Common Brittonic was an ancient Celtic language spoken in Britain.

It is also variously
known as Old Brittonic,British, and Common or Old Brythonic. The language of
the Celtic people known as the Britons, by the 6th century it split into the various Brittonic
languages: Welsh, Cumbric, Cornish, and Breton. It is classified as a P-Celtic and Insular
Celtic language.
Common Brittonic is a form of Insular Celtic, which is descended from Proto-Celtic, a
hypothetical parent language that by the first half of the first millennium BC was already
diverging into separate dialects or languages.[1][2][3][4] There is some evidence that
the Pictish language may have had close ties to Common Brittonic, and might have been
either a sister language or a fifth branch.[5][6][7]
Evidence from Welsh shows a great influence from Latin on Common Brittonic during
the Roman period, and especially so in terms related to the Church and Christianity, which
are nearly all Latin derivatives.[8] Common Brittonic was later replaced in most of Scotland
by Gaelic and south of the Firth of Forth also by Old English (which later developed
intoScots). Common Brittonic survived into the Middle Ages in Southern Scotland and
Cumbriasee Cumbric. Common Brittonic was gradually replaced by English throughout
England; in the north, Cumbric disappeared as late as the 13th century and, in the
south, Cornish was effectively a dead language by the 19th century, although attempts to
revitalize it have met with some success.[9] O'Rahilly's historical model suggests the
possibility that there was a Brittonic language in Ireland before the arrival of Goidelic
languages there, but this view has not found wide acceptance.