Celtic language-death in England

The decline of Celtic languages in England was the historical process by which the Celtic languages died out in what is modern-day England. It happened in most of southern Great Britain between about 400 and 1000 AD, but in Cornwall, it was finished only in the 18th century.

Prior to about the 5th century AD, most people in Britain spoke Insular Celtic languages (for the most part, specifically Brittonic languages), but Vulgar Latin may have taken over in larger settlements (e.g. Londinium), especially in the southeast, which were administered by the Roman ''Provincia Britannia''. The fundamental reason for the demise of those languages in early medieval England was the migration of Germanic settlers, known as Anglo-Saxons, who spoke West Germanic dialects that are now known collectively as Old English, particularly around the 5th century, during the collapse of Roman power in Britain. Gradually, those Celtic-speakers who did not flee to Brittany or to highland zones within Britain switched to speaking Old English until Celtic languages were no longer extensively spoken in what became England.

However, the precise processes by which that shift happened have been much debated, not least because the situation was strikingly different from, for example, post- Roman Gaul, Iberia or North Africa, where Germanic-speaking invaders gradually switched to local languages. Explaining the rise of Old English is therefore crucial in any account of cultural change in post-Roman Britain and in particular to understanding the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain. The rise of Old English is an important aspect of the history of English as well as the history of the Celtic languages.

Debate continues over whether a mass migration event, resulting in large-scale population shift, is the best explanation for the change seen during that period, or whether a political takeover by a small number of Anglo-Saxons could have driven a settled Brittonic-speaking majority to adopt Old English. Recently, scholars have proposed that both of those processes could have occurred in different regions and at different times.

Chronology

Fairly-extensive information about language in Roman Britain is available from Roman administrative documents attesting to place- and "personal-names, along with archaeological finds such as Celtic coinage, coins, the Bloomberg and Vindolanda tablets, and Bath curse tablets. That shows that most inhabitants spoke British Celtic and/or British Latin. The influence and position of British Latin declined when the Roman economy and administrative structures collapsed in the early 5th century.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).Paul Russell,
Latin and British in Roman and Post-Roman Britain: methodology and morphology
, ''Transactions of the Royal Philological Society'', 109.2 (July 2011), 138–57.

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 Old English. 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 Germanic languages and who came to be known as Anglo-Saxons. 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 Cornwall. Only a few English words of Brittonic origin appear to have entered Old English.

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, Kenneth Jackson combined historical information from texts like Bede's '' Ecclesiastical History of the English People'' (731) with evidence for the linguistic origins of British river names to suggest the following chronology, which remains broadly accepted (see map):

* 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.
* Area II shows English-language dominance c. 600.
* Area III, where even many small streams have Brittonic names, shows English-language dominance c. 700.
* In Area IV, Brittonic remained the dominant language until at least the Norman Conquest, and river names are overwhelmingly Celtic.

Although Cumbric, in the north-west, seems to have died during the 11th century,Diana Whaley, ''A Dictionary of Lake District Place-names'', Regional series (English Place-Name Society), 1 (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2006), esp. pp. xix-xxi. Cornish 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 the last few decades have seen an attempted revival.

During that period, England was also home to influential communities speaking Latin, Old Irish, Old Norse and Anglo-Norman. None of those seem to have been a major long-term competitor to English and Brittonic, however.

Debate on whether British Celtic was being displaced by Latin before the arrival of English

There is an ongoing discussion about the character of British Celtic and the extent of Latin-speaking in Roman Britain.David N. Parsons,
Sabrina in the thorns: place-names as evidence for British and Latin in Roman Britain
, ''Transactions of the Royal Philological Society'', 109.2 (July 2011), 113–37. It is now 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 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 seems likely that Latin was the language of most of the townspeople; the administration and the ruling class; the military; and, following the no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution of Christianity, the church. However, British Celtic probably remained the language of the peasantry, which was the bulk of the population; the rural elite was probably bilingual. However, at the most extreme, it has been 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.

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.

Debate on why is there so little Brittonic influence on English

Old English shows little obvious influence from Celtic or spoken Latin: there are vanishingly few English words of Brittonic origin.Kastovsky, Dieter, ‘Semantics and Vocabulary’, in ''The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1: The Beginnings to 1066'', ed. by Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 290–408 (pp. 301–20).Matthew Townend, 'Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French', in ''The Oxford History of English'', ed. by Lynda Mugglestone, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 75–105 (pp. 78–80).

The traditional explanation for the lack of Celtic influence on English, supported by uncritical readings of the accounts of Gildas 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. In recent decades, a number of specialists have maintained support for similar interpretations,D. Hooke, 'The Anglo-Saxons in England in the seventh and eighth centuries: aspects of location in space', in ''The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective'', ed. by J. Hines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 64–99 (p. 68).O. J. Padel. 2007. “Place-names and the Saxon conquest of Devon and Cornwall.” In ''Britons in Anglo-Saxon England'' ublications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies 7 N. Higham (ed.), 215–230. Woodbridge: Boydell. and variations on that theme continue to feature in standard histories of the language. Peter Schrijver has said 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.

The development of contact linguistics in the later 20th century, which involved study of present-day language contact in well-understood social situations, gave scholars new ways to interpret the situation in early medieval Britain. Meanwhile, archaeological and genetic research 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 West Saxon royal line was supposedly founded by a man named Cerdic, whose name derives from the Brittonic ''Caraticos'' (cf. Welsh ''Ceredig