Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (69 page)

Spoken Latin is from this point on called Romance, signalling that the emerging dialects of Vulgar Latin were now free to develop independently of one another (although the first vernacular document that survives in a precursor of French dates only from 842).† The German and Alan invasions marked the final, total failure of the empire’s civil defence. One of the effects of the social dislocation that came in its train would have been a breakdown in the availability of education. In fact, there is evidence that illiteracy had been growing everywhere since the instability of the preceding century. Numbers of preserved inscriptions decline in the mid-third century, severely in Italy, drastically in a border region such as Upper Moesia (modern Bosnia), dying out everywhere around 400.
⁴⁴
Augustine, writing in North Africa in the early fifth century, recounts as a miracle the story of a slave who could read.
⁴⁵
In the middle of the sixth century, Caesarius of Arelate (Arles, near Marseilles) recognises that not only
rūsticī
but even
negōtiātōres
(merchants and businessmen) may be unable to read.
⁴⁶
Without widespread education, consciousness of the norms of classical Latin would no longer act as a brake on oral transmission.

Besides the weakening of scholarly tradition and memory, two other forces will have fostered the break-up of Latin as a single language. One is that, all over its range, Latin had speakers who were in positions of influence but whose parents had grown up speaking something else, most often a Germanic language. The other stemmed from the breakdown of the centralised systematic administration, and the rise of feudal society: individuals and families were organised much more into personal hierarchies, from the king and his baronial supporters down to the smallholder and his serfs, each link bound by personal loyalties of homage. This meant that localities became more inward: increasingly, people stayed put, in contact only with their neighbours; and the result was a faster separation of Roman speech into local dialects and languages.

^*
Just the latest example is the Manchu, who ruled China from 1644 to 1911, but were totally absorbed by their subject population. Their language is now on the edge of extinction. (See Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 143.)

† The ‘Strasburg Oaths’, a treaty between Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald. Ironically, it comes only after the restoration of a single government across most of France, German and Italy. (See Chapter 8, p. 317.)

But if, from the language point of view, the net effect of the Germans’ westward
Völkerwanderung
was nil, their fellow victims of incursion from the east, the Slavs (Tacitus’s
Veneti
), had far better luck. In the mid-fifth century, the Huns surged through and past them, then withdrew to the Black Sea, leaving the Veneti and their kin to move permanently into the eastern plains (
pol
^y
e
) of Poland vacated by the Vandals and Lombards, among others. The following surges of Avars and Bulgars were more or less successfully resisted by the eastern Roman empire. But they served not only to flush the remaining Germans (Gepids, Ostrogoths and Lombards) out of the more southerly areas, the Carpathians and the Balkans; they also served to cover the Slavs’ push southward. In the sixth century, the Slavs took possession of the arterial route from Aquileia on the Adriatic to Constantinople, a road that had kept this part of the empire, alone in the east, strongly linked to Latin-speaking Italy. In this way they finally moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman empire, including—as we have seen (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 261 )—Greece itself. In that traditional centre of the civilised world they were to be diffused and assimilated by the residents; but farther north, their relative numbers were far more overwhelming. By the seventh century the Slavs had been left in linguistic possession of most of eastern Europe, where they are to this day.
^*

The question naturally arises: why did the Slavic conquerors’ language establish itself, while that of the Germans largely disappeared? But there is no evident answer. Latin survived as Romanian at least; and this might suggest that, as in western Europe, the Slavic invaders had abandoned their language in an area where they were confronted with a more organised culture. But the geography hardly fits. It was Dalmatia and Moesia (former Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) that were long-term Roman provinces, unchallenged since Trajan had conquered the whole area of the Balkans in AD 106-7; Dacia (modern Romania) had been abandoned for strategic reasons in 271, when Germanic-speaking Gepids and Visigoths had taken over. It is true that Dacia had at first been heavily settled with colonists by Trajan.
⁴⁷
And there were surviving Romance speakers (known to the Greeks as
Rhômšnoi
) up and down the Dalmatian coast until the beginning of the twentieth century. But the explanation seems to be that the Latin-speaking population drifted northward from Moesia into Dacia over the next few centuries;
Bláxoi hodîtai
, ‘Vlach nomads’, were a feature of the scenery on the northern marches of the empire up until the eleventh century.
⁴⁸

^*
They made a late exception to admit the Magyars in the tenth century, creating the Hungarian pocket in the midst of Slavic central Europe.

Whatever the intervening history, the Roman culture of the Balkan area, always something of an outpost, does not seem to have been strong enough ever to revive under the new Slavic masters.

Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age—the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.

