Celtic borrowings When the Anglo-Saxons took control of Britain, the original Celts moved to the northern and western fringes of the island – which is why the only places where Celtic languages are spoken in Britain today are in the west (Welsh in Wales) and north (Scottish Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands). Celtic speakers seem to have been kept separate from the Anglo-Saxon speakers. Those who remained in other parts of Britain must have merged in with the Anglo-Saxons. The end result is a surprising small number – only a handful – of Celtic borrowings. Some of them are dialectal such as cumb (deep valley) or loch (lake). Reminders of Britain’s Celtic past are mainly in the form of Celtic-based placenames including river names such as Avon, ‘river’, Don, Exe, Severn and Thames. Town names include Dover, ‘water’, Eccles, ‘church’, Kent, Leeds, London and York. More recently, though, Celtic words were also introduced into English from Irish Gaelic – bog, brogue, blarney, clan, slogan, whisky.
. The first inhabitants of the British Isles were not English speakers at all. They were part of an ethnic grouping known as the Celts. However, not many Celtic loan words survived to become a part of Anglo-Saxon English. The Old English word rice--a noun meaning "kingdom" (cf. Ger. Reich), is almost certainly Celtic in origin,A few other Old English words such as ambeht ("servant"), and dun ("hill, down") might be Celtic loan-words, but scholars are still uncertain. Algeo (277) suggests about a dozen other Celtic words are probably genuine borrowings from the Celtic peoples during the Anglo-Saxon period, including these mostly archaic terms: bannuc ("a bit"), binn ("basket, crib"), bratt ("cloak"), cine ("gathering of parchment leaves"), clugge ("bell"), dry ("magician"), luh ("lake",) mind ("diadem").
