C Cambridge University Press 2009

English Language and Linguistics 13.2: 227249. 

doi:10.1017/S1360674309003001 Printed in the United Kingdom

Celtic influence on Old English and West Germanic

ANGELIKA LUTZ
University of Erlangen
(Received 4 May 2008; revised 25 December 2008)

This article concentrates on the question of language contact between English and Celtic
in the period between the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britannia (?AD 449) and the Norman
conquest of England (AD 1066) but in some places reaches out to West Germanic times
and to the period after the Norman conquest. It focuses on a certain region, that of
the Southern Lowlands, mainly Anglo-Saxon Wessex, and deals with evidence that has
been mentioned before: (1) the twofold paradigm of to be and (2) the Old English
designations for Celts that refer to their status as slaves. The article demonstrates that
both the syntactic and the lexico-semantic evidence is particularly concentrated in West
Saxon texts. Together, both types of evidence are shown to support the assumption that
a very substantial Celtic population exerted substratal influence on (pre-)Old English by
way of large-scale language shift in one of the early heartlands of England. This substratal
Insular Celtic influence on Old English is contrasted with the adstratal Celtic influence
on continental West Germanic.1

1 Ongoing discussion about the fate of the Celts after the Anglo-Saxon conquest
The earliest narrative sources, Gildas De excidio et conquestu Britanniae (sixth
century) and Bedes Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (eighth century),2 leave
no doubt that the Anglo-Saxons were victorious but that Britannia became England
only gradually, starting out from the earliest settlement areas in the south and east
and after a long series of battles. For the losing side, Bedes Historia ecclesiastica,
I.15 describes three types of destiny: flight, death, or slavery (see Colgrave & Mynors
1969: 52f.). Until today, many scholars have assumed on linguistic grounds that the
great majority of the Celts either chose to flee or died in battle, since Old English as well
as Modern English contain remarkably few Celtic loanwords.3 An explicitly linguistic
early version of this assumption, by an Oxford historian (Freeman 1888: 103), reads as
follows:
Those who thus lived side by side with their conquerors in Gaul, in Spain, in Lombardy,
kept their language. Why did those who were in exactly the same case in Britain lose
theirs? . . . because in Britain there was a real displacement of one people by another,
while in Gaul, Spain, and Italy there was not.

1
2
3

I would like to thank Theo Vennemann (Munich), Stephen Laker (Leiden and Manchester), and an anonymous
reader for valuable suggestions.
See Winterbottom (1978) and Colgrave & Mynors (1969).
The percentages for the Celtic share of Modern Standard English in a table by Scheler (1977: 72) are dramatically
low: 0.34 for the entire vocabulary, 0.00 for the basic vocabulary.

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A very recent version of the same view, but with particular reference to the situation
in the early core areas, is found in a paper by Richard Coates (2007: 173f.):
I argue that the linguistic evidence favours the traditional view, at least for the south and
east, . . . there is no reason to believe large-scale survival of an indigenous population
could so radically fail to leave linguistic traces.

More than a century before Coates, Otto Jespersen offered a very different explanation
for the extremely small number of Celtic loanwords. He related the linguistic evidence to
the unequal relationship between winners and losers after the Anglo-Saxon conquest:4
There was nothing to induce the ruling classes to learn the language of the inferior natives;
it could never be fashionable for them to show an acquaintance with that despised tongue
by using now and then a Keltic word. On the other hand the Kelt would have to learn the
language of his masters, and learn it well.

Thus, according to Jespersen, the adoption of the new, Germanic language by the Celts
after the Anglo-Saxon conquest left practically no trace of their original language in
English whereas Celtic suffered a dramatic loss of speakers over the centuries. Baugh
& Cable (2002: 54) basically support Jespersens view, though not for the early
settlement areas:
The Celts were by no means exterminated except in certain areas . . . In the east and
southeast, where the Germanic conquest was fully accomplished at a fairly early date, it
is probable that there were fewer survivals of a Celtic population than elsewhere. Large
numbers of the defeated fled to the west.

But the view that only a few Celts remained in the areas of early settlement does not tally
with the place name evidence. According to the place name expert Margaret Gelling,
the evidence for the Southern core areas of early Anglo-Saxon settlement strongly
suggests early large-scale immigration of Germanic settlers and, at the same time, the
continuance of British speech in conditions of peaceful coexistence during at least the
first two centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period (Gelling 1993: 51). She therefore tries
to explain the virtual absence of Celtic loanwords as due to a community of interests
between Saxon and Celtic farmers who would be fully equipped with all the words
they needed for the things which concerned them in their daily lives (Gelling 1993:
56). However, her assumption of peaceful coexistence fails to take account of the
evidence of the narrative sources for long series of battles between slowly advancing
Anglo-Saxons and retreating Celts, especially by Gildas, Bede, and, most importantly
for Wessex, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (see Blair 2003: ch. I.6). And, in a different
way, Gellings assumption also fails to account for the evidence of Ines laws for early
Wessex, which demonstrate that after the subjection of an area to Saxon rule the
new ruler was interested in peaceful coexistence between Saxons and Celts within his
territory but on terms which did not entail equal rights for West Saxons and Celts, as
will be discussed in section 4 below.
4

Jespersen (1982: 35f.); this statement is also found in the first edition of 1905.

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Thus, taken together, Jespersen was basically right with regard to the assumption
that the inequality of the contact situation was the main reason for the few lexical
traces of Celtic in English, but he just like most later scholars of English did
not look for possible structural traces in English left by Celts who shifted to the
language of the victorious Anglo-Saxons. However, in treatments of language contact
outside the field of English studies, it has meanwhile become textbook knowledge
that such unequal contacts between two peoples resulting from a conquest have
very different effects on the two languages concerned, that of the conquerors (the
superstratum) and that of the losing side (the substratum).5 The effects of superstratal
contact can be illustrated with the changes resulting from the Norman conquest.
Although English eventually prevailed, after centuries of foreign dominance, the French
superstratum had an excessive effect on the lexicon of the English substratum.6 In
contrast to a superstratum language, a substratum language has little lexical effect on
the superstratum, for the reasons already pointed out by Jespersen for Celtic in relation
to English and other languages, though without reference to a stratal terminology.7
Nevertheless, a substratum language may exert far-reaching structural influence on
the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the superstratum if many speakers of the
substratum abandon their own language for the superstratum, i.e. in case of large-scale
language shift.8 Thus, scholars looking for Celtic loanwords in English as a result of
the Anglo-Saxon conquest are looking for the wrong type of traces of this kind of
contact,9 in particular since Britannia represented the same type of habitat as the old
homes of the Anglo-Saxons, with a familiar fauna and flora and with opponents and
neighbors of a type that the Germanic invaders had been in contact with in continental
Europe for centuries.10
5

