Abstract :
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.