Prima facie, the fate of Britain should have been just like that of Gaul or Iberia, or indeed Italy. Germanic invaders, in this case from the north-western coast of Europe, entered a reeling province of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD, and never went home. In light of the experience of western Europe, this should have resulted in a few centuries of turmoil before the establishment of a more or less stable kingdom or (failing unification) an array of states, which would have ended up speaking some new variant of Latin. In fact what happened was a gradual advance and settlement of the invaders (whom we may term oversimply ‘Saxons’
^*
), from the south-east towards the north-west, a process arguably never completed but at least covering the lowland areas up to the Pennines and Dartmoor by the end of the sixth century, and most of modern England and south-eastern Scotland by the end of the seventh. Gradually, over the same period, the number of regional kingdoms reduced to three, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

Linguistically, the intermediate stages are obscure, but the triumph of Latin as a popular language, analogously to what always happened on the Continent, never even looked possible. There is never any sense of a takeover of British society by Saxons; it is more the classic story of alien invaders gradually establishing a bridgehead, then spreading out, and building a new order on their own terms, like European imperialists in the Americas. There are no records in British of the period, but the records left in Latin (notably Gildas’s
De Excidio Britonum
, ‘The Ruin of the British’,
c
.540, and Nennius’s compilation of
Excerpta
up to
c
.800) paint a hostile picture of the Saxons as destroyers. West Saxons were literate from the ninth century in their own language (itself a curiosity for Germanic invaders), the Norsemen from a little later. Neither pay much heed to their British predecessors.

How could this be? The Britons, after all, were heirs to four hundred years of Roman civilisation, just like the Gauls, and were if anything notorious for their military prowess; indeed, potentates from Britain (Maximus in 388, Constantine in 407) had twice led successful forces on to the Continent in the previous fifty years. Granted that the major forces had already been withdrawn to Italy, allowing the Saxons to make their bridgehead, in the generations that followed the Britons should still have had expertise in depth to regroup in the 90 per cent of the country they still controlled, and either drive back, or force a compromise with, the incomers.

^*
There is actually an implicit dispute in the sources on who these invaders were. Evidently they were speakers of a Low German dialect, but Gildas ( a Celt, writing before 550) calls them Saxons ( or more exactly
Saxones ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi
, ‘those ferocious Saxons of unspeakable name hateful to God and men’, xxiii.l), while Procopius (a Greek—less personally involved—writing also before 550, and probably using information from Angles on a Frankish mission to Byzantium) says they were Angles and Frisians (
Gothic War
, iv.20). It is the Venerable Bede, in his history published in 731, who calls them Angles, Saxons and Jutes ( i. 15 ). The Saxons and Franks (named for their favourite weapons, the
seax
or knife and the
franca
or javelin) were not among the tribes known to Tacitus, but would have lived where he places the Chauci and the Tungri, at the mouths of the Weser and Rhine respectively.

Instead we see a steady fall-back, and the unmixed spread across the country of English, a mixture of Angle, Saxon, Frisian and perhaps Jutish varieties of Low German. The only parallel, in fact, to this spread of a Germanic language is what happened when the Germanic invaders encountered virgin territory, in the islands of the North Sea and in Iceland. There of course the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, spread, because it had no competition. Could the Britons of the urbanised lowlands somehow have just melted away? Nothing less is needed to explain the complete walkover within Britain of those Germanic languages, and above all of English.

A recent theory, from David Keys, says that they may have.
⁴⁹
The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the
mortālitās magna
that hit Ireland, according to the
Annals of Ulster
, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the
Annales Cambriae. A
folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague.

There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50-100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.
⁵⁰
On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England.

So English supervened. It did not long have the eastern and central regions of the island to itself: in the late eighth century a new force entered the system, a new set of Germanic invaders, the Norsemen or Vikings, from Scandinavia. They progressed from coastal raids to settlement in the west of Scotland and the east of Northumbria to a partition of the island with the Saxons by treaty (
c
.886), and finally in 1013 to outright conquest of the whole kingdom. This was by Sveinn Forkbeard, succeeded by his son Knútr, better known as Canute.

Unlike the British-English divide, relations between Anglo-Saxon and Viking, if initially hostile, proved fairly permeable in the longer term. One way of understanding this is to see the Vikings as classic Germanic invaders, military raiders who won most of the battles but lost the peace, in that they settled down—perhaps with English wives—and largely picked up their subjects’ or victims’ language. Nevertheless, since the language into which they were settling was a close-ish relative (though with a good twenty generations of separate development behind it), there was easy scope for bilingualism and a degree of mutual understanding. The result was an abundant infusion of Norse loan words into English, and quite a lot of impact on the grammar too. In modern English, some 7 per cent of the basic vocabulary is of distinctly Norse origin (including such words as
take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin
and
skirt
);
⁵¹
and it is this mix of the two languages which gave rise to the bizarrely unrelated set of third-person pronouns
he, it, she
and
they.
^*

The early era of western European conquests thus closed with a kaleidoscopic shifting of Germans westward, and of Slavs southward. The Germans were able to retain their language only when they conquered territory that was largely, or totally, empty—Britain devastated by plague, and Iceland previously uninhabited. Their conquests in the western heartlands of the Roman empire had essentially no linguistic impact. Latin remained strong in the west and south of the continent; there, the linguistic effects of Roman conquest were never undone. The Slavs, perhaps because they were invading less civilised—and hence less highly populated—regions had much greater effect where they settled in the Balkans; but they too were absorbed or eliminated in the areas of ancient civilisation that they overran, parts of Greece and Anatolia.