The Traditional Languages and Dialects of the British Isles

"Sir,he's chorving me." said the student. By a process of interrogation I ascertained that to be chorved was the opposite of being chuffed, which means pleased, so to chorve someone is to annoy them. But the teenage student was a reet gradely lad, so I didn't bother too much, but I had better explain that in the traditional Lancashire town where I was working to be a reet gradely lad is to be a right good young man.Don't think that students spoke all the time in dialect, they didn't, but they lapsed into dialect words occasionally, maybe thinking that as I am a Lancashire man I would understand them.  

I grew up with some Lancashire dialect. A crying child was skriking, a term found in the Norse-influenced Manx Gaelic, from nearby Isle of Man.  Another Norse-derived word is to  flit, which means to move house. When I was in Norway I used the dialect word "tar" to say thank you. The Norwegians, who say "tak" understood me. A ham joint was known as a pestle. In some parts of Manchester the alley between terraced houses was known as a ginnel. Clearing the table after a meal was siding it.

These are some examples of dialect words that have survived into modern times. Their use is becoming less and less as time passes, but some enthusiasts still preserve ancient words. 

Why were there so many dialects at one time? We speak of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, but they were several distinct peoples each with their own language. The Saxons spoke a tongue related to Friesian, a kind of North German still spoken today, but even then there were differences between the English of King Alfred spoken in Wessex in the South West and the English of the London region. Moreover, the Angles and the Jutes were more related to the Danes and spoke a Scandinavian tongue. Later on Danish and Norwegian settlers came to parts of Britain, and brought their language with them. Danes were strongly present in the North East of England, but in the North West, including parts of Lancashire,Norwegians settled.

But language was not static. The incoming languages interacted with native tongues and evolved. It used to be thought that the native Britons all spoke versions of Welsh, but recent scholarship has moved to the view that Eastern Britain,where the Saxons and Angles settled, spoke a Germanic language related to Flemish. The Germanic tongues that predated the Anglo-Saxons may well have  been spoken in Scotland where it formed the basis of the Scottish dialects of English. One of these,Lallans [lowland Scottish] is subject to a concerted campaign to preserve it, as is its relative, Ulster Scots. Another local version spoken in Aberdeen in Eastern Scotland was Doric, a peculiarity of which is to say "fit was" rather than "What was." Britain was therefore in the second half of the  first millennium was a linguistic cauldron in which dialects interacted and evolved, differently in each locality. 

Eventually when the Norman kings began to speak English in the time of Edward the First the English spoken in London became dominant. But  local dialects still survived, though in a long process of decay that became intensified by population movements, easier transport and mass communications.

The River Severn surges south from its birth place in Wales to meet the sea at the Bristol Channel.It is not widely known that the part of England west of the Severn spoke Welsh until the Eighteenth century. Furthermore, a version of Welsh was spoken in Derbyshire [North Midlands, quite hilly] until the twelfth century. There is place name evidence that Lancashire spoke a mixture of Welsh and English in the late first millennium. Ince is a Lancashire town whose name drives from the Celtic inis,meaning an island.The town had been constructed on  an island in swampland.In the east of the Manchester conurbation I used to walk to work up a steep street called Penny Meadow, whose name is a combination of the English word meadow and the Welsh y pen, meaning the high [pen y meadow.]  There are six living Celtic tongues, three of which are Brythonic [derived from Britain]and three Gaelic [of Irish origin.] A fourth Brythonic tongue is known,but not spoken [more later.] Of the Brythonic tongues Welsh and Cornish are spoken in Britain, but Breton is spoken in Brittany, France.

Welsh is spoken only in Wales, and is very much found most on the west and in the hills. While it is the joint official language of Wales, not everyone is keen on it. The Welsh language comes in two variants, spoken in North and South Wales respectively. The official language of Wales is the southern variety.

Cornish was a language that died out in the 1870s but was revived by enthusiasts. A few people use it in Cornwall, England's most  southwesterly county, which has a small nationalist movement, its own tartan based on Scottish models and its own flag. Cornwall was a Celtic kingdom absorbed into Saxon Wessex in the tenth century. While it is in England many Cornish do not call themselves English as they like to regard themselves as having a distinct identity.

"Yan, tan, tethera...." was the way in which Cumbrian shepherds in England's most north-westerly county used to count to three.They were counting in Cumbric, a long extinct, unrecorded Brythonic language of Northern England spoken when the North was known as Hen Ogledd, the Old North, before the Angles' expansion.Several different Cumbric counting systems are known, so Cumbric must have been a fragmented system of local dialects.Sadly,no written records remain, and St Bede, writing in the eighth century did not see Cumbric as sufficiently distinct from Welsh to merit mentioning.

No written texts in Pictish, the pre-Gaelic language of much of Scotland,  survive and whether it was a Celtic tongue or a relict pre-Celtic language is unknown. more recently some scholars have suggested that it was a Germanic language related to Norse. Certainly in many parts of Scotland Norn was spoken. We have thought it introduced by the Vikings, but if the Norse tongue was related to Pictish anyway the two languages would easily meld.North-Eastern Scotland, where the Picts were prevalent,  never spoke Gaelic, but a version of English, so it is unlikely that Pictish was a form of Celtic.

The only relics of Norn are found on lonely Fair Isle between Orkney and Shetland where some Norse seabird names survive.

" Is an Gaelge beg liom." I speak a little Gaelic, which  is the language of Ireland and at one period areas of Irish settlement. There are several Gaelic dialects, of which three are spoken in Ireland. The Gaelic of the South West, the Munster dialect was deemed by scholars in the nineteenth century to be the purest and so became the official Gaelic of Ireland. But there are two more dialects,the Connaught dialect spoken in Mayo and Sligo,  and Ulster Gaelic, spoken in Donegal. The Irish peace process has led to cultural pressures in Northern Ireland for the revival of Gaelic there, but there is pressure to establish Ulster Gaelic as an official language rather  than the Munster Gaelic of the South West.

In the fifth and sixth centuries Gaelic spread from Ireland.The Isle of Man, between Britain and Ireland, spoke Gaelic by the ninth century, though modern Manx, a language revived as Cornish was, is heavily influenced by Norse, in the first millennium Irish warriors from Ulster,known as Scots,  invaded West Scotland, bringing Ulster Gaelic with them  and as their power spread to encompass most of Highland Scotland so Gaelic expanded at the expense of Pictish, which became extinct or at least unrecognizable. Scottish Gaelic is still spoken, but it is not in a strong position. Yet Gaelic enjoyed a brief flourishing on the Welsh coast when Irish tribes grabbed land off the Welsh, briefly controlling the fertile Lleyn Peninsula, before Welsh resistance expelled them.

Yet there may have been another language in parts of Ireland, which has been extinct for about two thousand years.Some scholars think that this language was Ivernic, but the identity of this tongue is a mystery. Some scholars suggest that it was a Brythonic [British]  form of Celtic, others think that it was a relic of the languages of Ireland before the evolution of Celtic tongues. No one knows.

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