10

Cf. Thomason & Kaufman (1988), Thomason (2001), Winford (2003), Heine & Kuteva (2005). For precise
definitions of this pair of terms and for clear descriptions of the linguistic effect of a substratum on the
superstratum see especially Vennemann (1984: 10512, 1998: 2458), and Thomason & Kaufman (1988:
11618).
Schelers (1977: 72) percentages for the French share are 28.37 for the entire vocabulary and 38.00 for the
basic vocabulary. The most typical lexical traces of the Norman conquest are found in the military, legal and
administrative sections of modern English, which reflects the change of power (see Lutz 2002: 14850). That
this applies cross-linguistically is illustrated by Vennemann (1984: 10516).
Charles-Edwards (1995: 735) remarks on the low status of British and its large number of foreign loans
compared to Irish: Because British had low status by comparison with Latin, Irish and English, it was more
subject to external influence.
See esp. Winford (2003: ch. 7.II Group second language acquisition or language shift). For Celtic substratum
influences on English see numerous recent papers in Filppula et al. (2002a, 2008) and Tristram (1997, 2000,
2004, 2006), but also Vennemann (2002) and Roma (2007). For important older studies see below.
Pace Coates (2007: 174), who maintains: Lexical (vocabulary) borrowing is a prerequisite for any other type
of borrowing, for example of grammatical forms and constructions and of features of pronunciation. This
applies in cases of ordinary borrowing but not in the case of language shift, as is rightly pointed out by Tristram
(2007: 193f.), in the same volume.
See Lutz (2002: 163 n.14): Lexical borrowing from a substratum language into the superstratum is practically
restricted to linguistic contact in a habitat which is alien to the conquerors but familiar to the conquered
population, e.g. in colonial North America and Australia between British colonists and indigenous tribes.
Celtic words denoting animals and cultural artefacts were borrowed only rarely; well-known examples from
Old English are brocc (cf. dial. brock badger) and binn manger (Scheler 1977: 31; see also Breeze 2002).

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Wolfgang Keller (1925), on the basis of a study of the syntax of Yeats and Synge (van
Hamel 1912), was the first to point out that instead of looking for Celtic loanwords,
scholars should search for traces of Celtic influence in the syntax of English. He
compared the contact situation of Celtic and English to that of German and Slavic and
argued:11
Nicht im Wortschatz, sondern in der Syntax ist der Einflu der fremdsprachigen
Unterschicht in erster Linie zu spuren, denn es handelt sich fur den deutsch sprechen
den Slaven ebenso wie fur den englisch sprechenden Kelten zunachst um ein Einsetzen

der fremdsprachigen Worter in den Satz der eigenen Sprache, ein wortliches Ubersetzen.

The scholars who followed Kellers suggestion, mostly Celticists and Germanists, in
particular Walther Preusler (1938, 1956), Ingerid Dal (1952), and Heinrich Wagner
(1959: 14352), noted that Celtic influences on various features of English syntax
became much more pronounced in the later history of English, and Wagner (1959:
151) assumed that this was helped by the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon power structures
after the Norman conquest. Very recently, however, some authors have gone so far
as to claim that compared to later stages of English, Old English is practically free
from Celtic influence. This view is presented most explicitly in two recent papers
by Hildegard Tristram,12 where she claims that written Old English represents the
language of the Germanic elite and that the language of the Celtic-influenced lower
classes did not make it into the Old English sources (Tristram 2004: 103):
The written language was, of course, that of a small powerful elite, ethnically the AngloSaxons . . . In the later period, there must have been a tripartite division of the types of OE:
a) the written language of the elite the norms of which were carefully maintained (OEW),
b) the spoken vernacular of the elite (OEH), . . . and c) the vernacular of the bulk of the
population, which was largely of British and in the Danelaw areas also of Scandinavian
extraction (OEL) . . . Of the two types of spoken Old English, only the low variety surfaced
after the replacement of the Anglo-Saxon elite by William the Conqueror.

In contrast to Tristram (2004, 2007), who assumes strong Celtic substratal influence for
spoken Old English of the majority, the Indo-Europeanist and Celticist Peter Schrijver

11

12

Thus, Gellings assumption of a community of interests between Saxon and Celtic farmers does help to
explain why English borrowed far more words denoting wild animals from the Australian languages than from
Celtic (see Turner 1994: 30327; dingo, kangaroo, koala, wallaby, wallaroo, wombat, wonga-wonga are among
the words that are not restricted to Australian English).
Keller (1925: 56): The influence of the lower classes speaking a different language is mostly felt in the syntax
and not in the lexicon, since for Slavs speaking German and for Celts speaking English means first of all
inserting foreign words into the sentences of their own language, translating word by word (translations are
my own unless stated otherwise). For a well-balanced characterization of the importance of Kellers article for
later work on the influence of Celtic for the syntactic development of English see Filppula et al. (2002b: 812).
Tristram (2004, 2007: 20314). For similarly extreme views see Vennemann (2002: 204): written Old English is
a pure West Germanic language, and Vennemann (2004: 49), arguing for a Zweiteilung, . . . mit Angelsachsisch
als der Phase der germanischen Syntax und Englisch als der Phase der keltisierten Syntax (a division into
two, . . . with Anglo-Saxon as the phase of Germanic syntax and English as the phase of Celticized syntax),
with a breaking point in the fourteenth century, but also Wagner (1959: 143): das Altenglische [ist] ein reiner
altgermanischer Dialekt (Old English [is] a pure Germanic dialect).

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claims that the Lowland areas, which were affected by the Anglo-Saxon conquest
earliest and most strongly, experienced little direct contact with Celtic (Schrijver 2002:
109):13
Germanic settlers that began occupying the North Sea basin from the fourth century
onwards from northern Germany and Denmark primarily came into contact with speakers
of North Sea Celtic in the British Highland Zone . . . and with speakers of Northwestern
Romance in the British Lowland Zone and in the Low Countries, where Saxon, Kentish,
Coastal Dutch and Frisian came into being.

