Appearence and tactics of early 5th century Saxons.

[Thiudareiks Flavius]

7. And that's the main argument. But then I must add that we don't have any sources that shed light on names and places between 400 and 800, Bede being the fight one and he speaks mostly of other things. My point is, the invasion-theorists say that the change was fast and brutal, with the inavaders forcing a new language upon the vanquished. My answer would be that a new langauage could also have taken up 300 years to push earlier languages out. My best example is the Arab conquest of Syria and North Africa, where former Romans citizens gradually took up a new faith and also a new language. All inhabitants of these areas now speak Arab, and the Arabs did not kill or displace the masses, nor invade with a mass migration in their wake. Sure, the linguistic bother me, i admit that, but contuity on the ground speaks against a displacement of the rural population

My current take on this debate (my position has changed a few times over the years) is that there is a tendency for people to view it as a binary question - either it was a wholesale invasion and displacement or there was substantial continuity. I feel that the answer may lie somewhere between these two extremes.

The adoption of 'Germanic' names, dress-styles, weaponry, political organisation and building styles is paralleled in parts of post-Roman Europe where we know that the numbers of the Germanic invaders were actually very small: Frankish Gaul, Ostrogothic Italy and Visigothic Gaul and Spain, for example. So these things in themselves aren't neccessarily signs of wholesale displacement. But Britain is significant in the way language was affected.

In Gaul, Italy and Spain we find a scattering of Germanic loan words entering the languages - largely to do with war and political organisation for obvious reasons - but the languages remained substantially post-Latin/Romance. But in Britain we do see a fairly wholesale adoption of a Germanic language. Old English has a few Latin loan words, but most of these are either (i) pre-invasion words which had found their way into West Germanic through contact with the Roman Empire before the Fifth Century or (ii) ecclesiastical terms which found their way into Old English via the Church. It also has a tiny number of Celtic words, names and place names (especially, for some reason, the names of rivers - Avon, Thames etc). But otherwise Old English remained stubbornly Germanic until the Norman Invasion.

Other examples of wholesale replacement of the native language tend to reveal different circumstances to what probably happened in post-Roman Britain. In North Africa, for example, Berber, Punic and Latin were certainly replaced by Arabic. But there the Arab invaders didn't just bring a new political order, but also brought a religion which was based on a Holy Book and worship in Arabic. Non-Arabic languages survived the invasion for some centuries, but it seems that it was the central place that Arabic held in the form of Islam brought to North Africa that led to their eventual demise and the wholesale adoption of Arabic.

In Britain, on the other hand, the invaders didn't bring a religion which was as 'aggressive' in its dominance or as linked to the newcomer's language.

In Roman Dacia the local languages were slowly replaced by Latin. Ditto for Gaul and Spain which is why modern France, Spain and Romania all speak Romance languages rather than Celtic, Iberian or Dacian ones. But in all those cases we see this happening as a result of not just political domination but also colonisation over a period of many centuries.

In New Guinea we see local dialects (thousands of them - there are more languages spoken in Papua New Guinea and West Irian than anywhere else on Earth) replaced by English and Bhasa Indonesian or, more commonly, by pidgin combinations of the colonists' languages and local dialects. But this is because most of the local languages are mutually unintelligable and the colonial languages or pidgins based on them provide a lingua franca by which the locals can not only communicate with the colonists but also with each other.

The wholesale adoption of Old English in the areas of Britain settled and dominated by Germanics does, in my opinion, indicate a substantial colonisation by newcomers. But I don't go so far as to say it supports wholesale displacement of the local population. Clearly it means there were more Germanic-speakers coming to Britain than there were in Ostrogothic Italy or Frankish Gaul, but other evidence indicates that the imposition of Old English was also due to political and cultural domination by these newcomers of the locals.

I'd say the situation in post-Roman Britain is closer to that in Roman Dacia, though with the colonisation and subsequent linguistic dominance happening much faster. There almost certainly was some displacement, particularly at first. But it was nowhere near wholesale displacement. The newcomers came in sufficient numbers to dominate the locals politically and then linguistically, but many of the people of 'Angalaland' in the Sixth to Eleventh Centuries would still have been people of Celtic descent who simply adopted Germanic names and language.