THE CHANGING DISTRIBUTION OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES IN THE BRITISH ISLES

By Professor EMRYS JONES, M.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.G.S.

To most other disciplines, a geographer is a person who pushes his finger into other people's pies.

His excuse is that every facet of human activity has a special aspect - the world is his pie. His primary concern is with distribution, but this would be sterile indeed if he could not explain distributions in historical or sociological terms. Although my theme, then, is distribution - more specifically changes in distribution - I must be forgiven if I appear to trespass on grounds which are more familiar to some of you than they are to me.

I do not want to delve deeply into the historical aspects of my topic, because accurate knowledge of distributions is confined to the last hundred years, but I will remind you briefly of the general disposition of the Celtic languages in historical times. To a geographer it is interesting that 1,500 years ago the Celtic languages were already identified closely `Highland Britain', i.e. those areas which are generally above 600 feet. It was Sir Cyril Fox who brilliantly demonstrated the significance of Highland Britain as opposed to Lowland Britain in terms of prehistoric cultures. Scotland, Ireland, Wales, North England and the South-West peninsula fall into the former province, and here, in the Dark Ages, the Celtic languages flourished. Already there was the familiar division into `p' Celts and `q' Celts. The former, which we may call Brythonic, dominated Wales and North England, and extended into the South-West peninsula and even across the sea to Brittany. Whether the Pictish people of Scotland spoke Brythonic or not is simply not known. Goedelic - `q' Celtic- dominated Ireland, the west of Scotland, and the Isle of Man. There are six languages, in two groups: Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Manx; Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Confining this paper to the British Isles, I shall say nothing about the distribution of Breton.

On reflecting that the Celtic speakers of Britain had come from Europe and that some had been pushed westward from, for example, south-east England, it is tempting to see in their distribution as a whole in Highland Britain a classic example of the peripheral distribution of an ousted culture. Remnant cultures are often found in highland areas, furthest away from centres of change. They have, in fact, been pushed into the poorest and furthest corners. The large-scale view, however, is only half the truth, and hides the distinctiveness and dynamism of early Celtic culture.....

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