I am talking specifically about the native language of Britain, before the English. For some reason it simply disappeared when the Anglo-Saxons arrived on the coast of the North Sea in the 5th century AD. The Welsh and Scottish tongue survived, but the main of Britain has passed into history with not even a trace. What is the reason for this mysterious vanishing?

Manx (Isle of man) had its last speakers in the 1970es.
 
Is it odd the Anglo-Saxon name is associated with the Germanic assimilation of Britain, but the modern English is closer to Frisian than Saxon? Or am I misreadin here?

The "Anglo-Saxons" were a mix of a few different coastal Germanic groups: Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians.

280px-Anglo.Saxon.migration.5th.cen.jpg
 
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That assumes that the native population remains; lowland Britain seems different, with migration to Brittany etc

IIRC DNA testing indicates that most British people's ancestry goes back to the same group of seemingly pre-Celtic people and seems to be related to other Atlantic coast groups such as the Basques.

DNA that matched this group was strongest in Western Ireland and weakest in Yorkshire but every common everywhere.
 
Frisian is the only survivor from that time: the Jutes and Saxons eventually wound up speaking Danish and Low German. (And Saxony as a place wound up inland).
 
Ah here's what I was looking for: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/mythsofbritishancestry

Genetically the people of the British Isles can still mostly be traced back to their paleolithic ancestors who were closer to the Basques than anything.

Some of the analysis in the linked article is a bit of a reach but there just isn't DNA evidence for Anglo-Saxons massacering local populations or forcing them out and replacing them en masse.

According to Roman sources southern Brittish people were similar to the Belgae in language while away fromthe south coast people spoke differently. One more out there theory is that the Belgae spoke a Germanic language in which case a lot of Old English could come from that.

But basically when the Anglo-Saxons showed up you had Brittish Romance in the cities and the elite, probably something like the Belgae language in the south and various Welsch-ish languages around elsewhere which would not have been standardized and were probably quite diverse.

Much easier to impose a new language on the mash-mash than in, say, France where everyone except for some remote rural communities spoke at least dialects of the same language.
 
Frisian is the only survivor from that time: the Jutes and Saxons eventually wound up speaking Danish and Low German. (And Saxony as a place wound up inland).

Not quite true, while jutish died out, low German IS the direct descent of the mainland Saxon language.

As for the inland Saxony, that's a lot more confusing.
 
Let's see:
-British Romance was weaker than the ancestors of Italian, French and Spanish since a lot of the local people in the countryside didn't speak it, much moreso than on the continent.
-Non-Latin British languages were weaker than continental Latin dialects because they had less prestige, were not associated with cities, administration and religion and were not uniform.
While the presence of different languages might explain the disappearance to some extent I don't think it is sufficient. After all both the Basque and the Brittany language survived despite also not being associated with the Roman upper class. France was also bilingual with both Celtic and Roman languages being spoken, but here the Germanic invasion simply lead to the extinction of Celtic while the Roman language persisted.

-Germanic conquest was muuuuch slower than on the continent so the Germanic invaders didn't bite off more than they could assimilate.
How was the conquest of England slower? It is generally assumed to have started in 440 when the Germanic mercenaries rebelled against the Romans. The first invasion of France took place thirty years earlier in 406, and other incursions had taken place since the 380s. The invasions of Italy begun at latest in 455 (sacking of Rome) and lasted for at least a century (until the invasion of the longobards in northern Italy). If anything the conquest of England seems to have been faster.

-Less urban population.
At the end of the fourth century England was as urbanised as the rest of the Roman Empire. The invasions and the collapse of long distance trade brought about a severe de-urbanisation, but I'm not aware that it was more severe than in France. Even if the English deurbanisation was particularly severe (explaining the different development of the language), this raises the questions why it was exceptionally severe.

-Many Germanic people already there.
If you are refering to the Germanic mercenaries living in England, such mercenaries were also common in continental Europe and often formed the nucleus of a Germanic state.

-More contact with the Germanic homeland.
This might explain the survival of the Italian language as Italy is separated by the Alps, but France also had a lot of contact with the Germanic homeland which was just over the Rhine, yet it did not take a Germanic language. I find it difficult to imagine that contact across a river was less often than contact across a sea.

-Some stuff I've read says that a lot of the continental Germanic armies were pretty diverge grab bags of mercenaries.
And the Germanic people invading England consisted out of Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians, hardly a monolithic group.

That assumes that the native population remains; lowland Britain seems different, with migration to Brittany etc

DNA testing has shown that only about 30% of the genome is of anglo-saxon origin (e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35344663), so a significant part of the pre-conquest population must have remained.
 
How was the conquest of England slower? It is generally assumed to have started in 440 when the Germanic mercenaries rebelled against the Romans. The first invasion of France took place thirty years earlier in 406, and other incursions had taken place since the 380s. The invasions of Italy begun at latest in 455 (sacking of Rome) and lasted for at least a century (until the invasion of the longobards in northern Italy). If anything the conquest of England seems to have been faster.

An alternative to Daztur's explanation is that because the Britons resisted successfully for so long, the last Welsh principality didn't fall until the 13th century, it meant that British customs remained the customs of the 'enemy', including the language, thus hindering assimilation. Also, while the Saxons didn't relatively quickly establish themselves in the lowlands of Britain, there is evidence to suggest that it took more than a century for them to bring the lowlands completely under their control and at one point they were brought to a standstill in the early 5th century.

Part of the problem is that the literary sources and the archaeology disagree so strongly...

teg
 
There is evidence that language divisions in settled areas are generally quite stable over time eg the division between the Norman settlements in Wales and neighbouring Welsh speaking areas were stable up until the 19th/20th century.
 
Didn't some towns/cities on the German/Polish border swap ethnicity when one or other was deemed to be the height of culture?

And Anglo-Saxon conquest was hardly a quick thing - Elmet, Rheged, even Bernicia remained Celtic for quite some time. I would imagine it would be in the peasants interest in the Anglo-Saxon areas to adopt the language and styles of the elite so as not to seem to be identifying with the enemy.
 
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