The research into this topic uses a variety of approaches to approximate the Romano-British language spoken in Sub-Roman Britain on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon arrival.
[7] The received view that Romano-British impact on English has been minimal on all levels became established at the beginning of the 20th century following work by such scholars as Otto Jespersen (1905)[8] and Max Förster (1921).
[9] Opposing views by Wolfgang Keller (1925)[10] Ingerid Dal (1952),[11] Gerard Visser (1955),[12] Walther Preusler (1956),[13] and by Patricia Poussa (1990)[14] were marginal to the academic consensus of their time.
Significant survival of Brittonic peoples in Anglo-Saxon England has become a more widely accepted idea thanks primarily to recent archaeological and genetic evidence.
Endorsed particularly by Hildegard Tristram (2004),[22] the Old English diglossia model proposes that much of the native Romano-British population remained in the northern and western parts of England while the Anglo-Saxons gradually took over the rule of these regions.
[23] This kind of variance between written and spoken language is attested historically in other cultures, notably Latin, and may occur commonly.
He further concludes that “the idea that this state could continue for hundreds of years seems most unlikely,” noting further that no document from the time alludes to such a situation (by contrast, in Gaul, references are made to the lingua romana rustica as being different from written Latin).
[28] Some language innovations occurred primarily in texts from Northern and South-Western England – in theory, the areas with the greater density of Brittonic people.
Tristram argues that contact with both Brittonic and Norse speakers explains the language innovations in texts from Northern England.
[22] Innovations in the Northern zone texts associated by Tristram with Brittonic influence:[22] However, Millar argues that “in all of the modern Germanic languages, there has been some movement away from a synthetic towards an analytic typology ... it can therefore be suggested that the changes involved are ‘hard-wired’ in all the Germanic languages ...” He concludes that Norse is the most likely origin for the losses, based on the geographical distribution of the initial stages of change correlating strongly with Viking settlement patterns.
In Middle English, the old intensifier "self" was replaced by a fusion of pronoun + "self" which is now used in a communication to emphasise the object in question e.g. "A woman who is conspicuously generous to others less fortunate than herself.
In modern French this is predominant as to the reflexive elle s'est lavé les cheveux ("she washed her hair") and otherwise sometimes conventional.
Old English used it such as Seo cwen het þa þæm cyninge þæt heafod of aceorfan, literally "The Queen had them the King the head off cut", which mirrors exactly the syntax of modern German: Die Königin ließ sie, dem König den Kopf ab(zu)schneiden.
[49] Modern English must use an internal possessor (an ordinary possessive construction within the direct object): "The Queen had them cut off the King's head".
The use of the sounds in Germanic languages has generally been unstable and it has been posited that the continual influence of Celtic may have had a supportive effect in preserving English use.
Kenneth Jackson commented that it is “impossible to point to any feature about Anglo-Saxon phonology which can be shown conclusively to be a modification due to the alien linguistic habits of the Britons.”[55]