Survival of the Welsh Language

Silurium (Caerleon) with its fine amphitheatre, in Monmouthshire; and

Segontium, (Caernarfon), in Gwynedd.

In Britain, at least for a few hundred years after the Roman victories on mainland Europe, the Celts held on to much of their customs and especially to their distinctive language, which has miraculously survived until today as Welsh. The language of most of Britain was derived from a branch of

Celtic known as Brythonic: it later gave rise to Welsh, Cornish and Breton

(these differ from the Celtic languages derived from Goidelic; namely,

Irish, Scots, and Manx Gaelic). Accompanying these languages were the

Celtic religions, particularly that of the Druids, the guardians of traditions and learning.

Though the Celtic tongue survived as the medium of everyday speech, Latin being used mainly administrative purposes, many loan words entered the native vocabulary, and these are still found in modern-day Welsh, though many of these have entered at various times since the end of the Roman occupation. Today's visitors to Wales who know some Latin are surprised to find hundreds of place names containing Pont (bridge), while ffenest

(window), pysgod (fish), milltir (mile), melys (sweet or honey) cyllell

(knife), ceffyl (horse), perygl (danger), eglwys (church), pared (wall or partition), tarw (bull) and many others attest to Roman or Latin influence.

When the city of Rome fell to the invading Goths under Alaric, Roman

Britain, which had experienced hundreds of years of comparative peace and prosperity, was left to its own defences under its local Romano-British leaders, one of whom may have been a tribal chieftain named Arthur. It quickly crumbled under the onslaught of Germanic tribes (usually collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons) themselves under attack from tribes to the east and wishing to settle in the sparsely populated, but agriculturally rich lands across the narrow channel that separated them.

More than two hundred years of fighting between the native Celts, as brave as ever but comparatively disorganized, and the ever-increasing numbers of

Germanic tribesmen eventually resulted in Britain sorting itself out into three distinct areas: the Britonic West, the Teutonic East, and the Gaelic

North. It was these areas that later came to be identified as Wales,

England, and Scotland, all with their very separate cultural and linguistic characteristics (Ireland, of course, remained Gaelic: many of its peoples migrated to Scotland, taking their language with them to replace the native

Pictish).

From the momentous year 616, the date of their defeat at the hands of the

Saxons in the Battle of Chester, the Welsh people in Wales were on their own. Separated from their fellow Celts in Cornwall and Cumbria, those who lived in the western peninsular gradually began to think of themselves as a distinct nation in spite of the many different rival kingdoms that developed within their borders such as Morgannwg, Powys, Brycheinion, Dyfed and Gwynedd. It is also from this period that we can speak of the Welsh language, as distinct from the older Brythonic.

In a poem dated 633, the word Cymry appears, referring to the country; and it was not too long before the Britons came to be known as the Cymry, by which term they are known today. At this point, we should point out that the word Welsh (from Wealas) is a later word used by the Saxon invaders of the British Isles perhaps to denote people they considered "foreign" or at least to denote people who had been Romanized. It originally had signified a Germanic neighbor, but eventually came to be used for those people who spoke a different language.

The Welsh people themselves still prefer to call themselves Cymry, their country Cymru, and their language Cymraeg. It is also from this time that the Celtic word Llan appears, signifying a church settlement and usually followed by the name of a saint, as in Llandewi (St. David) or Llangurig