ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus mainly on contact effects as they are evidenced in regional varieties of English spoken in present-day or formerly Celticspeaking areas and in some neighbouring dialects. Although it seems hard to ascertain similar inuences in standard or ‘mainstream’ varieties of English, it is quite possible that certain features of the latter have at least indirectly been inuenced or reinforced by their Celtic counterparts-mostly mediated through the millions of speakers of Celtic-inuenced varieties who have emigrated to England or further aeld to America, Australia and other parts of the world. Some of these features are familiar from the earliest contacts; such are, e.g., the English progressive form and the cleft construction. Both have steadily increased their frequencies of use in most mainstream varieties of the modern period, and they have also greatly expanded their originally rather narrow domains of use (see section 4.2 for further discussion). On the other hand, there are features which were on the verge of demise in mediaeval English, but which have been given a new lease of life in the modern period. Such is, e.g. the so-called medial-object or conclusive perfect (see 4.2). Since all of these are robust features of the various ‘Celtic Englishes’ (CEs), the possibility of continuing direct or indirect input from the Celtic substrata, or alternatively, via the Celtic-inuenced varieties of English, will also have to be considered and weighed against other competing hypotheses (see section 4.2 for further discussion).
