The French-speaking and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland can best be treated with Switzerland as a whole, and of the other outlying Romance groups only a few words need be said. In the Channel Isles, the pre-Norman basis was Celtic-speaking, and there are abundant indications of links with Brittany. Norsemen came in and Norse place-names are well in evidence, but the islands under this influence became merely an outlying fragment of Normandy, and Norman French became the language. The islands, in spite of very close settlement, have doggedly retained distinctive dialectical peculiarities. There are many other examples of this non-fusion in islands such as Ireland, Crete, Ceylon, and Java.
Guernsey has at least three varieties, for example. The importance of the roadstead of St. Peter Port in Guernsey for British commerce with Bordeaux in the Middle Ages was a powerful factor in the dissociation of the Channel Isles from Normandy and their retention by the kings of England, and their strong anti-French prejudices were long a feature. The growth of commerce with England and the fact that the local dialects have no literature make the islands one of the comparatively rare cases of modern language change long after the organization of close settlement. Of the islands of the western Mediterranean it may be said that in the Balearics a variant of Catalan is spoken, while the other islands, including Corsica, use Italian dialects, save that the Alghero district in Sardinia uses the same dialect as the Balearic Islands.
4
The Peoples of German Speech
Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed. It is most probable that the people who used these languages were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to a large extent.
The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.
In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards. The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the hill people were moving down and making the population more Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming cities of the Roman Church in most cases. The wave of Roman civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between hills and plains and between High German and Low German, but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.
Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic Celtic language. But farther east the languages of the hill people had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech ([p. 61]). The downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east of the Elbe old languages (probably of Lettic kinship, see [p. 18]) gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became the frontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old frontier territory) to the west of it.
The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark, between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the Elbe frontier. Probably German was already in use here and there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed the character of the country. It was done under German leadership, and brought in German settlers. In the early Middle Ages there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains. This is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia. The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but in the Middle Ages they spread farther north. It is largely Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old features and Slav names. Slav place-names are as characteristic on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of language of a people already having some settled organization. This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names on the English plain. The changes of language areas since the Middle Ages have probably been quite small. The zone west of the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig' of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.
The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinct as 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the last century. The new treaty boundary between Germany and Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone. The Low German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of the people of that region and their concentration on the work of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.