Chapter 11: Celtic and Celtic Englishes

It has generally been assumed that Celtic influences in English grammar over the centuries have been minimal. The last couple of decades, however, have witnessed a continuing rise of interest in the ‘Celtic Hypothesis’, which argues for a need to reassess the role of the Celtic languages in the development of English. In this chapter we explicate the Celtic Hypothesis through a discussion of two syntactic features which in our view are likely to have arisen as a result of either direct or indirect (reinforcing) Celtic influence, leaving its mark on English grammar in two waves: first in the early medieval period, and later in the modern contact periods. These features are the progressive or ‘expanded’ form of verbs and the it-cleft construction. We argue that the commonalities between the histories and later developments of these features are such that they provide evidence for continued contact influences between Celtic and English.