Why is there so little Celtic influence in English?

Historians now know that the transition from post-Roman Celtic Britain to Anglo Saxon England was more complicated than Germanic-speaking invaders simply coming in and displacing the Romano-British population until that culture survived only in Wales and Cornwall. However, the British language(s) seem to have only given place names and some words for geographic features to the English language. If it was really a process of immigration and absorption of British speakers into the new English culture, where are all the Celtic loan words English would have gained during that time?

Lots of place names in England are derived from Celtic. The situation in England is pretty similar to the situation in America with Native American languages. There is extensive borrowing of Native American place names but negligible influence on American English vocabulary. For example, I'm from Ohio. I was born in Chillicothe, lived part of my life in Wapakoneta, and now live temporarily in the Kanawha valley in West Virginia.

Doesn't the evidence support displacement rather than absorption? If not, why is there so little borrowing from Celtic?
 
Historians now know that the transition from post-Roman Celtic Britain to Anglo Saxon England was more complicated than Germanic-speaking invaders simply coming in and displacing the Romano-British population until that culture survived only in Wales and Cornwall. However, the British language(s) seem to have only given place names and some words for geographic features to the English language. If it was really a process of immigration and absorption of British speakers into the new English culture, where are all the Celtic loan words English would have gained during that time?

Lots of place names in England are derived from Celtic. The situation in England is pretty similar to the situation in America with Native American languages. There is extensive borrowing of Native American place names but negligible influence on American English vocabulary. For example, I'm from Ohio. I was born in Chillicothe, lived part of my life in Wapakoneta, and now live temporarily in the Kanawha valley in West Virginia.

Doesn't the evidence support displacement rather than absorption? If not, why is there so little borrowing from Celtic?

Probably a mix of:

-Generally low population living there to begin with relative Gaul and such, and very little of it urbanized/exposed to Roman literature in any meaningful sense (and virtually none of Old Welsh standardized in written form in the Lloegr) since the areas which became England were the ones under the most "control" of Rome,
-Lack of maintenance of a written standard upon the Romans' exit from the isle, likely exacerbated by the contemporary Britons' rather fractious and unstable practices in government and administration, which also saw a much reduced sense of prestige in either British or Romance once the Saxons arrived and took over the place, and
-Lack of any perceived need for Celtic or Romance vocabulary in Old English, apart from place names and geographic descriptions, especially if you buy the notion that the Saxons were thoroughly anti-Welsh (in the context of both Celtic and Romance peoples, i.e. "foreign"/strange peoples from their POV). I personally don't put stock in that last bit though, since we have attestations of various Saxon kings with decidedly Brythonic names (e.g. Cerdic, Ceawlin, Cedda, Caedwalla), which leads me to believe that transition to living under Saxon rules was not uniformly oppressive or violent...further reinforcing the notion that Old English had more perceived "worth" as a language than that of Old British in eastern Britain.
 
Last edited:
Top