Thus, with regard to the Saxons as the most important Low German group that settled
the Southern Lowlands, Schrijver argues that there was hardly any contact with Celticspeaking Celts but instead with Romanized Celts who spoke Latin. This would mean
that our extant West Saxon texts lack obvious Celtic contact features. I disagree with
both Tristrams and Schrijvers views, and I do so on the basis of Old English textual
evidence evidence that has been referred to before but with less specific emphasis
on Old English and largely without reference to principles of modern general contact
linguistics.
2 Structural evidence for Celtic substratum influence on (pre-)Old English:
the twofold paradigm of the Old English verb to be
Probably the most important structural piece of evidence for the assumption of direct
Celtic substratum influence on (pre-)Old English is the Old English present-tense
paradigm of the verb to be, which agrees both formally and functionally with the
Celtic languages in all Old English dialects and, at the same time, differs from all
other Germanic languages, even from Old Saxon, which is generally believed to be
the closest relative of West Saxon English (Morris Jones 1913: 189; Campbell 1959:
768; Krahe & Meid 1969: 98; see table 1 overleaf ). The twofold paradigms of West
Saxon and Cymric distinguish two sets of forms and functions, the habitual present
and the actual present.
West Saxon had b-forms not only in the present indicative but also in the subjunctive
and imperative. Grammars of Old English and handbooks describe the twofold
paradigm as a feature of Old English without any reference to Celtic, some contrast
the situation in Old English with Middle English when this distinction gradually
disappeared.14 Krahe & Meid (1969: 141) assume besondere Bewahrung (special
13

14

See also the summary in Schrijver (2007: 170): Anglo-Saxon settlers met predominantly, if not exclusively,
speakers of late-spoken Latin when they arrived in the British Lowland Zone . . . Old English, with its more
important centers in the Lowland Zone, is unlikely to have undergone much in the way of Celtic substratum
influence.
Campbell (1959: 768), Brunner (1962: 27580), Sievers & Brunner (1965: 427) and Lehnert (1990: 79)
provide detailed overviews of the dialectal variants, for which see also below. With reference to the subjunctive
and imperative, Wischer (2008) quite rightly emphasizes the particularly high degree of formal agreement
between West Saxon and Cymric. Lass (1994: 171) states, erroneously, that in the plural West Saxon has only
the s-forms, and he lists various modern South-western dialectal b-forms, but without mentioning the fact that

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Table 1. The twofold present indicative of the verb to be in West Saxon and Cymric
and the simple paradigms in the other Germanic languages
West Saxon

Old Saxon

Old High Old

German Norse Gothic

wyf
wyt
yw

bium
bist
is(t)

bim
bist
ist

em
est
es

im
is
ist

ym
ywch
ynt

sind(un)

birum
birut
sint

erom
ero
ero

sijum
siju
sind

Cymric

habitual

actual

habitual actual

bo
bist
biD

eom
eart
is

byDaf
byDy
byD

boD

sind(on) byDwn
byDwch
byDant

preservation) of the b-forms in Old English, which may be due to language contact
with Celtic. Wolfgang Keller (1925) was the first to suggest that the twofold paradigm
was introduced into pre-Old English by the early Britons in their efforts to acquire the
language of the new rulers of Britain and was thus an Old English innovation under
Celtic influence. With regard to the forms of the twofold paradigm in Cymric and Old
English, Keller (1925: 58f.) pointed out:
Dem perfektiven (konkreten) Prasens wyf . . . steht das imperfektive (generelle, habituelle)
Prasens byDaf . . . gegenuber, das . . . zugleich fur das Futur gebraucht wird: bydd heit
noch heute, genau wie altenglisches biD (byD), ist immer, ist im allgemeinen und
wird sein . . . Dazu bildet das Kymrische einen Konjunkt[t]iv (Subjunktiv) . . . der genau
dem altenglischen beo, beon entspricht. Endlich gehort dazu, wie im Altenglischen, ein
Imperativ bydd sei. . . . Allerdings bildet das Kymrische von der Wurzel bheu auch noch
ein generelles Imperfekt byddai er war im allgemeinen . . . 15

And, with reference to the formal agreement of the b-paradigms in Old English and

Cymric, he stated: Das ist eine sehr weitgehende Ubereinstimmung

der Formen, die
bei der haufigsten Form byD sogar bis zu vollstandiger Gleichheit geht.16 But he
emphasized that the functional agreement between the two neighboring languages was

even more remarkable, since it implied eine groere Ahnlichkeit

des Denkens bei

15

16

unlike in Old English, they do not form part of a twofold paradigm. And Obst & Schleburg (2004: 186) do not
make it clear that the Old English forms formed such a twofold paradigm.
The perfective (concrete) present wyf . . . contrasts with the imperfective (general, habitual) present byDaf . . . ,
which is also used for future meaning: until today, bydd means is always, is in general and will be,
just like Old English biD (byD). . . . In addition, Cymric has a subjunctive . . . which corresponds exactly to Old
English beo, beon, and lastly, just as in Old English, an imperative bydd be. . . . However, in addition, Cymric
also forms a general imperfective byddai he was in general from the root bheu . . .
Keller (1925: 59): This is a far-reaching formal agreement which, in the case of the most frequently used form
byD, goes as far as complete identity. Hildegard Tristram, in her most recent discussion of the twofold paradigm
of to be, acknowledges the importance of this syntactic feature for the assumption of Celtic influence on Old
English (Tristram 2008: 309f., in reaction to Lutz in press, for which see also note 24 below).

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Angelsachsen und Briten . . . als bei Angelsachsen und Friesen oder Deutschen.17 His
analysis of the Old English evidence was based on a detailed study by Karl Jost (1909),
which is basically corroborated by the recent assessment of the DOE s.v. beon, on the
basis of the entire evidence. The DOE lists three different types of usage distinctions,
(a) future vs present, (b) actional vs statal, and (c) durative vs non-durative, for which
see the following examples:18
(1) Future vs present
gemyne is & ongyt e sylfne, t u eart nu t ic ws io; & u byst fter fce
t ic nu eom
consider this and understand that you are now what I once was and that you will be
eventually what I am now (HomU 20.116)
(2) Actional (vs statal)
Durh Da earan Da word bioD onfangen, & on Dm mode hie beoD acennedu Durh Dt
ondgiet [quia dum per aurem sermo concipitur, cogitatio in mente generatur]
words are received by your ears, and processed by your brain in your mind (CP
15.972)
(3) Durative or iterative (vs non-durative)
simle u bist halig, dryhtna dryhten
you are holy forever, Lord of Lords (ChristA 404)

The Old English evidence, which began in the eighth century, almost three centuries
after the Anglo-Saxon conquest, shows that the usage distinctions between the two
paradigms were observed with some degree of consistency in texts of all kinds.19 Thus,
by the time of the first Old English texts, the distinction between the two paradigms
of to be was clearly no longer a feature of lower-class speech only, which suggests
early and large-scale language shift from Celtic to Old English. Keller (1925: 60), on
the basis of his comparison of the formal and functional parallels between Old English
and Cymric, came to the following conclusion:
Hier hat das Altenglische vom Britischen entlehnt. Die altenglischen Formen und
Funktionen der Wurzel bheu, die den anderen germanischen Dialekten fremd sind,
entstanden im Munde und im Denken von englisch sprechenden Briten.20
17
18

