Settler colonising Old Britain: Dimitri Mitrovic, Settler Colonization and Language Contact: How they Shaped Old English, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonising Old Britain: Dimitri Mitrovic, Settler Colonization and Language Contact: How they Shaped Old English, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

21Jun25

Excerpt: The traditional story of the Adventus Saxonum, or the arrival of the Germanic-speaking populations in Britain, is one of invasion, genocidal violence and conquest. Following the withdrawal of the Roman troops in the fifth century, Germanic tribes washed up on the southern and eastern shores of the island and proceeded to plunder their way inland, forcing the native Britons to the northern and western frontiers, into areas which were to become Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and Southern Scotland. This characterization of the events is heavily influenced by De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a sermon written by the sixth-century British monk Gildas, who depicted the coming of the Germanic-speakers as a harrowing time in which any Britons who remained in the occupied regions were massacred or reduced to servitude. Archaeologists, however, came to doubt this view, partly as a result of an anti-migrationist trend in the field that sought to decouple material culture from tribal identities, and instead emphasized that artifacts could be spread through peaceful or semi-peaceful diffusion, rather than violent invasions and migrations. Through this lens, it was argued that a relatively small elite of male Germanic warriors had arrived in Britain, and their cultural and political dominance resulted in the bulk of the pre-existing population, which remained in place, adopting Anglo-Saxon culture until they began to conceive of themselves as English, rather than British. Though it originated in archaeological circles, this “elite dominance” model eventually came to be endorsed by historians such as Wood (2010). English historical linguists have tended to have difficulties accepting the viewpoint that the spread of Germanic languages in Britain was merely the result of an elite dominance scenario. Old English, which emerged by the seventh century from contact between the various Germanic dialects brought to Britain, contains very little obvious influence from the Celtic languages, and toponymic evidence suggests an almost total replacement of Celtic and Latin place names with Germanic ones during the transition between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Celticists, on the other hand, have seized upon the acculturation model, and have pushed back against the notion that Old English is devoid of Celtic influence. While the number of English words derived from British Celtic is widely accepted to be extremely small, it has been suggested that various English grammatical features bear the mark of a Celtic substrate, but only manifested themselves in writing once the Norman Conquest had extinguished the dominance of the West Saxon literary form, which had supposedly preserved a conservative and more purely Germanic structure than the Celtic-influenced dialects spoken by the commoners. This idea has become known as the “Celtic hypothesis.” In this paper, I will begin by deconstructing the Celtic hypothesis on linguistic grounds. I will then investigate the Adventus Saxonum utilizing archaeological, toponymic, and above all recently-published archaeogenetic data, in order to argue that the evidence in favor of a model of settler colonization via mass migration, rather than elite dominance, is insurmountable in the south and east of Britain. Following this, using theories of language contact and creolization, and analyzing analogous scenarios for which there is more historical evidence, I will explain why Celtic was unable to strongly affect early insular Germanic, despite the fact that some Britons did in fact live alongside the settlers and even started families with them. To conclude, I will examine the reasons for why the linguistic fates of Britain and Gaul differed from one another so drastically, despite the fact that both places experienced colonization by Latin-speakers and Germanic-speakers.

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