The Brittonic languages (also Brythonic or British Celtic)(; ; and ) form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages; the other is Goidelic. It comprises the extant languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word , denoting a Celtic Briton as distinguished from Anglo-Saxons or Gaels.
The Brittonic languages derive from the Common Brittonic language, spoken throughout Great Britain during the Iron Age and Roman period. In the 5th and 6th centuries emigrating Britons also took Brittonic speech to the continent, most significantly in Brittany and Britonia. During the next few centuries, in much of Britain the language was replaced by Old English and Scottish Gaelic, with the remaining Common Brittonic language splitting into regional dialects, eventually evolving into Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Cumbric, and possibly Pictish, which is more often identified as a descendant of a related to Brittonic branch of Celtic, known as Pritenic. Welsh and Breton continue to be spoken as native languages, while a revival in Cornish has led to an increase in speakers of that language. Cumbric and Pictish are extinct, having been replaced by Goidelic and Anglic speech. There is also a community of Brittonic language speakers in (the Welsh settlement in Patagonia).
Name The names "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" are scholarly conventions referring to the Celtic languages of Britain and to the ancestral language they originated from, designated Common Brittonic, in contrast to the Goidelic languages originating in Ireland. Both were created in the 19th century to avoid the ambiguity of earlier terms such as "British" and "Cymric". "Brythonic" was coined in 1879 by the Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word .Jackson, p. 3. "Brittonic", derived from "Briton" and also earlier spelled "Britonic" and "Britonnic", emerged later in the 19th century, though being attested in French (as "brittonique") as early as in 1834. "Brittonic" became more prominent through the 20th century, and was used in Kenneth H. Jackson's highly influential 1953 work on the topic, Language and History in Early Britain. Jackson noted by that time that "Brythonic" had become a dated term: "of late there has been an increasing tendency to use Brittonic instead." Today, "Brittonic" often replaces "Brythonic" in the literature. Rudolf Thurneysen used "Britannic" in his influential A Grammar of Old Irish, although this never became popular among subsequent scholars.
Comparable historical terms include the Medieval Latin and and the Welsh . Some writers use "British" for the language and its descendants, although, due to the risk of confusion, others avoid it or use it only in a restricted sense. Jackson, and later John T. Koch, use "British" only for the early phase of the Common Brittonic language.
Before Jackson's work, "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" were often used for all the P-Celtic languages, including not just the varieties in Britain but those Continental Celtic languages that similarly experienced the evolution of the Proto-Celtic language element to . However, subsequent writers have tended to follow Jackson's scheme, rendering this use obsolete.
The name "Britain" itself comes from , via Old French and Middle English , possibly influenced by Old English , probably also from Latin , ultimately an adaptation of the native word for the island, .Chadwick, Hector Munro, Early Scotland: The Picts, the Scots and the Welsh of Southern Scotland, Cambridge University Press, 1949 (2013 reprint), p. 68
An early written reference to the British Isles may derive from the works of the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia; later Greek writers such as Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo who quote Pytheas' use of variants such as (), "The Britannic [land, island]", and (), "Britannic islands", with being a Celtic word that might mean 'painted ones' or 'tattooed folk', referring to body decoration.
Evidence Knowledge of the Brittonic languages comes from a variety of sources. The early language's information is obtained from coins, inscriptions, and comments by classical writers as well as place names and personal names recorded by them. For later languages, there is information from medieval writers and modern native speakers, together with place names. The names recorded in the Roman period are given in Rivet and Smith.*
Characteristics The Brittonic branch is also referred to as P-Celtic because linguistic reconstruction of the Brittonic reflex of the Proto-Indo-European phoneme is p as opposed to Goidelic k. Such nomenclature usually implies acceptance of the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic hypothesis rather than the Insular Celtic hypothesis because the term includes certain Continental Celtic languages as well. Other major characteristics include: The retention of the Proto-Celtic sequences and , which mostly result from the Proto-Indo-European syllabic nasals. Celtic (written u in Latin texts and ou in Greek) became gw- in initial position, -w- internally, whereas in Gaelic it is f- in initial position and disappears internally:
+Proto-Celtic‘white’‘servant’Proto-Brythonic BretonCornishWelsh , (contrast Irish)
Initial s- Initial s- followed by a vowel was changed to h-:
+Proto-Celtic‘old’‘long’‘similitude’Proto-Brythonic BretonCornishWelsh(contrast Irish)
Initial s- was lost before , and :
+Proto-Celtic‘polished, smooth’‘marrow’‘to turn, twist’Proto-Brythonic BretonCornishWelsh(contrast Irish) ,
The initial clusters sp-, sr-, sw- became f-, fr-, chw-:
+Proto-Celtic‘heel’‘nose’‘you (pl.)’Proto-Brythonic BretonCornishWelsh(contrast Irish) ,
Lenition Voiceless plosives become voiced plosives in intervocalic position. +Lenited(contrast Old Irish)
Voiced plosives became soft spirants in intervocalic position and before liquids:
+Welsh∅(earlier )CornishBreton(contrast Old Irish)
Voiceless spirants Geminated voiceless plosives transformed into spirants:
+BretonCornishWelsh(contrast Irish)
+BretonCornishWelsh(contrast Irish)—
Voiceless stops become spirants after liquids:
+Proto-Celtic‘end’‘strength, force’Proto-BrythonicBretonCornishWelsh(contrast Old Irish)
Nasal assimilation Voiced stops were assimilated to a preceding nasal:
+Proto-Celtic‘butter’‘open land’Proto-BrythonicBretonWelsh, (contrast Old Irish)
Brittonic retains original nasals before and :
+Proto-Celtic‘hundred’‘death’Breton(personification)Welsh(contrast Irish)‘to die’
Classification The family tree of the Brittonic languages is as follows:
Common Brittonic Western Brittonic Cumbric Welsh Southwestern Brittonic Cornish Breton
Brittonic languages in use today are Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Welsh and Breton have been spoken continuously since they formed. For all practical purposes Cornish died out during the 18th or 19th century, but a revival movement has more recently created small numbers of new speakers. Also notable are the extinct language Cumbric, and possibly the extinct Pritenic Pictish. One view, advanced in the 1950s and based on apparently unintelligible ogham inscriptions, was that the Picts may have also used a non-Indo-European language.Jackson, 1955 This view, while attracting broad popular appeal, has virtually no following in contemporary linguistic scholarship.Driscoll, 2011 Pictish is more often considered to be a member of its own branch known as Pritenic, which is closer to Brythonic than to Goidelic, but distinct from both.
