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5 - Anglo-Saxons and Celts in the British Highlands, 600–800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Peter Trudgill
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
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Summary

By AD 850, Old English was spoken everywhere in England, though not necessarily exclusively, with three geographically peripheral exceptions: the far south-west, where Cornish remained for another thousand years; the far north-west from the Lake District northwards into south-western Scotland; and small areas of the English border counties of Shropshire and Herefordshire which remained Welsh-speaking until the eighteenth century. Scotland had originally been no less Brittonic-speaking than England; but by AD 650–700 English had become dominant in the south-east of Scotland from the region around Edinburgh in the Lothians down to what is now the border with England. Cumbric remained dominant in the south-west of the country, in the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Long Journey of English
A Geographical History of the Language
, pp. 54 - 65
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Gelling, Margaret. 1993. Place-names in the landscape: the geographical roots of Britain’s place-names. London: Dent.Google Scholar
Hadley, Dawn, & Richards, Julian. 2021. The Viking Great Army and the making of England. London: Thames & Hudson.Google Scholar
Holman, Katherine. 2007. The Northern Conquest: Vikings in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Signal.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce, & Robinson, Fred. 2012. A guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Morris, Marc. 2021. The Anglo-Saxons: a history of the beginnings of England. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar

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