If the Romans had hung around Britain longer, I betcha we'd be speaking a Romance language now.

[raccoon]

And so would the Brits, Aussies, etc.

Anyone else think so, or anybody else care? :-)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. No, because the Anglo-Saxons might still have invaded

They came in after the Roman Empire was essentially fallen apart. The Britons whom the Romans dealt with were Celts.

[Odin2005]

2. Pretty much. We'd be speaking Welsh.

[raccoon]

3. "For a long time, historians argued that Latin was spoken throughout Britain and that,

had the Anglo-Saxon invasions not occurred, the English would still be speaking a Latinate tongue. More recently, other scholars have argued that while Latin may have been spoken in the towns, Celtic languages persisted in the countryside. The question has not yet been resolved."

(From THE MODERN SCHOLAR: A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Recorded Books, LLC. ,2006,
Prof. Michael D.C. Drout.)

[LiberalEsto]

4. On the other hand, they spoke a lot of French

after the Norman invasion, and that didn't exactly stick around except in the form of anglicized loan words like pork and beef, etc.

[SheilaT]

5. Actually, the imposition of French at the

upper levels of English society profoundly changed the language, including the grammar. English during the middle ages rapidly shed almost all declensions and simplified a lot of verbs. And it's why we wound up with by far the largest vocabulary of any language out there.

English is the only language that has a thesaurus, and is the only language that needs one.