19

20

Keller (1925: 59): a greater similarity of thinking between Anglo-Saxons and Britons than between AngloSaxons and Frisians or Germans. For Old English, he referred to the detailed description by Jost (1909).
DOE s.v. beon E.13; for the functional distinction of the uses of the two paradigms in Old English see also
Jost (1909), Mitchell (1985, I: 6514), and Kilpio (1989: esp. 948, and 1993, based on a discussion of the
Helsinki Corpus material).
See esp. Kilpio (1993) and Wischer (2008). Campbell (1959: 768) characterizes the semantic distinctions
of the two paradigms as fairly well preserved, Mustanoja (1960: 583) as well preserved in OE, particularly
earlier in the period; Pilch (1970: 38) describes the meaning of the former as either iterative or future and of
the latter as neutral. The distinction is abandoned in early Middle English, earlier in Northern than in Southern
and Southwestern texts (see MED s.v. ben, OED s.v. be, Jost 1909: 139f., Brunner 1962: 2779).
Here, Old English has borrowed from Brittonic. The Old English forms and functions of the root bheu, which
are alien to the other Germanic dialects, developed in the mouths and minds of English-speaking Britons.

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The twofold paradigm of to be represents the most obvious but not the only syntactic
evidence for early Celtic substratum influence due to language shift by speakers of
Celtic which was addressed by Keller. He also discussed the English progressive but
in that case concentrated on the rise of the -ing form in Middle English (Keller 1925:
616; see Filppula 2003 and Filppula et al. 2008: 5972 for the entire development
and its relation to Celtic). But later on, in a very substantial article, Ingerid Dal (1952)
demonstrated that there were rare attestations of the -ing form also in late Old English
and that the rules for its uses agreed with those for the much more widely used present
participle. In Lutz (in press), the use of the present participle instead of the -ing form
in early Wessex is discussed as an adequate earlier attempt at translating the same
nominal Celtic construction type by Celts who switched to the language of the new
rulers. Other syntactic features that have been made plausible as a result of Celtic
substratum influence are evidenced only rarely in Old English (see Vennemann 2002
for the loss of the external possessor construction) or did not surface until much later.
In Kellers time, the explanation of structural similarities as being due to language
shift from the substratum to the superstratum was novel. Meanwhile, however, it
has become textbook knowledge of general contact linguistics and is described
as a consequence of imperfect learning in the course of language shifting (see
Thomason & Kaufman 1988) and, more precisely, as relexification of structures of
the substratum with the lexical means of the superstratum.21 Kellers ideas were
taken up by some Celticists and Germanists but largely ignored by Anglicists until
recently (see Filppula et al. 2002b: 812, Filppula 2003:1548). An early exception is
Hermann Flasdieck (1937), but his criticism of Kellers interpretation of the twofold
paradigm of to be as the result of Celtic influence may have contributed to the long
neglect of Kellers pioneering study. Flasdieck (1937: 332f.) found the Old English
b-paradigm and its formal and functional agreement with Celtic, in particular that
between West Saxon and Cymric, remarkable but was not convinced by Kellers
explanation:
Daneben blieb das voll ausgebildete bh-Verb mit der 2. Pers. bist in besonderer Bedeutung
bestehen, dessen Eigenleben wohl am starksten im sachs. Gebiet war . . . In der neuen
Heimat mag die Erhaltung u berdies gefordert worden sein durch das Zusammentreffen mit
der kelt. Bevolkerung. Denn die kelt. Sprachen, insbesondere das Kymrische, haben neben
dem gewohnlichen konkreten Pras. . . . ein . . . abstraktes (generelles, iteratives; praes.
consuetidinis) Prasens der Basis bheu, das auch futur. Bedeutung haben kann; dazu
gehoren auch Konjunktiv, Imperativ sowie Verbalnomina (Inf. und Part. Pras.). Indes
wird man die ae. Formen nicht mit Keller als Entlehnung aus dem Brit., entstanden im
Denken und Sprechen von englisch redenden Briten, ansehen durfen.22

21

22

See Muysken (1981), Winford (2003: chs. 6 Bilingual mixed languages, 7 Second language acquisition and
shift, and 9.9.2 Relexification and substrate influence), and Lefebvre (2004: ch. 3 Relexification account of
creole genesis).
Parallel to it [i.e. the es-/ar- paradigm], the fully developed bh-verb with the 2nd person bist was preserved
with a separate meaning, whose independence was probably most pronounced in the Saxon territory . . . In

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235

For this, Flasdieck advanced three arguments,23 all three of which can be
invalidated:
(i) In contrast to Celtic, Old English lacks b-forms in the preterite.

It is true that Cymric distinguishes two past-tense sets of forms and meanings, as was
also pointed out by Keller. However, it has meanwhile been shown for Irish and Irish
English that in the course of shifting to the superstratum, features of the substratum
are transmitted to differing degrees, depending on the nature and degree of the contact
(see Winford 2003: 23941). The fact that West Saxon had b-forms in the present-tense
paradigm (including the subjunctive and imperative) but not in the preterite may be
due to the higher frequency of use of the present tense in daily oral contact, for which
see also section 4 below.
(ii) The reduction of the b-paradigm is most pronounced in the North.

Flasdieck, just like Baugh (see section 1 above), seems to have been under the
impression that Celtic influence was least pronounced in the Southern core areas and
particularly strong in the North; it will be shown in section 4 that stronger substratum
influence on West Saxon than on other Old English dialects, as suggested by the
evidence of the b-paradigm, is what we should expect.
(iii) Old Saxon likewise preserves bheu.

Here, Flasdieck seems to have referred to the fact (see table 1, above) that, in contrast
to Gothic and Old Norse, Old Saxon and also Old High German contained some
b-forms in their simple paradigms, as also mentioned by Keller (1925: 56f.). But
Flasdieck failed to realize that Keller (1925:59) had based his assumption of a greater
similarity of thinking between Anglo-Saxons and Britons than between Anglo-Saxons
and Frisians or Germans on the observation that Old English and Celtic had twofold
paradigms whereas the continental West Germanic languages had simple paradigms.
For a more detailed discussion of the situation on the continent see the following
section.

23

the new homeland, its preservation may have been furthered by contact with the Celtic population, since
besides the usual, concrete present the Celtic languages, Cymric in particular, have . . . an . . . abstract (general,
iterative; praes. consuetudinis) present of the form bheu, which may also carry future meaning; this also
includes the subjunctive, the imperative, and the verbal nouns (infinitive and present participle). Nevertheless,
the Old English forms should not be viewed as Brittonic loans, developed by English-speaking Britons in their
thinking and speaking, as suggested by Keller. It is likely that Krahes suggestion of special preservation of the
b-paradigm, possibly under Celtic influence, goes back to Flasdiecks article which was published five years
prior to the first edition of Krahes book (1942).
Auch das As. kennt die langere Erhaltung von bheu; der Abbau von bheu erfolgt gerade im Norden Englands;
u berdies fehlt dem Ae. ein Prat.zu bheu, wie es das Kelt. kennt. (Old Saxon likewise preserves bheu; the
reduction of bheu [i.e. of the b-paradigm] is most pronounced in the North; moreover, Old English lacks a
b-preterite, as is found in Celtic.)

