The British Isles is a group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Continental Europe.It includes Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man, Shetland, Orkney, and thousands of smaller islands.Traditionally the Channel Islands, are included, however these specific islands are geographically part of mainland continental Europe, as they are positioned off the French coast …

The indigenous people of the British Isles have a combination of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman ancestry.. Between the 8th and 11th centuries, "three major cultural divisions" had emerged in Great Britain: the English, the Scots and the Welsh, the earlier Brittonic Celtic polities in what are today England and Scotland having finally been absorbed into Anglo-Saxon …

British Latin or British Vulgar Latin was the Vulgar Latin spoken in Great Britain in the Roman and sub-Roman periods. While Britain formed part of the Roman Empire, Latin became the principal language of the elite, especially in the more romanized south and east of the island.However, in the less romanized north and west it never substantially replaced the …

British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. Britishness, the British identity and common culture; British English, the English language as spoken and written in the United Kingdom or, more broadly, throughout the British Isles; Celtic Britons, an ancient ethno-linguistic group

The Celtic languages form a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of which four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are the Goidelic languages (i.e. Irish and Scottish Gaelic, which are both descended from Middle Irish) and the Brittonic languages (i.e. Welsh and Breton, which are …

The modern Brittonic languages are generally considered to all derive from a common ancestral language termed Brittonic, British, Common Brittonic, Old Brittonic or Proto-Brittonic, which is thought to have developed from Proto-Celtic or early Insular Celtic by the 6th century BC.. A major archaeogenetics study uncovered a migration into southern Britain in the middle to late …

Irish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge) [ˈɡeːlʲɟə], also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the …

The archipelago has been referred to by a single name for over 2000 years: the term 'British Isles' derives from terms used by classical geographers to describe this island group. By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the …

British English (BrE) is, according to Oxford Dictionaries, "English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, …

Fairly-extensive information about language in Roman Britain is available from Roman administrative documents attesting to place-and "personal-names]], along with archaeological finds such as coins, the Bloomberg and Vindolanda tablets, and Bath curse tablets.That shows that most inhabitants spoke British Celtic and/or British Latin.The influence and position of …