Ancient Celtic language of Britain, ancestor to Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Cumbric
This article is about an ancestral Celtic language. For the group of languages descended from it, see Brittonic languages.
Common Brittonic
*Brittonikā[1]
Region
Great Britain
Ethnicity
Britons
Era
c. 6th century BC to mid-6th century AD[2] Developed into Old Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, Breton and probably Pictish[3]
Language family
Indo-European
Celtic
Insular Celtic
Brittonic
Common Brittonic
Language codes
ISO 639-3
–
Linguist List
brit
Glottolog
None
Linguasphere
50-AB
Common Brittonic (Welsh: Brythoneg; Cornish: Brythonek; Breton: Predeneg), also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic,[4][5] is an extinct Celtic language spoken in Britain and Brittany.
It is a form of Insular Celtic, descended from Proto-Celtic, a theorized parent language that, by the first half of the first millennium BC, was diverging into separate dialects or languages.[6][7][8][9] Pictish is linked, likely as a sister language or a descendant branch.[10][11][12]
Evidence from early and modern Welsh shows that Common Brittonic was significantly influenced by Latin during the Roman period, especially in terms related to the church and Christianity.[13] By the sixth century AD, the languages of the Celtic Britons were rapidly diverging into Neo-Brittonic: Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, Breton, and possibly the Pictish language.
Over the next three centuries, Brittonic was replaced by Scottish Gaelic in most of Scotland, and by Old English (from which descend Modern English and Scots) throughout most of modern England as well as Scotland south of the Firth of Forth.[14] Cumbric disappeared in the 12th century,[14] and in the far south-west, Cornish probably became extinct in the 18th century, though its use has since been revived.[15][a] O'Rahilly's historical model suggests a Brittonic language in Ireland before the introduction of the Goidelic languages, but this view has not found wide acceptance.[17] Welsh and Breton are the only daughter languages that have survived fully into the modern day.
^Schrijver, Peter (1995). Studies in British Celtic historical phonology. Leiden studies in Indo-european. Amsterdam Atlanta (Ga.): Rodopi. p. 45. ISBN 978-90-5183-820-6.
^Common Brittonic at MultiTree on the Linguist List
^Cite error: The named reference UGlas was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Eska, Joseph F. (2019-12-01). "The evolution of proto-Brit. *-/lth/ in Welsh". Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. 66 (1): 75–82. doi:10.1515/zcph-2019-0003. ISSN 1865-889X. S2CID 212726410.
^Sims-Williams, Patrick (November 1984). "The Double System of Verbal Inflexion in Old Irish". Transactions of the Philological Society. 82 (1): 138–201. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1984.tb01211.x. ISSN 0079-1636.
^Henderson, Jon C. (2007). The Atlantic Iron Age: Settlement and Identity in the First Millennium BC. Routledge. pp. 292–295. ISBN 9780415436427.
^Sims-Williams, Patrick (2007). Studies on Celtic Languages before the Year 1000. CMCS. p. 1.
^Koch, John T. (2006). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 1455.
^Eska, Joseph (2008). "Continental Celtic". In Woodard, Roger (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Europe. Cambridge.
^Forsyth, Katherine (2006). Koch, John T. (ed.). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. pp. 1444, 1447.
^Forsyth, Katherine (1997). Language in Pictland: The case against "non-Indo-European Pictish". Utrecht: de Keltische Draak. p. 27.
^Jackson, Kenneth H. (1955). "The Pictish Language". In Wainwright, F. T. (ed.). The Problem of the Picts. Edinburgh: Nelson. pp. 129–166.
^Lewis, H. (1943). Yr Elfen Ladin yn yr Iaith Gymraeg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
^ abNicolaisen, W. F. H. Scottish Place Names. p. 131.
^Tanner, Marcus (2004). The last of the Celts. Yale University Press. p. 225. ISBN 0300104642.
^Ferdinand, Siarl (2018). "The Promotion of Cornish in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly: Attitudes towards the Language and Recommendations for Policy". Studia Celtica Fennica. 19: 107–130. doi:10.33353/scf.79496.
^O'Rahilly, Thomas (1964). Early Irish history and mythology. School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. ISBN 0-901282-29-4.
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CommonBrittonic (Welsh: Brythoneg; Cornish: Brythonek; Breton: Predeneg), also known as British, Common Brythonic, or Proto-Brittonic, is an extinct Celtic...
Britons as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael. The Brittonic languages derive from the CommonBrittonic language, spoken throughout Great Britain during...
Cornish, and Bretons (among others). They spoke CommonBrittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages. The earliest written evidence for the...
Cumbric was a variety of the CommonBrittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" in what is now the counties...
Look up brittonic in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Brittonic or Brythonic may refer to: CommonBrittonic, or Brythonic, the Celtic language anciently...
The Southwestern Brittonic languages (Breton: Predeneg ar mervent, Cornish: Brythonek Dyghowbarthgorlewin) are the Brittonic Celtic languages spoken in...
Western Brittonic languages (Welsh: Brythoneg Gorllewinol) comprise two dialects into which CommonBrittonic split during the Early Middle Ages; its counterpart...
Celtic Britons inhabited most of the island of Great Britain and spoke CommonBrittonic or British. Abnoba - Gaulish goddess worshipped in the Black Forest...
of the Brittonic languages of Scotland survive to the modern day, though they have been reconstructed to a degree. The ancestral CommonBrittonic language...
of some combination of Old English, Norman French, Old Norse, and CommonBrittonic. The lexicon of a Creole language is largely supplied by the parent...
would have been Pictish tribes speaking a language closely related to CommonBrittonic, or a branch of it augmented by fugitive Brythonic resistance fighters...
computer science). In historical linguistics, Σ is used to represent a CommonBrittonic consonant with a sound between [s] and [h]; perhaps an aspirated [ʃʰ]...
delimiters. The Cornish language separated from the southwestern dialect of CommonBrittonic at some point between 600 and 1000 AD. The phonological similarity...
Graupius in northern Scotland in AD 83 or 84. His name can be interpreted as Brittonic *calg-ac-os, 'possessing a blade', and is seemingly related to the Gaelic...
are, for example, CommonBrittonic, Gaulish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, or other languages. List of English words of Brittonic origin List of English...
in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: CommonBrittonic, a Celtic language; and Latin, brought to Britain by the Roman conquest...
Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic language family. Along with Welsh and Breton, Cornish is descended from the CommonBrittonic language spoken...
Welsh. The preceding period, from the time Welsh became distinct from CommonBrittonic around 550, has been called "Primitive" or "Archaic Welsh". The phonology...
Middle Irish) and the Brittonic languages (Welsh and Breton, descended from CommonBrittonic). The other two, Cornish (Brittonic) and Manx (Goidelic),...
Cunobeline or Cunobelin (CommonBrittonic: *Cunobelinos, "Dog-Strong"), also known by his name's Latin form Cunobelinus, was a king in pre-Roman Britain...
(Cymraeg [kəmˈraːiɡ] or y Gymraeg [ə ɡəmˈraːiɡ]) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively...
the peoples of southern Britain; all were called Britons and spoke CommonBrittonic, a Celtic language. This language, and Celtic culture more generally...
The Catuvellauni (CommonBrittonic: *Catu-wellaunī, "war-chiefs") were a Celtic tribe or state of southeastern Britain before the Roman conquest, attested...
and personal names, makes it clear that a Celtic language, called CommonBrittonic, was spoken across what came to be England by the Late Iron Age. At...
ethno-linguistic group Brittonic languages, a branch of the Insular Celtic language family (formerly called British) CommonBrittonic, an ancient language...
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