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3 Differences between the Celtic influence on (pre-)Old English and earlier

influences of Celtic on the West Germanic languages
In a recent paper, the Celticist Stefan Schumacher addressed the question of language
contact between Old English and Insular Celtic in the larger context of contact between
the Germanic and Celtic languages both in Britain and on the Continent.24 He adduced
lexical, semantic, onomastic and structural evidence and rightly emphasized that the
character of the contacts in prehistoric central Europe, which extended over a long
time span and a large area of central Europe, must have been extremely varied.25 The
contact zone extended from the Rhine estuary to western Slovakia, as shown by his
map on p. 169. As an example for structural evidence, Schumacher discussed the
twofold paradigm of to be in Celtic and Old English. He pointed to the fact that
some of the Germanic simple paradigms of the continental Germanic languages also
have b-forms, as shown in table 1 above: all continental West Germanic languages have
b-forms in the first and second persons singular, Old High German also in the first and
second persons plural. By contrast, Gothic and Old Norse do not have any b-forms.
Schumacher referred to Krahe & Meid (1967: 140f.) but not to Flasdiecks article
for the assumption that the preservation of the twofold paradigm in Old English was
possibly due to contact with Celtic. He criticized Keller for not explaining the b-forms
in the continental West Germanic languages and stated: Dadurch, da Keller diese
Formen als irrelevant beiseite lie, wurde seine Analyse des altenglischen Befundes
ahistorisch und somit falsch.26 Stephen Laker (2008: 28f. and note 33), who cites
Schumacher extensively and likewise criticizes Kellers analysis for not explaining the
mixed continental West Germanic paradigms, points out that (2008: 29) a similar
criticism of Kellers proposal was already made by Flasdieck (1937: 3323).
In my view, Schumachers assessment of Kellers study is not to the point. Keller
was aware of the b-forms in the simple paradigms of the continental West Germanic
languages but focused his attention on what he rightly considered to be the linguistically
essential formal and functional difference between Old English and Celtic on one hand
and the remaining Germanic languages on the other, namely that between the twofold
and the simple paradigm, and he interpreted the twofold paradigm of Old English
with its semantic differentiation as (couched in modern terminology) the result of
relexification of the twofold paradigm of Celtic due to language shift from the Celtic
substratum to the Anglo-Saxon superstratum. Kellers analysis is thus perfectly sound
24

25

26

Schumacher (2007). In their reactions to the manuscript version of an earlier paper of mine (Lutz in press),
Stephen Laker (Leiden), Peter Schrijver (Utrecht), and Hildegard Tristram (Freiburg) called my attention to
Schumachers paper before its publication. I am grateful for their comments on my earlier paper, which was
first presented at the Twelfth Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (Munich, 16 August
2005) and is addressed to a readership which includes archaeologists and historians.
Schumacher (2007: 16985). This presumably long-lasting and varied contact between Germanic and Celtic
must be distinguished from an even earlier phase of development, at a time when Celtic, Italic, Germanic,
Baltic and Slavic can be assumed to have formed a more or less homogeneous unit in northwestern Europe
(see Oettinger 1997, 2003).
Schumacher (2007: 197): By leaving these forms aside as irrelevant, Kellers analysis of the Old English
evidence became ahistorical and thus wrong.

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from the viewpoint of modern general contact linguistics, and it takes account of the
historical fact of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of a Celtic-dominated area.
Schumachers own interpretation of the Celtic and Germanic evidence for the verb
to be is basically as follows (see Schumacher 2007: 193202): the twofold paradigm
of Old English is not due to language contact between Celtic and (pre-)Old English
but to much earlier contact of Celtic with West Germanic (but not with North and East
Germanic). Shortly before the earliest attested texts, this twofold paradigm developed
into the formally mixed simple paradigms of Old Saxon and Old High German that
we have, whereas Old English, under the renewed influence of Celtic after the AngloSaxon conquest, preserved this twofold paradigm much longer, until after the Norman
conquest. Thus, Schumacher interprets the situation in Old English as due to special
preservation in the sense of Krahe & Meid yet, in contrast to them, explicitly assumes
language contact between Celtic and West Germanic to have been responsible for a
twofold paradigm in all West Germanic languages.
Schumacher is certainly right to address the problem of the b-forms in the continental
West Germanic paradigms, since they are of interest from a contact-linguistic viewpoint
as possible evidence for language contact between Celtic and West Germanic. However,
I consider the assumption of a twofold paradigm for West Germanic much less likely
than the assumption of formally mixed paradigms as actually attested in Old Saxon and
Old High German, namely on account of the fact that our evidence for contact between
Celtic and West Germanic differs from the evidence for contact between Celtic and
Old English. The West Germanic evidence shows characteristics that are partly typical
for superstratal influence, partly for cultural borrowing and/or intimate borrowing on
roughly equal terms (see the examples discussed by Schumacher 2007: 17285). This
scanty and extremely varied evidence for language contact between Celtic and West
Germanic seems to be in agreement with the long and varied common prehistory as far
as we can reconstruct it. The most plausible examples for Celtic superstratum influence
on West Germanic are the words for empire and office (G. Reich, Amt and OE
rce).27 For these and many related words, modern English has French terms that go
back to the Norman conquest. More generally, the varied evidence for contact between
Celtic and West Germanic on the Continent, with its array of lexical and structural
loans, contrasts with the contact situation after the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britannia,
which is characterized by an extreme paucity of lexical loans from Celtic and by the
relexification of the Celtic twofold paradigm in Old English and thus represents a clear
case of substratum influence.
As regards the mixed paradigms of to be in Old Saxon and Old High German, I
would like to point to what I consider some kind of a parallel in Old English, namely
the plural form of the actual paradigm (e)aron are attested in the Anglian dialect
27

See also Green (1998: 14851). Schumacher (2007: 172f.) lists these examples for superstratal influence as
widely accepted examples for Celtic influence but adds: Aus solchen Wortern wurde der voreilige Schluss
gezogen, dass die Kelten zu gewissen Zeiten den Germanen kulturell u berlegen gewesen seien (Such words
led to the premature conclusion that the Celts were culturally superior to the Germanic at certain times).

