Southern Britain was German in pre-Roman times ?

[Robert Vermaat]

What about multilingual cultures. Most of the europeans has been that during the last 1000 years and probably where before that too. In Stockholm by the end of the 15 c you would meet alot of people that spoke Swedish/Finnish/German. And then again the Nation of Sweden had dialects so diffrent that they could not understand oneother. (some areas still have rather strange accents).

Martin,

Although people may speak more languages that does not mean the culture can be described as multilingual. The Dutch speak English to a high degree (not to mention other European languages as well as non-European languages being spoken here) but that still does not mean we are a multilingual nation.

The Britons spoke Brythonic at home and Latin at the work or at the marketplace (overcoming dialects and other languages), but when Roman power collapsed the Brythonic remained.

The point made above of Germanic language development had nothing to do with influences or dialects, but with language evolution. Linguists can recognaise when languages develop and when regional developments occur. In case of this discussion, no traces of a pre-Roman Germanic language are found to have influenced what we know of English. English is proven to be developed from a 3rd to 5th c. Germanic language.

To kame the point viz. Oppenheimer - he is right when he notices that English contains extremely few Brythonic words, but in fact English contains no 'pre-Roman Germanic' words at all.