There is little direct evidence for the linguistic situation in Britain for the next few centuries. However, by the 8th century, when extensive evidence for the language situation in England is next available, it is clear that the dominant language was what is today known as Old English. There is no serious doubt that Old English was brought to Britain primarily during the 5th and 6th centuries by settlers from what are now the Netherlands, north-western Germany, and southern Denmark who spoke various dialects of Germanic languages and who came to be known as Anglo-Saxons. The language that emerged from the dialects they brought to Britain is today known as Old English. There is evidence for Britons moving westward, and also across the English Channel to Brittany, but those who remained in what became England switched to speaking Old English until Celtic languages were no longer extensively spoken there. Celtic languages continued to be spoken in other parts of the British Isles, such as Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall. Only a few English words of Brittonic origin appear to have entered Old English.
Because the main evidence for events in Britain during the crucial period (400–700) is archaeological and seldom reveals linguistic information, and written evidence even after 700 remains patchy, the precise chronology of the spread of Old English is uncertain. However, Kenneth Jackson combined historical information from texts like Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) with evidence for the linguistic origins of British river names to suggest the following chronology, which remains broadly accepted (see map):
As of around 2010 there was an ongoing discussion about the character of British Celtic and the extent of Latin-speaking in Roman Britain. Scholars 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-speaking settlers. It was thought likely that Latin was the language of most of the townspeople; the administration and the ruling class; the military and the church. Some scholars thought that British Celtic probably remained the language of the peasantry, which was the bulk of the population; the rural elite was probably bilingual. But others 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 would a monoglot population.
Old English shows little obvious influence from Celtic: there are vanishingly few English words of Brittonic origin. Latin loanwords into early Old English were more numerous; since they were part of a continuous process of borrowing from Latin into Germanic languages, it is hard to be sure how many belong to the early Old English period, but they number in the tens or hundreds.
The traditional explanation for the lack of Celtic influence on English, supported by uncritical readings of the accounts of Gildas and Bede, is that Old English became dominant primarily because Germanic-speaking invaders killed, chased away, and/or enslaved the previous inhabitants of the areas that they settled, particularly in the East. A number of specialists maintained support for such explanations into the 21st century, and variations on this theme continued to feature in standard histories of English. Peter Schrijver said in 2014 that "to a large extent, it is linguistics that is responsible for thinking in terms of drastic scenarios" about demographic change in late Roman Britain.
The adoption of Germanic languages by status seeking Britons could in turn lead to a 'retrospective reworking' of kinship ties to the dominant group ultimately leading to the "myths which tied the entire society to immigration as an explanation of their origins in Britain".
One piece of evidence for elite acculturation has been the Celtic names of members of the Anglo-Saxon elite
Textual sources hint that people who are portrayed as ethnically Anglo-Saxon actually had British connections: the West Saxon royal line was supposedly founded by a man named Cerdic, whose name derives from the Brittonic Caraticos (cf. Welsh Ceredig), whose supposed descendants Ceawlin and Caedwalla (d. 689) also had Brittonic names. The British name Caedbaed is found in the pedigree of the kings of Lindsey. The names of King Penda and some other kings of Mercia have more obvious Brittonic than Germanic etymologies, but they do not correspond to known Welsh personal names. The early Northumbrian churchmen Chad of Mercia (a prominent bishop) and his brothers Cedd (also a bishop), Cynibil and Caelin, along with the supposed first composer of Christian English verse, Cædmon, also have Brittonic names.
It has been pointed out that there was conspicuously no attempt by contemporary British or Anglo-Saxons genealogists to give British and Anglo-Saxon royal families a common ancestry, in contrast to the practice of Anglo-Saxon genealogies intermeshing around claimed common descent from Woden or Welsh genealogies intermeshing in a supposed common descent from the fourth-century Romano-British imperial claimant Magnus Maximus.
Critics of elite acculturation point out that in most cases, minority elite classes have not been able to impose their languages on a settled population. Furthermore, the archaeological and genetic evidence has cast doubt upon theories of expulsion and ethnic cleansing but also has tended not to support the idea that the extensive change seen in the post-Roman period was simply the result of acculturation by a ruling class. In fact, many of the initial migrants seem to have been families, rather than warriors, with significant numbers of women taking part and elites not emerging until the sixth century.
In light of that, the emerging consensus among historians, archaeologists and linguists is that the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain was not a single event and thus cannot be explained by any one particular model. In the core areas of settlement in the south and east, for example, large-scale migration and population change seem to be the best explanations. In the peripheral areas to the northwest, on the other hand, a model of elite dominance may be the most fitting. In that view, therefore, the decline of Brittonic and British Latin in England can be explained by a combination of migration, displacement and acculturation in different contexts and areas.
Supporters of the acculturation model in particular must account for the fact that in the case of a fairly swift language shift, involving second-language acquisition by adults, the learners' imperfect acquisition of the grammar and the pronunciation of the new language will affect it in some way. As yet, there is no consensus that such effects are visible in the surviving evidence in the case of English. Thus, one synthesis concluded that 'the evidence for Celtic influence on Old English is somewhat sparse, which only means that it remains elusive, not that it did not exist'.
Although there is little consensus about the findings, extensive efforts have been made during the 21st century to identify substrate influence of Brittonic on English.
Coates has concluded that the strongest candidates for potential substrate features can be seen in regional dialects in the north and the west of England (roughly corresponding to Area 3 in Jackson's chronology), such as the Northern Subject Rule.
The contrast to experience in places post-Roman Gaul where the invaders adopted the Latin derived languages of the local population has been suggested by Bryan Ward-Perkins to have been due to the successful native resistance of local, militarised tribal societies to the invaders may perhaps account for the fact of the slow progress of Anglo-Saxonisation as opposed to the sweeping conquest of Gaul by the Franks.
One idiosyncratic explanation for the spread of English that gained extensive popular attention was Stephen Oppenheimer's 2006 suggestion that the lack of Celtic influence on English was caused by the ancestor of English being already widely spoken in Britain by the Belgae before the end of the Roman period. However, Oppenheimer's ideas have not been found helpful in explaining the known facts since there is no solid evidence for a well established Germanic language in Britain before the fifth century (among the Belgae or otherwise) and the idea contradicts the extensive evidence for the use of Celtic and Latin.
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 the Scottish Place-Name Societies.
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'. Those are likely to have been names for enclaves of Brittonic-speakers but again are not that numerous.
Thus, place-names are important for showing the swift spread of English across England and also provide important glimpses into details of the history of Brittonic and Latin in the region, but they do not demand a single or simple model for explaining the spread of English.
Debate continues within a framework assuming that many Brittonic-speakers shifted to English, for example over whether at least some Germanic-speaking peasant-class immigrants must have been involved to bring about the language-shift; what legal or social structures (such as enslavement or apartheid-like customs) might have promoted the high status of English; and precisely how slowly Brittonic (and British Latin) disappeared in different regions.
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Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 98–101.
David N. Parsons, 'Sabrina in the thorns: place-names as evidence for British and Latin in Roman Britain', Transactions of the Royal Philological Society, 109.2 (July 2011), 113–37 (pp. 125–28). https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.2011.01276.x
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Quoting Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 99.
Alaric Hall, 'The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy', in Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Richard Jones and Sarah Semple (Donington: Tyas, 2012), pp. 101–29 (pp. 112–13). https://www.academia.edu/2977260
Higham and Ryan (2013), p. 100.
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James, Alan. "Brittonic Language in the Old North: A Guide to the Place-Name Evidence" (PDF). https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2020_Edition.pdf
Ekwall, Eilert (1960) [1936]. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (Fourth ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 143. ISBN 0-19-869103-3. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) 0-19-869103-3
"Survey of English Place-Names". English Place-Name Society. http://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 100.
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Alaric Hall, ‘A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period', in Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R. W. McConchie, ed. by Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily, Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 14 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 219–31 (p. 221). https://www.academia.edu/821750
James, Alan. "Brittonic Language in the Old North: A Guide to the Place-Name Evidence" (PDF). https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2020_Edition.pdf
"Survey of English Place-Names". English Place-Name Society. http://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
James, Alan. "Brittonic Language in the Old North: A Guide to the Place-Name Evidence" (PDF). https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2020_Edition.pdf
The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, Volume 30. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1982. p. 41. https://books.google.com/books?id=gShKAAAAYAAJ
James, Alan. "Brittonic Language in the Old North: A Guide to the Place-Name Evidence" (PDF). https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2020_Edition.pdf
"Survey of English Place-Names". English Place-Name Society. http://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/
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Alaric Hall, 'The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy', in Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Richard Jones and Sarah Semple (Donington: Tyas, 2012), pp. 101–29 (pp. 108–9). https://www.academia.edu/2977260
Alaric Hall, 'The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy', in Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Richard Jones and Sarah Semple (Donington: Tyas, 2012), pp. 101–29. https://www.academia.edu/2977260
Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 100–101.
James, Alan. "Brittonic Language in the Old North: A Guide to the Place-Name Evidence" (PDF). https://spns.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Alan_James_Brittonic_Language_in_the_Old_North_BLITON_Volume_II_Dictionary_2020_Edition.pdf
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Brittonic Languages, First to Twelfth Century A.D., Edinburgh University Publications, Language and Literature, 4 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953).
David N. Parsons, 'Sabrina in the thorns: place-names as evidence for British and Latin in Roman Britain', Transactions of the Royal Philological Society, 109.2 (July 2011), 113–37. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.2011.01276.x
Alaric Hall, 'The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy', in Sense of Place in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. by Richard Jones and Sarah Semple (Donington: Tyas, 2012), pp. 101–29. https://www.academia.edu/2977260
Filppula, Markku, and Juhani Klemola, eds. 2009. Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis. Special issue of English Language and Linguistics 13.2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/special-issue-on-reevaluating-the-celtic-hypothesis/C3E723FF6AB62B7DC35E37C3EB0E6B06
Quoting D. Gary Miller, External Influences on English: From Its Beginnings to the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 35–40 (p. 39).