The Celts
Professor Patrick Sims-Williams of Aberystwyth University on Celtic language …
It’s very difficult to say if you can be a Celt without speaking a Celtic language. When linguists like me say ‘Celtic’, we mean ‘Celtic-speaking’ because we can define the Celtic language very specifically as having certain characteristics that other languages don’t have.
Apart from some Pictish, one language was spoken with slight variations over the whole of Britain, and it carried on over into France as well. Some of the tribal names actually recur. For example, around Winchester were the Belgae and they were also the people of Belgium. Then in Yorkshire were the Parisii, and that’s exactly the same name as the tribe that lived around what is now Paris.
All of the indications are that the languages of the tribes carrying the same names were very similar. [Roman historian] Tacitus actually says that almost the same language was spoken in southern Britain and northern Gaul. Look at some of the names. The Cantiaci were a British tribe in Kent. In Latin, this became Cantium, which eventually becomes ‘Kent’ – a good Celtic name that you get in various forms on the Continent as well. Take King’s Lynn: llyn is the Welsh word for ‘lake’ and there was a pool at King’s Lynn from which it took its name.
‘British Celtic’
Obviously, at this time, not everyone in Britain was speaking Welsh. They would have been speaking a variety of Celtic, which we can call ‘British Celtic’, that gradually evolved into Welsh and Cornish and into Breton for those who later went across to that part of Gaul.
It’s difficult to put an exact date on it but there was clearly a common culture. How that was arrived at is lost in the mists of the past, but there must have been some movement of people. What proportion of the people living here are the descendants of those who moved in with the Celtic language is another question. Maybe they spoke another language, learned Celtic and lost their own language. We don’t know.
We really know nothing about any other language in Britain, apart from Celtic, that explains all the place names in Britain before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. It’s almost impossible to say when the Celtic languages first reached the British Isles because the documentation only starts in the last part of the 1st millennium BC, when Britain was already Celtic in language.
Borrowing from the Romans
The main linguistic evidence for the relationship between the Romans and the Celts is that a large number of Latin words – perhaps 1,000 – were taken into British Celtic. They turn up not only in Welsh but also in Cornish, which was spoken until the 18th century, and also in Breton.
For example, the word for an ‘arm’ in Welsh is braich, which comes from Latin bracchium. You might wonder why the Celts borrowed such a basic word when they must have already had one for the same thing – surely an arm is an arm? Well, the answer is that the Celtic word covered the arm and the hand. So they borrowed the Latin word bracchium so they could have separate words for the two parts of the body.
The places where this borrowing of Latin words actually occurred could have been anywhere but perhaps was especially likely where civilisation was most technologically advanced. There you would find Latin words such as pons (‘bridge’) replacing the old native word breva, which you now find in place names but not otherwise. Words to do with the Church were also borrowed, including the word ‘church’ itself – ecclesia in Latin became eglwysig in Welsh, with similar words in Cornish and Breton. Although the Church was strongest in the Romanised part of Britain and less so in the far west, it was Wales and the other Celtic-fringe regions that have conserved these words.
The fate of the Celtic speakers
On the Continent, the Celtic languages were basically destroyed by the Roman occupation. In the British Isles, this probably happened to a lesser extent. On the Continent, people were bilingual for a long period and then, in about the 5th century AD, the Celtic language was finally abandoned. In Britain, there probably was bilingualism as well; perhaps some people spoke more Latin than Celtic. Nevertheless when the legions withdrew at the beginning of the 5th century, Celtic was strong enough to survive and, perhaps, have a resurgence. And, of course, it has survived as modern Welsh and Cornish and, in fact, on the Continent in Brittany, where the Breton language descended from the ‘British Celtic’ that was spoken on this island.
What’s believed about the fate of the people who spoke British Celtic is a matter of fashion. At one time, people liked to think that all the British peoples were exterminated or fled. Now the fashion is to think that they stayed behind and were assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon population – in other words, they were bilingual to start off with, then they started speaking English and gave up speaking the Celtic language, all except the people on the western side of the island. It’s an open question that is being debated a lot at the moment.
Becoming anglicised
When the Anglo-Saxons arrived from the Continent speaking a Germanic language, there were very strong reasons why people here should speak Anglo-Saxon. Their social standing and their legal position depended on which language they spoke, so they had every incentive to change their language and become anglicised. But, of course, in some ways when they lost their language they lost their identity, and they ceased to be regarded as a separate people fairly quickly.
As far as we can see, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t borrow a large number of words from the Britons. Perhaps it had something to do with the social standing of the two groups, or the fact that there were always more Germanic speakers coming in from the east who wouldn’t know these words so they didn’t get taken over. It’s not clear quite why this was, but during this period of transition, it seems to have been the Britons who learned English rather than the Anglo-Saxons who learned Celtic.
One could say that the English today have lost out because most people in Europe today are bi- or even trilingual. By becoming the speakers of the dominant world language, the English don’t feel the necessity to learn other languages.
From Portugal to the Black Sea
I think that, with Welsh, Gaelic and the few other surviving remnants of Celtic languages, we see the last vestiges of something that was once Europe wide. Some people like to think of the Celts as the founders of the European Union, but it’s not quite as simple as that. However, the spread of ‘Celtic’ was remarkable. We’re talking about a language that spread all the way from Portugal to the Black Sea and even into Turkey, but it’s only survived on the Atlantic fringe. We associate it now with mountains and the sea, but in fact, it was originally the language spoken in the plains and the river valleys of most of Europe.
This connection between the languages helped trade and the circulation of ideas and culture. We know that cults existed for the same gods in various places, and if you’ve got a common religion, you’ve got some sort of contact. Caesar even says that people who were studying to be Druids in France used to go to Britain in their final years of study to complete their training, which again suggests a linguistic continuity and a similar sort of culture.
From the few inscriptions that we’ve got from before the time of Christ, we can see that the languages spoken by the various British tribes were very similar and just beginning to show signs of divergence. Later on, they grew apart – the Irish are clearly speaking a very different language from the Welsh in the Middle Ages – and, indeed, people seem to have forgotten that they once spoke almost the same language.