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Table 2. Differing formal parallels between the Old English actual paradigms and
the simple paradigms in the other Germanic languages
West Saxon

Anglian

Old Saxon Old High Germ. Old Norse Gothic

habitual

actual habitual actual

bo
bist
biD

eom
eart
is

boD

sind(on) biDon

beo(m)
bist
biD

am
arD
is

bium
bist
is(t)

bim
bist
ist

em
est
es

im
is
ist

aron,
sind(on)

sind(un)

birum
birut
sint

erom
eroR
ero

sijum
siju
sind

from early on (besides sint/sindon), since aron is assumed to reflect early language
contact between Anglian and Old Norse; note the plural forms with initial vowel (bold
face) in Anglian and Old Norse in table 2.28
Formal admixture affecting an existing paradigm, as assumed for Anglian, is what
we also find in the later history of English, when forms derived from the Old Norse
demonstrative pronoun were integrated into the paradigm of the personal pronoun
in the Danelaw dialects of Old and Middle English (they, them, as opposed to the
West Germanic Southern forms hi, hem), from where the borrowed forms eventually
spread into Standard English. These examples of Scandinavian influence are commonly
attributed to intimate borrowing on roughly equal terms.29 So far, no one has ever
suggested that such formal admixture was preceded by functionally differentiated
paradigms as attested in Old English for the verb to be under Celtic influence and
as Schumacher assumes for West Germanic, under earlier Celtic influence on the
continent. Schumachers assumption of a twofold paradigm for West Germanic cannot
be completely ruled out for the entire contact territory but seems rather unlikely as
the result of the types of contact that Schumachers examples suggest. By contrast,
the Celtic influence on (pre-)Old English, which resulted in the well-attested twofold
paradigm of the Old English dialects, was clearly substratal, and Keller was right to
suggest that such formal and functional restructuring as reflected in the Old English
paradigms could only occur in the mouths and minds of English-speaking Britons.
The following section concentrates on lexical and semantic characteristics of Old
English and, in particular, of the West Saxon dialect, that lend support to the assumption
of early Celtic substratum influence particularly in the Southern Lowlands.
28
29

Campbell (1959: 768), Krahe & Meid (1969: 98), and Samuels (1985: 274f.).
This type of contact with Old Norse, on roughly equal terms, needs to be distinguished from superstratal
influence, which was first largely restricted to the Danelaw but eventually, during the reigns of thelweard and
Cnut, extended to the southern regions, e.g. in the law codes formulated by Archbishop Wulfstan for both kings
and in late entries of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This superstratal influence of Old Norse on Old English is
best reflected by words such as lagu law (replacing ) and eorl viceroy or governor of one of the great land
divisions of England (replacing ealdorman); see Fischer (1989), Keynes (1994: 4854, 87f.), DOE s.v. eorl 3
and OED s.vv. alderman 1a and earl 2.

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Table 3. Pelterets list of words for slave

deriving from wealh(-)
OE weale sb. (f) A female Celtic slave
OE wealh sb. (m)
1. A foreigner
2. A Briton, a person of Celtic-speaking origin
3. A slave
4. A British or Celtic slave
OE weal-sada sb. (m) A slave-shackle
OE wilisc adj.
1. Foreign
2. British, Celtic
3. Of slave status
4. British (language)
5. Welsh
OE wiln sb. (f) A female slave
OE wiln-incel sb. (f) A little or young slave

4 Lexical and semantic evidence for Celtic substratum influence

on (pre-)Old English
The lexical evidence that can be adduced in support of Celtic substratum influence
due to language shift from Celtic to (pre-)Old English does not consist of loanwords
but of Old English designations for Celts, especially those referring to their status
as slaves. The following discussion is based on David Pelterets comprehensive study
of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England.30 The evidence for Old English words meaning
slave reflects the fact that the institution of slavery was well-established in AngloSaxon England, as in other parts of Europe, and that Anglo-Saxons figured as slave
owners, as slavers, and as slaves. Before dealing with wealh and etymologically related
words it needs to be emphasized that the most widely used Old English word meaning
slave is De ow /De owa (with a large number of derivatives), which survives in ModG.
dienen serve, Diener servant, and Dirne prostitute (Pelteret 1995: 415, 30516;
Kluge & Seebold 2002 s.vv.). The slave meaning of OE wealh has been adduced as
linguistic evidence for the status of the Celts before (see esp. Faull 1975: 2044, but
also Barber 1993: 102 and Hickey 1995: 1035). However, Pelterets detailed study of
the entire word family, which is based on the complete Old English evidence, allows
for a much more differentiated assessment of its historical and linguistic relevance. The
list of words for slave deriving from wealh(-) in table 3 above, together with Pelterets
investigation of the textual evidence (see esp. Pelteret 1995: 31922, 3258), deserves
a detailed discussion.

30

Pelteret (1995). For an overview of the evidence for words meaning slave see also Roberts & Kay (1995, 1:
546f., section 12.01.10.09 Bondage, slavery).

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Only two of the four meanings of the noun wealh refer to slave status, sense 3
generally, sense 4 to that of a person of Celtic origin. According to Pelteret (1995:
320f.), the attestations of sense 3 betray a remarkable regional concentration:
This sense see[m]s to have been limited to the south of England. In biblical translations
it appears only in those composed in the West-Saxon dialect. Thus in the West-Saxon
version of Matthew 24: 50 weales (weles, wieles) translates serui . . . In the Vespasian
Psalter, undoubtedly in the Mercian dialect even though transcribed in Canterbury, seruus
is always glossed iow; in the Rushworth Gospels the corresponding word is esne; and
the Lindisfarne Gospels have either esne, Dea, or rl.

This regional concentration of the evidence was also discussed by Faull (1975: 35f.),
who even referred to the contrastive use of different words for slave just quoted from
Pelteret (1995). But Faull also pointed to the (undeniable) fact of the extremely uneven
attestation of the Old English dialects, which may give us a somewhat skewed picture
of the dialectal situation. Pelteret (1995: 321), with particular reference to the late Old
English works of Abbot lfric, emphasizes that even the West Saxon evidence for the
meaning slave is not uniform but seems to reflect changes in the attested history of
this dialect:
lfrics use of wealh [slave] seems to have been limited to his earlier writings, and even
then its appearance is a rare occurrence . . . he eliminated it over a period of time, perhaps
because of the possibility of confusing it with sense 2.

The evidence for the legal status of the Celts under West Saxon law is difficult to
interpret. On the basis of Ines laws dating from the late seventh century, CharlesEdwards (1995: 730f.) characterizes their position in early Wessex as follows:
They had a legal status, but their wergilds were around half those enjoyed by the
corresponding Frankish or English rank. . . . the West Saxon noble had a wergild of 1,200
shillings, but the Welsh noble within the West Saxon kingdom had a wergild of 600
shillings.