History and origins
The modern Brittonic languages are generally considered to all derive from a common ancestral language termed Brittonic, British, Common Brittonic, Old Brittonic or Proto-Brittonic, which is thought to have developed from Proto-Celtic or early Insular Celtic by the 6th century BC.
A major archaeogenetics study uncovered a migration into southern Britain in the middle to late Bronze Age, during the 500-year period 1,300–800 BC. The newcomers were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from Gaul. During 1,000–875 BC, their genetic markers swiftly spread through southern Britain, but not northern Britain. The authors describe this as a "plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain". There was much less inward migration during the Iron Age, so it is likely that Celtic reached Britain before then. Barry Cunliffe suggests that a Goidelic branch of Celtic may already have been spoken in Britain, but that this middle Bronze Age migration would have introduced the Brittonic branch.
Brittonic languages were probably spoken before the Roman invasion throughout most of Great Britain. It might have been spoken on the Isle of Man, although by the early Middle Ages it had a Goidelic language, Manx. During the period of the Roman occupation of what is now England and Wales (AD 43 to ), Common Brittonic borrowed a large stock of Latin words, both for concepts unfamiliar in the pre-urban society of Celtic Britain such as urbanization and new tactics of warfare, as well as for rather more mundane words which displaced native terms (most notably, the word for 'fish' in all the Brittonic languages derives from the Latin rather than the native – which may survive, however, in the Welsh name of the River Usk, ). Approximately 800 of these Latin loan-words have survived in the three modern Brittonic languages. Pictish might have resisted Latin influence to a greater extent than Brittonic languages, potentially splitting from Common Brythonic because of resistance, if wasn't separate from Brythonic before as Pritenic.
It is probable that at the start of the Post-Roman period, Common Brittonic was differentiated into at least two major dialect groups – Southwestern and Western. (Additional dialects have also been posited, but have left little or no evidence, such as an Eastern Brittonic spoken in what is now the East of England.) Between the end of the Roman occupation and the mid-6th century, the two dialects began to diverge into recognizably separate varieties, the Western into Cumbric and Welsh, and the Southwestern into Cornish and its closely related sister language Breton, which was carried to continental Armorica. Jackson showed that a few of the dialect distinctions between West and Southwest Brittonic go back a long way. New divergencies began around AD 500 but other changes that were shared occurred in the 6th century. Other common changes occurred in the 7th century onward and are possibly due to inherent tendencies. Thus the concept of a Common Brittonic language ends by AD 600. Substantial numbers of Britons certainly remained in the expanding area controlled by Anglo-Saxons, but over the fifth and sixth centuries they mostly adopted the Old English language and culture.
Brittonic grammar had a case system similar to Irish and Scottish Gaelic and descending from Proto-Celtic, however this had vanished by the 6th century.
Decline
The Brittonic languages spoken in what are now Scotland and England began to be displaced in the 5th century through the settlement of Irish-speaking Gaels and Germanic peoples. Henry of Huntingdon wrote that Pictish was "no longer spoken", despite Pictish names appearing up to 14th century.
The displacement of the languages of Brittonic descent was probably complete in all of Britain except Cornwall, Wales, and the English counties bordering these areas such as Devon, by the 11th century. Western Herefordshire continued to speak Welsh until the late nineteenth century, and isolated pockets of Shropshire speak Welsh today.
Sound changes The large array of Brittonic sound changes has been documented by Schrijver (1995), building upon Jackson (1953).
Changes to long vowels and diphthongs Brittonic has undergone an extensive remodeling of Proto-Celtic diphthongs and long vowels. All original Proto-Celtic diphthongs turned into monophthongs, albeit a number of these re-diphthongized at later stages.