Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic (i.e. British Celtic) speakers as they switched language to English following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon political dominance in Britain.
Table 1: A number of possible shift features selected as representative by Richard Coates, Gary Miller and Raymond Hickey
* regional, northern England; ** regional, southwestern England
Features
Coates [1]
Miller [2]
Hickey [3]
Two functionally distinct 'to be' verbs
✔
✔
✔
Northern subject rule *
✔
✔
✔
Development of reflexives
✔
✔
Rise of progressive
✔
✔
Loss of external possessor
✔
✔
Rise of the periphrastic "do"
✔
✔
Negative comparative particle *
✔
Rise of pronoun -en **
✔
Merger of /kw-/, /hw-/ and /χw-/ *
✔
Rise of "it" clefts
✔
Rise of sentential answers and tagging
✔
Preservation of θ and ð
✔
Loss of front rounded vowels
✔
The research into this topic uses a variety of approaches to approximate the Romano-British language spoken in Sub-Roman Britain on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. Besides the earliest extant Old Welsh texts, Breton is useful for its lack of English influence.[4]
The Brittonic substratum influence on English is considered to be very small, but a number of publications in the 2000s (decade) suggested that its influence may have been underestimated. Some of the developments differentiating Old English from Middle English have been proposed as an emergence of a previously unrecorded Brittonic influence.[5][6]
There are many, often obscure, characteristics in English that have been proposed as Brittonicisms. White enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works.[5] However, these theories have not become a part of the mainstream view of the history of English.[7]
^Coates 2010.
^Miller, D. Gary (2012). External influences on English: from its beginnings to the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199654260.
^Hickey, Raymond (2012). "Early English and the Celtic hypothesis". In Nevalainen, Terttu; Traugott, Elizabeth C. (eds.). The Oxford handbook of the history of English. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 497–507. ISBN 9780199922765.
^German 2001, pp. 125–41.
^ abWhite 2004.
^Isaac 2001.
^Minkova, Donka (2009). "A history of the English language, and: A history of the English language, and: The Oxford history of English". Review. Language. 85 (4). Linguistic Society of America: 893–907. doi:10.1353/lan.0.0180. JSTOR 40492958.
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