Official URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45048886

The Early Middle Ages were a period of constant interchange and multicultural relationships. This means that the speakers of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages, i.e. Irish and British Celtic (Breton, Cornish and Welsh), were in close cultural and linguistic contact. While these contacts on the two islands have received considerable attention in historical studies, linguistic evidence has not been brought to bear on the question to the same degree, or with the same authority. It is the main aim of my research project Languages in Exchange: Ireland and her Neighbours {LEXIN), to add to a better understanding of the linguistic contacts between Irish and British Celtic in the early medieval period (AD 600-900). The focal point of the investigation is the corpora of glosses in the Insular Celtic languages. The multilingual character of the scriptoria in which these texts were studied can be seen in the bulk of Old Irish and British Celtic glosses in which not only many instances of intra-Celtic loanwords are found, but also glosses transmitted in parallel in the two languages, and glosses which were translated from one Celtic language into the other. The main approach of the project is the comparative historical linguistic method, i.e. phonological, morphological and semantic comparison and analysis and diachronically and synchronically contrastive linguistics. In this paper, the different types of language contact will be discussed and for each of them an example from the corpus (see the sources below) will be presented. The main part of the article is divided into two sections: the first one concentrates on Intra-Celtic contact; the second one deals with language contact between the Insular Celtic vernaculars and Latin.