Celtic language-death in England

Celtic language-death in England refers primarily to the process by which speakers of Brittonic languages in what is now England switched to speaking English. This happened in most of England between about 400 and 1000 CE, though in Cornwall only in the eighteenth century.

The causes of Celtic language-death in early medieval England 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. Explaining the rise of Old English is therefore crucial in any account of cultural change in post-Roman Britain, and in particular the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, and is an important aspect of the History of English.

The modern scholarly consensus is that the prime reason for the death of Brittonic in most of England was that in the fifth to sixth centuries, a new political elite of Old English-speaking immigrants made it politically expedient for other people in Britain to adopt their new rulers' language and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity.

Fairly extensive information about language in Roman Britain is available from Roman administrative documents attesting to place- and personal-names, along with archaeological finds such as coins, the Bloomberg and Vindolanda tablets, and Bath curse tablets. This shows that most inhabitants spoke British Celtic and/or British Latin until the Roman economy and administrative structures collapsed, around the early fifth century.

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