page_title: Celtic language decline in England
section_title: Debate: was British Celtic being displaced by Latin before the arrival of English?
hierarchical_section_title: Celtic language decline in England / Debate: was British Celtic being displaced by Latin before the arrival of English?
caption_attribution_description: English: Roman writing tablet from the Vindolanda Roman fort of Hadrian's Wall, in Northumberland (1st-2nd century AD). Tablet 343: Letter from Octavius to Candidus concerning supplies of wheat, hides and sinews. British Museum (London)
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: There is an ongoing discussion about the character of British Celtic and the extent of Latin-speaking in Roman Britain. It is presently agreed that British Latin was spoken as a native language in Roman Britain, and that at least some of the dramatic changes that the Brittonic languages underwent around the 6th century were due to Latin-speakers switching language to Celtic, possibly as Latin speakers moved away from encroaching Germanic settlers. It seems likely that Latin was the language of most of the townspeople, of administration and the ruling class, the military and, following the introduction of Christianity, the church. However, British Celtic probably remained the language of the peasantry, which was the bulk of the population; the rural elite were probably bilingual. However, at the most extreme, it has been suggested that Latin became the prevalent language of lowland Britain, in which case the story of Celtic language-death in what is now England begins with its extensive displacement by Latin.
  Thomas Toon has suggested that if the population of Roman Lowland Britain was bilingual in both Brittonic and Latin, such a multilingual society might adapt to the use of a third language, such as that spoken by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, more readily than a monoglot population.
caption: Tablets from Vindolanda bearing Latin text.
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