ABSTRACT
The Celtic people who colonized Great Britain in the second half of the first millennium bc were speakers of P-Celtic – one of the two branches of Celtic characterized by their differing reflexes of early Celtic /kw/. 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 Clyde–Forth valley. The Anglo-Saxon invasions followed the Roman occupation, and by the seventh century ad the Celtic-speaking area was halved, with Anglo-Saxon 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.
