Introduction

ALONG with many eminent British linguists, such as Robert W. Burchfield or David Crystal, Richard Coates, in a recent study on the Late British contribution to the making of English toponymy, commented on the absence of ordinary lexis of Late British origin in the English lexicon by saying that:

Is this really a paradox? I would claim that comparison with other instances of historical shift situations should lead us to expect that English did not borrow much lexical material from Late British. I would also suggest that while English did not borrow much lexis, the language was indeed affected by grammatical and phonological transfer from Late British before the impact of the Vikings and the Normans made itself felt, but that this only showed in writing in the Early Middle English period after the demise of Old English diglossia. It was the lack of earlier scholarly attention given to the different types of linguistic contact situations as well as to the complex processes of language acquisition, change, death and birth, which prompted the question: ‘Why did the Britons not contribute more loan words to English?’ In the following paper, I am going to discuss a few recent linguistic approaches and explore what they may tell us about the type of linguistic situation which obtained in Britain during the period of the Anglo-Saxon takeover and before the advent of the Vikings.