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3 - Interlude: A View from the Celtic Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Peter Trudgill
Peter Trudgill
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
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Summary

Britain was amonolingual Celtic-speaking island for at least a millennium before Roman colonisers brought Latin to England in AD 43, during the reign of the Emperor Claudius. A description of the geographical spread across Britain of early forms of English is therefore equivalent to a description of the geographical retreat of the Brittonic Celtic language which had preceded Germanic to the island by hundreds of years. This retreat led to Cornish, Welsh and Cumbric eventually becoming separated from one another geographically and eventually linguistically.

Keywords

Celts in BritainBrittonicCumbricGoidelicY Gododdin
Type
Chapter
Information
The Long Journey of English
A Geographical History of the Language
 , pp. 31 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Tim., Clarkson 2010. The men of the North: the Britons of southern Scotland. Edinburgh: John Donald.Google Scholar
Cunliffe, Barry. 2018. The Ancient Celts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Higham, Nicholas. 2007. Britons in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce, & Robinson, Fred. 2011. A guide to Old English. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar

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