Thus, slave status was just one form of a more general legal inequality between Saxons
and Celts at least in early Wessex.31 Grimmer (2007: 107) rightly emphasizes that the
explicit treatment of the rights of Britons in this early law code is remarkable in itself:
The fact of their inclusion in the Code obviously implies a large enough population of
Britons in Wessex to require protection under law. He also points out:
The laws tell us that Britons and Saxons co-existed in Wessex under the same authority.
The fact of their differentiation strongly suggests the circumstance of West Saxons living
amongst Britons, or vice versa.32

31
32

See Liebermann (190316, I: 89123) and Grimmer (2007: 1046). For the relationship between Lex Salica
and Ines laws with regard to the rights of Celts see Pelteret (1995: 324, 819).
Grimmer (2007: 112). The importance of Ines laws as evidence for a substantial British population in early
Wessex is also pointed out by Ward-Perkins (2000: 5235).

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By King Alfreds time, the legal status of Celts in Wessex was no longer specified, but
it is important to note that Ines laws survive as an appendix to Alfreds. Pelteret (1995:
84) interprets this fact as follows:
The main body of the code indicates that changes had taken place in West-Saxon society
since the time of Alfreds predecessor, Ine. The latters legislation, promulgated between
688 and 694, had recognized that the British were an important ethnic group in Wessex,
even though many of them appear to have been slaves. No consideration is given to them
in Alfreds laws and one must assume that in some measure they had been integrated into
Anglo-Saxon society during the intervening two centuries, even though the process still
had some way to go as the South-west had not yet been completely subjugated.

And Grimmer (2007:114) rightly emphasizes that the assimilation of Britons in Wessex
must have required the complicity and active participation of a whole social system,
in this case West Saxons as well as Britons. But the laws of Alfred leave much room
for speculation about the details of this presumably very long process.
The evidence for OE wln female slave (< wealhin) tells a somewhat different
and simpler story. First of all, the word wln never refers to the Celtic origin of such a
person, as is emphasized by Pelteret (1995: 327):
The association of the word with wealh is to be seen in the alliterative tag wealas and
wylna, which is used in the Old English Heptateuch as the equivalent of seruos et ancillas
(Genesis 20:14). Unlike wealh, however, the word is never used as any sort of national
appellative for the Celts in extant sources . . . the word always represents ancilla.

Pelteret (1995: 43) rightly assumes that the form type with i-mutation suggests a very
early date for the formation of wealhin (< wealh), before this prehistoric sound change
took effect (cf. Campbell 1959: 200). The change of meaning of the word to slave
occurred in the centuries between the Anglo-Saxon conquest and the earliest attested
sources, which suggests that the employment of Celtic women as slaves was very
common in the Southern core areas at least in those early times.33 The early formative
wln needs to be distinguished from weale female Celtic slave, a weak n-stem without
i-mutation, a more recent derivative from wealh, which combines senses 2 Briton,
Celtic-speaking person and 3 slave, and is attested only in two Riddles.34
The textual evidence for wln clearly points to the Southern Lowlands, which were
affected by the Anglo-Saxon conquest earliest and most strongly. According to Pelteret
(1995: 328), most attestations for wln are from the late West Saxon works of lfric,
but occasionally the word is also used by Wulfstan, who was presumably born in the
33

34

The ongoing debate of historians, archaeologists and geneticists cannot be dealt with in this article, but it
goes without saying that the linguistic evidence presented here speaks for a substantial immigration of males
and a considerably less substantial immigration of females from northern Germany, as advocated by Harke
(2003, 2006, 2007) on the basis of much earlier research; for various alternative views see Hills (2003) and
Oppenheimer (2006).
See Pelteret (1995: 513). The Old English riddle tradition is dated to the eighth century at the earliest; nstems, both masculine and feminine, were very productive whereas formations with -en (< -in) with umlaut
had become rare by late Old English (see Kastovsky 1992: 389f.; for the integration of Latin loans into this
pattern see Campbell 1959: 560f.).

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south-eastern Danelaw and became bishop of London and eventually archbishop of

York and Worcester (Lapidge et al. 1999 s.n. Wulfstan the homilist). In the following
quotation from one of his homilies, e owa (the most widely used word meaning male
slave in all dialects) is contrasted with hlaford lord, and wln female slave with
hl fdige lady:35
Ealswa baldlice se eowa clypaD and namaD on his pater noster his Drihten him to fder
swa se hlaford, and seo wylen eallswa wel swa seo hlfdige.

Nevertheless, most of the textual evidence for wln female slave is concentrated in the
South, just like the evidence for wealh slave. This suggests that, in the early centuries
at least, slaves in Anglo-Saxon England were frequently of Celtic extraction in this
Southern core area and that in the same area female slaves were typically of Celtic
origin.36
With regard to the exact contextual meaning of wln, Pelteret (1995: 327) notes that
the word always seems to refer to legal status. He quotes from lfrics homily On the
Epiphany of the Lord:37
Hit gelimp forwel oft t on anre tide acenD seo cwen and seo wyln, and Deah geDicD
se Deling be his gebyrdum to healicum cynesetle and Dre wylne sunu wunaD eal his lif
on Deowte.

This quotation also helps to explain how a child attained the status of a wln-incel.
Pelteret (1995: 327) further emphasizes that there are several indications that wln was
not just used to denote a female slave in general but that it referred more specifically to
one who had a personal relationship with her owner, for which he adduces a quotation
from lfrics Sermon on Auguries:38
Ac seo sawl is Ds flsces hlfdige and hire gedafnaD t heo simle gewylde Da wylne,
t is t flsc, to hyre hsum. wyrlice frD t Dam huse r seo wyln biD re
hlfdian wissigend and seo hlfdige biD re wylne underDeodd.

In another quotation from the same sermon, lfric refers to a female slave as seo
wyln, who is elsewhere specified as an minra wimmanna (Pelteret 1995: 327f.). The
35
36

37

38

Ed. Bethurum (1957: 173): In his Pater noster, the slave addresses his Lord as father as boldly as the lord, and
the slave woman just like the lady; cf. Pelteret (1995: 328).
The noun wln and the adjective wlisc, meaning foreign; British, Celtic; of slave status and, from late Old
English onwards, also Welsh, were affected by the same sound changes, namely by i-mutation, compensatory
lengthening resulting from intervocalic loss of /h/ and, in late West Saxon, by monophthongization (see
Campbell 1959: 200, 24055, 300f., 318). For this reason, it is not clear whether the etymological relation
between wln and wealh had become partly obscured due to sound changes and partial change of meaning or
was still transparent for speakers of late Old English.
Translated by Pelteret (1995: 327), referring to Thorpe (1844: 110.269 and 1846: 111.258): It happens very
often that the queen and the slave bring forth at one time, and yet the prince, through his birth, grows up for
the lofty throne, and the son of the slave continues all his life in servitude.
Pelteret (1995: 327), with references to the edition and translation by Skeat (the latter emended by Pelteret):
But the soul is the fleshs mistress, and it befits her that she should ever rule the bondmaid, that is the flesh,
according to her command. It fares ill with the house where the bondmaid is the ruler of the mistress and the
mistress is in subjection to the bondmaid.

