What did the Ancient Britions speak?

Factual Questions
1

I was watching King Arthur(the Bruckheimer movie) last week and during the movie, I got into a dicussion with one of the othe people watching. It was because I was trying to figure out what language the characters would be speaking. I assumed that since they were Romans(most of them, anyway) that they would be speaking Latin.

But in an early scene, one of the priests is heard praying in latin…which is wierd assuming they’re already speaking that. The other person suggested they are speaking Old English, but as far as I know, English is a combination of French and German, and didn’t really emerge until at least 500 years later.

So what did the Britions speak before English came about?

2

I think it would be a variant on Welsh. My understanding is that the Welsh-speaking area of Britain was once much larger, but that the Anglo-Saxons gradually pushed them westward.

I’m sure someone with more knowledge will be along shortly, so I stand to be corrected.

3

King Arthur, if there’s a historical basis for the myth, would have lived in the fifth to sixth century unsuccessfully battling the invading/migrating Germanic tribes Angles, Saxons and Jutes. I suppose he would have spoken Latin or perhaps Celtic or perhaps he himself would have been a descendent of one of the many other Germanic tribes the Romans used as mercenary troops during their long twilight. The invaders would have spoken a form of Germanic, which would later be the basis of modern English.

4

I’m not sure when King Arthur is supposed to have lived by the latest group of scholars coming down the pike.

If he battled the Roman invasion of 43 AD, he would have spoken a Celtic language. His language would, unfortunately, be wiped out by the later invasions of Germanic tribes after the Romans withdraw their armies.

If he was fighting invasion by Germanic tribes around 410 AD, when the Romans told the Britons to see to their own defense, he likely would have spoken some Celtic language (Welsh, Scots and Irish Gaelic, Manx, and others that have not come down to us even in writing are all examples). Or he might have spoken a Germanic dialect, a Rune says.

If he fought Vikings and Danish invasion before the treaty of 886 and the establishment of the Danelaw, he would have spoken the language of the Saxons, a Germanic dialect that had largely wiped out the Celtic languages except in some far-flung regions and in place names.

If he fought William the Conqueror in 1066 and resisted the Francophone Viking descendents from Normandy, he would have spoken Old English, the language formed from the mixture of Old Norse of the Danes and the Germanic of the Saxons. Old English was the language Beowulf was told and written down in.

After William the Conqueror made French the official language, Old English absorbed its vocabulary and morphed into Middle English. Placing King Arthur in the Middle Ages means he would have spoken French (at least in courtly matters), and his common serfs would have spoken Middle English, like Geoffrey Chaucer.

Putting him in the 1400s or 1500s places him in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift and the transition between Middle English and Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare. Of course, at this time, there was a wide variation in regional dialect even in the span of a few miles. It would take Ben Caxton’s establishment of the printing press in London in 1474 to make the London dialect the standard across the country and edge out the competition, something that still hasn’t completely happened.

If you’ll notice, the first book published in English was made right at the height of the Great Vowel Shift. This means that the phonetic spellings that Caxton took for granted would very soon be rendered incomprehensible and downright bizarre. ‘Knight’, for example, was once pronounced as spelled. English orthography comes from the fact that spelling was frozen when pronunciation was changing radically.

5

There’s some pretty good evidence for what was spoken before the Saxon invasions, and it was Brythonic Celtic, akin to Old Welsh if not identical to it. It was in fact strongly influenced by Latin, in much the same way as Hawaiian, Samoan, etc., have been strongly influenced by English – lots of borrowed vocabulary, a few grammatical constructions making the crossover, syntactic influence, etc. There are a few samples of “Old Welsh” preserved from what’s now England from the right time period. (It might also be noted that the Northwest of England – Lancashire, Cumbria, etc. – and the Southwest – Devon, Cornwall, Somerset – preserved their Brythonic speech well past Hengest and Horsa down to much later times, in the case of Cornwall down to the 1790s.)

6

Wow…Check out the big brains on Derleth!!

No shit; that was a great answer.

7

I’ve heard, but have no evidence that I can cite hear to support it, that Arthur was a Welsh, pre-Christian chieftain or somesuch. At that point the whole of the island would have spoken various Celtic languages, so it’s probably closest to Welsh.

However, the Arthurian mythology is drawn from many sources: it was assembled from all sorts of myths - Celtic for one, but the story of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, is to my knowledge French. The unified story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is a product of the Middle Ages and it doesn’t make much sense, then, to try to assign a specific time and place where it happened.