page_title: Celtic language decline in England
section_title: Debate: why are there so few etymologically Celtic place-names in England?
hierarchical_section_title: Celtic language decline in England / Debate: why are there so few etymologically Celtic place-names in England?
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of place-names between the Firth of Forth and the River Tees: in green, names likely containing Brittonic elements; in red and orange, names likely containing the Old English elements -ham and -ingaham respectively. Survey area (approximately marked, in red) covers the pre-1974 counties of Northumbria, Durham, Selkirkshire, Roxburghshire, Berwickshire, Peeblesshire and the Lothians. Higher ground is lighter in colour; rivers are blue. First published at http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/placenames/frames.htm as part of Bethany Fox, 'The P-Celtic Place-Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland', The Heroic Age, 10 (2007), http://www.heroicage.org/issues/10/fox.html.
context_page_description: The decline of Celtic languages in England was the process by the Brittonic languages in what is currently England died out. This happened in most of England between about 400 and 1000, though in Cornwall it was finished only in the 18th century.
  Prior to about the 5th century AD, most people in Britain spoke Celtic languages, although Vulgar Latin may have taken over in larger settlements, especially in the south-east. The fundamental reason for the demise of these languages in early medieval England was the arrival in Britain of settlers who spoke the Germanic language now known as Old English, particularly around the 5th century. Gradually, those Celtic-speakers who did not move to Brittany or to highland zones within Britain switched to Old English until Celtic languages were no longer extensively spoken in what became England.
  However, the precise processes by which this shift happened have been much debated, not least because the situation was strikingly different from, for example, post-Roman Gaul, Iberia, or North Africa, where Germanic-speaking invaders gradually switched to local languages.
context_section_description: Place-names are traditionally seen as important evidence for the history of language in post-Roman Britain for three main reasons:
  It is widely assumed that, even when first attested later, names were often coined in the Settlement Period.
  Although it is not clear who in society determined what places were called, place-names may reflect the usage of a broader section of the population than written texts.
  Place-names provide evidence for language in regions for which we lack written sources.
  Post-Roman place-names in England begin to be attested from around 670, pre-eminently in Anglo-Saxon charters; they have been intensively surveyed by the English and Scottish Place-Name Societies.
  Except in Cornwall, the vast majority of place-names in England are easily etymologised as Old English (or Old Norse, due to later Viking influence), demonstrating the dominance of English across post-Roman England. This is often seen as evidence for a cataclysmic cultural and demographic shift at the end of the Roman period, in which not only the Brittonic and Latin languages, but also Brittonic and Latin place-names, and even Brittonic- and Latin-speakers, were swept away.
  In recent decades, research on Celtic toponymy, driven by the development of Celtic studies and particularly by Andrew Breeze and Richard Coates, has complicated this picture: more names in England and southern Scotland have Brittonic, or occasionally Latin, etymologies than was once thought. Earlier scholars often did not notice this because they were unfamiliar with Celtic languages. For example, Leatherhead was once etymologised as Old English lēod-rida, meaning "place where people [can] ride [across the river]". But lēod has never been discovered in place-names before or since, and *ride 'place suitable for riding' was merely speculation. Coates showed that Brittonic lēd-rïd 'grey ford' was more plausible. In particular, there are clusters of Cumbric place-names in northern Cumbria and to the north of the Lammermuir Hills. Even so, it is clear that Brittonic and Latin place-names in the eastern half of England are extremely rare, and although they are noticeably more common in the western half, they are still a tiny minority─2% in Cheshire, for example.
  Likewise, some entirely Old English names explicitly point to Roman structures, usually using Latin loan-words, or to the presence of Brittonic-speakers. Names like Wickham clearly denoted the kind of Roman settlement known in Latin as a vicus, and others end in elements denoting Roman features, such as -caster, denoting castra ('forts'). There is a substantial body of names along the lines of Walton/Walcot/Walsall/Walsden, many of which must include the Old English word wealh in the sense 'Celtic-speaker', and Comberton, many of which must include Old English Cumbre 'Britons'. These are likely to have been names for enclaves of Brittonic-speakers─but again are not that numerous.
  In the last decade, however, some scholars have stressed that Welsh and Cornish place-names from the Roman period seem no more likely to survive than Roman names in England: 'clearly name loss was a Romano-British phenomenon, not just one associated with Anglo-Saxon incomers'. Therefore, other explanations for the replacement of Roman period place-names which allow for a less cataclysmic shift to English naming include:
  Adaptation rather than replacement. Names that came to look like they were coined as Old English may actually come from Roman-period ones. For example, the Old English name for the city of York, Eoforwīc (earlier *Eburwīc), transparently means 'boar-village'. We only know that the first part of the name was borrowed from the earlier Romanised Celtic name Eburacum because that earlier name is one of relatively few Roman British place-names that were recorded: otherwise we would assume the Old English name was coined from scratch. (Likewise, the Old English name was in turn adapted into Norse as Jórvík, which transparently means 'horse-bay', and again it would not be obvious that this was based on an earlier Old English name we
caption: Map of place-names between the Firth of Forth and the River Tees: in green, names likely containing Brittonic elements; in red and orange, names likely containing the Old English elements -ham and -ingaham respectively. Brittonic names lie mostly to the north of the Lammermuir and Moorfoot Hills.[92]
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