names found on their coins have more obvious Germanic derivations than Celtic ones.

953: 2422:

A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period

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region, speakers of other languages there would have sought to become bilingual, and over a few generations, they stopped speaking the less prestigious languages (in this case,

324: 3095: 464:, perhaps especially after 407 AD, when it is probable that most or all of the Roman field army stationed in Britain was withdrawn to support the continental ambitions of 1126:

Place-names that survive only in Old English form may have had Brittonic counterparts for long periods without those being recorded. For example, the Welsh name of York,

849:

Although it is not clear who in society determined what places were called, place-names may reflect the usage of a broader section of the population than written texts.

355:

said in 2014 that "to a large extent, it is linguistics that is responsible for thinking in terms of drastic scenarios" about demographic change in late Roman Britain.

1950: 1680: 1652: 940:

Likewise, some entirely Old English names explicitly point to Roman structures, usually using Latin loan-words or to the presence of Brittonic-speakers. Names like

84:, where Germanic-speaking invaders gradually switched to local languages. This linguistic decline is therefore crucial to understanding the cultural changes in 1722:, ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen, Studies in Languages, 37 (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002), pp. 87–110. 2242:

Schiffels, S., Haak, W., Paajanen, P. et al. Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history. Nat Commun 7, 10408 (2016).

492:

has disputed this assertion by arguing that while a satisfactory Celtic derivation for the tribal name has not been reached, it is "clearly not Germanic."

2254:

Martiniano, R., Caffell, A., Holst, M. et al. Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons. Nat Commun 7, 10326 (2016).

1042:, which transparently means 'horse-bay', and again, it would not be obvious that was based on an earlier Old English name if that had not been recorded.) 2428:, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31 (pp. 220–21). 733:'). It has been argued that some of these changes are a substrate effect caused by speakers of British Celtic adopting Old English during that period. 225:

In Area I, Celtic names are rare and confined to large and medium-sized rivers. This area corresponds to English language dominance up to c. 500–550.

479:'s 2006 suggestion that the lack of Celtic influence on English was caused by the ancestor of English being already widely spoken in Britain by the 2533:, ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen, Studies in Languages, 37 (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002). 1019:

Names that came to look as if they were coined as Old English may actually come from Roman ones. For example, the Old English name for the city of

17: 3208:, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31 (p. 221). 72:

or a small scale military takeover occurred during this period, not least because the situation was strikingly different from, for example, post-

2863:

Gover, J.E.B., A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, with A. Bonner. 1934. The place-names of Surrey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (SEPN vol. 11).

171:. The influence and position of British Latin declined when the Roman economy and administrative structures collapsed in the early 5th century. 2521:

Filppula, Markku, and Juhani Klemola, eds. 2009. Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics 13.2.

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Supporters of the acculturation model in particular must account for the fact that in the case of a fairly-swift language-shift, involving

209: 3176:, ed. by Merja-Riitta Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Inge Særheim, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (Amerstdam: Benjamins, 2012), pp. 3–22; 3075:, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31. 2600:, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31. 1216:

Some Welsh names for places in England may have ancient etymologies independent of the English forms, this includes the Welsh name for

839: 3314: 1324: 1223:

Some settlement names may contain earlier Celtic names for rivers that now have English or Norse ones. Such settlement names include

729:

Phonology. Between c. 450 and c. 700, Old English vowels underwent many changes, some of them unusual (such as the changes known as '

340: 192: 2674:

Ferdinand von Mengden, “Old English,” in English Historical Linguistics, Vol.1 (ed. Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, 2012), p. 22

1908:

Ferdinand von Mengden, “Old English,” in English Historical Linguistics, Vol.1 (ed. Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, 2012), p. 22

3329: 1031:), transparently means 'boar-village'. We know that the first part of the name was borrowed from the earlier Romanised Celtic name 1817:. Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker (in German). Vol. 64. Strasbourg: Trübner. 465: 2665:

Jeanette Marsh, “Pre-Old English,” in English Historical Linguistics, Vol.1 (ed. Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, 2012), p. 9

2656:

Jeanette Marsh, “Pre-Old English,” in English Historical Linguistics, Vol.1 (ed. Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, 2012), p. 9

776:

The English features and the Celtic ones they are theorized to have originated from often do not have clear parallels in usage.

2489:

Miller, D. Gary. External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford 2012: Oxford University Press

366:

in well-understood social situations, gave scholars new ways to interpret the situation in early medieval Britain. Meanwhile,

3233:

Barrie Cox, ‘The Place-Names of the Earliest English Records’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 8 (1975–76), 12–66.

2408: 811:: in green, names likely containing Brittonic elements; in red and orange, names likely containing the Old English elements - 346:

The traditional explanation for the lack of Celtic influence on English, supported by uncritical readings of the accounts of

718:

Although there is little consensus about the findings, extensive efforts have been made during the 21st century to identify

3339: 3309: 1334: 1008: 794: 416:

have more obvious Brittonic than Germanic etymologies, but they do not correspond to known Welsh personal names. The early

140: 3172:

Carole Hough, 'Celts in Scandinavian Scotland and Anglo-Saxon England: Place-Names and Language Contact Reconsidered', in

511:

Table 1: A number of possible shift features selected as representative by Richard Coates, Gary Miller and Raymond Hickey

2956:

Hamerow, H. 1993 Excavations at Mucking, Volume 2: The Anglo-Saxon Settlement (English Heritage Archaeological Report 21)

2632:

Hickey, Raymond. 1995. 'Early Contact and Parallels between English and Celtic'. Vienna English Working Papers 4: 87–119.

761:

There is no evidence for a Celtic-influenced low status variety of English in the Anglo-Saxon period (in comparison, the

2141: 1831:, ed. by Alfred Bammesberger and Alfred Wollmann, Anglistische Forschungen, 205 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), pp. 373–96. 1703: 1485:

Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Brittonic Languages, First to Twelfth Century A.D.

842:

are traditionally seen as important evidence for the history of language in post-Roman Britain for three main reasons:

1487:, Edinburgh University Publications, Language and Literature, 4 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953), p. 220. 3304: 3181: 3121: 2097: 2071: 2041: 1994: 1862: 1785:, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi and Bethany Fox, The Northern World, 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 37-80 (pp. 73–74). 1309: 367: 89: 2403:

Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story: Constable and Robinson, London.

2287:"Large-scale population movements into and from Britain south of Hadrian's Wall in the fourth to sixth centuries AD" 1608:, Regional series (English Place-Name Society), 1 (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2006), esp. pp. xix-xxi. 1004:'Britons'. Those are likely to have been names for enclaves of Brittonic-speakers but again are not that numerous. 715:

influence on Old English is somewhat sparse, which only means that it remains elusive, not that it did not exist'.

505: 1173:

era (43-410 AD), several places that now have English names were recorded with Celtic-derived ones. This includes

3319: 2573: 1798:, ed. by A. Bammesberger and A. Wollmann, Anglistische Forschungen, 205 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), pp. 373–96. 214: 3264: