ABSTRACT
The Celtic people who colonized the British Isles in the second half of the first millennium BC were speakers of P-Celtic (see Celtic Languages in Campbell 1991). By the time the Romans arrived in Britain, this P-Celtic or Brythonic was the language of ‘Britannia’ = Brythonia, spoken from the Channel to the ClydeForth valley. The Anglo-Saxon invasions followed the Roman occupation, and by the seventh century AD the Celtic-speaking area was halved, with AngloSaxon established in a broadening swathe from the Tyne to the Channel coast as far west as Dorset, and Brythonic confined to a shrinking foothold in the western marches. Inherent in this process of break-up and tribal dispersion was the emergence of dialects - the earliest forms of Welsh and Cornish-Breton.