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relationship between a female slave and her master is also attested in a law of Cnut
presumably devised by Archbishop Wulfstan, which lays down penalties for a married
man who has sexual relations with his own slave. The latter is referred to as a wyln.39
lfric and Wulfstan, in their functions as high-ranking men of the church (and, in the
case of Wulfstan, as legal adviser of two kings, thelred and Cnut), were obviously
concerned with the moral and legal problems related to Anglo-Saxon masters and their
house slaves40 in late Anglo-Saxon England. And the fact that they addressed such
problems in homilies and law codes suggests that they were not dealing with isolated
cases.
What kinds of linguistic conclusions can be drawn from this lexical and semantic
evidence for the assumption of a Celtic substratum in Anglo-Saxon England, and
more particularly in Wessex? The evidence especially for wln and its early wholesale
change of meaning to female slave suggests that in the Southern Lowlands, at least
in early Anglo-Saxon England, the prototypical female slave was of Celtic origin.
The knowledge of (pre-)Saxon among such women would have been characterized by
interference from Celtic to various degrees, particularly in their syntax and phonology.
According to the principles of general contact linguistics, this is likely to have led
to the types of early substratum influences on the verbal system discussed above,
especially if female house slaves were recruited in considerable numbers and also from
monolingually Celtic enclaves for an extended period of time. Direct influence of their
imperfect Saxon on their masters language, i.e. on that of adult men of higher rank,
is doubtful. But as house slaves they would have been in close daily contact not only
with their masters but, linguistically more important, also with their masters children.
Hickey (1995: 104f.) rightly pointed to the possibility of language contact in AngloSaxon England between care persons of Celtic origin and their masters children. Based
on Dillard (1992), he also drew parallels with the role of black nurses in the southern
United States, but he did not have access to the detailed and specific evidence for
female Celtic slaves in the (pre-)Saxon core areas provided by Pelteret (1995), and
it is this type of evidence which makes the assumption of language contact between
care persons of Celtic origin and their masters children particularly plausible. Note
moreover that although the West Saxon laws of Ine and Alfred permitted all free men
(ceorlas) to own slaves (see Pelteret 1995: 84), members of the upper ranks of society
can be assumed to have owned more slaves than did ceorlas for doing menial work in
and around the house. This means that members of the Saxon upper classes are likely
to have come into particularly close contact with Celticized forms of Saxon.
Does this picture of the situation in the (pre-)Saxon core areas, which is based on
syntactic evidence for Celtic substratum influence and on the textual evidence for the
role of Celtic slaves, tally with Schrijvers assumption, based on writing in Romandominated Britannia, of massive language shift from Celtic to Latin for the entire
39
40

Pelteret (1995: 328); the quotation is from II Cnut, 54 (ed. Liebermann 190316, I: 348).
According to Pelteret (1995: 328), domestic slave is the most likely category of persons that the word would
describe.

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ANGELIKA LUTZ

British lowland population in the fourth and fifth centuries? In my view, the different
types of evidence for Roman-dominated Britannia and Anglo-Saxon England can be
reconciled quite easily, if we assume various degrees of CelticLatin bilingualism,
most concentrated in the Roman towns and villas, for the Roman-dominated lowlands.
After the Anglo-Saxon conquest of these areas, it would have been the most Romanized
members of the upper classes who left the lowlands, either for the West Country or for
Brittany. And it would have been the lower classes, particularly in the rural areas, with
little or no knowledge of Latin, who stayed behind since they had little to lose. On the
contrary, e.g. as house slaves, they could hope to improve their situation eventually or
at least that of their children, namely by working for their new masters and by learning
their language. And in doing so, in the course of centuries, they gradually transformed
the structures of that language, due to relexification and imperfect learning and to
transmitting such forms of Saxon to their masters children. The evidence for wln
suggests that this applied particularly to women. In later Wessex, when the term wln
had attained the more general meaning female slave, the use of this word need no
longer refer to a woman of Celtic origin, and if it did, we do not know whether such
a person spoke Celtic or to what particular degree her Old English was influenced
by the Celtic substratum. However, by that time, i.e. more than four centuries after
the Anglo-Saxon conquest, West Saxon itself had become Celticized to a considerable
extent, as is shown by the textual evidence for the twofold paradigm of to be. By the
late ninth century at the latest, from which we have the bulk of the early West Saxon
texts, this syntactic feature had become part of the language of the highest ranks of
West Saxon society. And since King Alfred and, following his initiative, lfric and
his contemporaries contributed to the development of a first standard language on the
basis of West Saxon, the same feature entered standard late Old English.
5 Conclusion and prospects
This article has concentrated on one of two syntactic features that were first adduced
by Wolfgang Keller as linguistic evidence for Celtic influence due to language shift to
Old English the twofold paradigm of to be. In addition, I have discussed Pelterets
detailed evidence for slavery based on words deriving from words for Celts. My main
aim was to show that the structural change of the English superstratum began to operate
before our earliest attested sources and that it was the heartlands of Anglo-Saxon
England conquered early on that provided the sociolinguistic conditions for large-scale
language shift. Keller could not build on a general theory of language contact and the
terminology now available, yet he perfectly understood that the twofold paradigm of to
be represented a significant structural and semantic difference between Old English
and the other Germanic languages. Nevertheless, his study offered only a beginning, as
he stated in his concluding remark (Keller 1925: 66). One of the questions that he could
have asked on the basis of the two syntactic features he dealt with is why one Celtic
feature (the twofold paradigm of to be) established itself in the superstratum very
early on (and disappeared a few centuries later), why the other (the progressive) took

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a whole millennium for its present-day stage of grammaticalization, and why others
only appeared after the Norman conquest or as late as Early Modern English (see the
evidence discussed in Filppula et al. 2008 and in other articles in this issue). In my
view, such questions need to be addressed not only from a sociolinguistic viewpoint
but also with more attention to the correspondences between particular structures of
the substratum and the superstratum at various given points in time and on the basis
of our knowledge about structural preferences of languages and language change.
Quite obviously, all this requires intense co-operation between linguists of different
disciplines.
Authors address:
Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik
FAU Erlangen-Nurnberg
Bismarckstrae1
91054 Erlangen
Germany
Angelika.Lutz@angl.phil.uni-erlangen.de

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