This speech and this dialect have a long history:
The main dialect used by the Anglo-Saxons was "Classical West Saxon"
and any student of Old English wandering in, say, Dorset, will find placenames
leaping straight from the textbook: Swyre from sweora, a neck, Chesil Bank
from ceosel, pronounced much the same, gravel or loose pebbles, and so on.
There is a lot of old Wessex language in Old English texts, no matter what
part of England they come from. For instance, the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE:
(Then Alfred the son of Ethelwulf succeeded his brother to the West Saxon
kingdom; and within a month Alfred fought against all the raiding army with
a little band of troops at Wilton...and the Danes had mastery of the field
of slaughter.)
There was, however, another language spoken in the West Country outside
Cornwall in early Anglo-Saxon times, and after the departure of the Romans.
It was only when I studied a little Breton that it occurred to me how much
we know about this language. Since the Bretons came from S.W.Britain, the
language like Cornish, but not the same, then we ought to be able to reconstruct
the parent language of both Cornish and Breton as it was before the division
in about 600 A.D. I made notes on this while travelling on the train every
morning, and eventually published my results as A HANDBOOK OF WEST COUNTRY
BRYTHONIC. I found that one or two early references to odd words confirmed
my reconstruction, as when the CARTULARIUM SAXONICUM of 682 A.D. maintains:
collem qui dicitur britannica lingua CRUCTAN apud nos CRYCBEORH (...the
hill (Creechbarrow Hill) which is called in the British tongue CRUCTAN,
but which we call CRYCBEORH)
It occurred to me that if the West Country connections of King Arthur are
proved, then this could have been the language he spoke, whether or not
he used Late Latin as well. High in a window in Wells Cathedral is a tiny
fragment of another language once widely used in the West Country:
This I interpret as: Gents, priez Dieu pour eulx, "(Good) people,
pray to God for them",
and the language is Norman French, or Anglo-French, the language of monasteries,
merchants, and administration from about 1100 to 1360 A.D. Despite its extraordinary
appearance and wayward spelling the language, when you come across it, is
usually quite accessible to anyone who knows some French. The days of linguistic
diversity in Wessex are not dead and gone: still living, but rarely ever
written down, is Anglo-Romany, a language learnt by Gypsies to be a mark
of Romany identity. Some words, such as dekko and pal are found in ordinary
spoken English, and linguists can spot straight away that they are words
left over from the full-blown Romany language, a kind of Hindi that came
from North India in the fifteenth century. Add to this the languages of
other immigrants old and new: Welsh is used week by week for church services
at Wesley's New Room chapel in Bristol, and elsewhere we can hear Panjabi,
Urdu, Cantonese, sometimes strongly Caribbean English. A minority can probably
converse in a little Irish: Ukrainian and Italian and Polish can be found,
and I daresay many others. Not so long ago, anyone going to the right school
could read and write in Latin, and the old school textbooks still turn up
on secondhand book stalls. To my mind, the diversity should be nourished
and encouraged, for the enrichment of the life of everyone in the West Country.
Joseph Biddulph