I'm pretty sure it goes further back than that, as there have been artifacts like jewelry dug up at dig sites that predate Roman interaction with the isle. (It suggest the indigenous people of the period were trading in Europe or with Caravans that traveled Europe).
Certainly. But up through the early centuries of the Common Era the inhabitants of the southern part of Britannia (its Roman name) or Albion (its Greek name, the earliest name on record) were Celts who spoke a Celtic language we call Brythonic, which has not been reconstructed to a very useful degree. Welsh and Cornish are descended from Brythonic. (We have no idea what they called the island.)
It wasn't until the Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailed to Britannia in the fifth century and took over, that a Germanic language was spoken there. We used to call it "Old English" but since it's not at all intercomprehensible with Modern English we now refer to it as Anglo-Saxon.
So any Roman (or other) influence on the language of the Brythonic people has almost no bearing on the development of the English language. To be sure, English has a legacy of Celtic vocabulary--although more in names than in words--but any second-order effect of the Roman influence on Brythonic in those names and words is impossible to identify.
Therefore the influence of other languages on English begins with the Anglo-Saxon occupation, because that's when the existence of English begins in its ancestor, the Anglo-Saxon language.
- As I noted there was considerable influence from the Scandinavian languages due to the establishment of Norse outposts on the north coast. Again, awkward, cake, fog, gasp, go, law, listen, moss, neck, root, skin, skirt, sky, sly, smile, take, want and window are all Norse words. The -s ending on third-person singular verbs is Scandinavian, and you can thank the Norsemen for replacing the Anglo-Saxon word sindan with "are."
- Naturally many Latin words had entered the Brythonic language when the Christian monks brought their religion to the island. These were lost with the Brythonic language. But the monks were the only Romans who stayed behind when the Empire collapsed, so they added those same words to Anglo-Saxon.
- Again, as I noted earlier, after the Norman invasion there was an enormous assimilation of French words into English. In addition to obvious borrowings like demeanor and majestic, many of our most common everyday words are French, including color, face, question, second, use and very. And as is often pointed out, while farmers called their animals by their Anglo-Saxon names: cow, sheep, pig, deer, chicken, calf; the butchers who sold the animals' meat and the chefs who cooked it used their French names: beef, mutton, pork, venison, cock, veal.
- And of course as England took its place as a center of culture and politics our language began to take words from Latin and Greek. Today we carelessly combine Greek and Latin roots into combinations with no historical validity, such as television: Greek "distance" with Latin "sight."
- We've also adopted words from many other languages. Russian czar, Spanish rodeo, Italian viola, Czech robot, Sanskrit karma, Chinese gung ho, Algonquin tomahawk, Inuit igloo, Navajo hogan, Dharuk boomerang, Finnish sauna...
My friends in eastern Europe, who are not as familiar with English as western Europeans are, look at a page of English text and insist that it can't possibly be a Germanic language. It looks more like French.
England isn't the only country with accents, I'm sure you are aware that the US has a few varieties . . . .
Radio, and even more strongly TV, have been steadily leveling American accents. When I was a kid in the 1950s it was very difficult for me to understand people from Mississippi or Alabama. But their children started listening to the network announcers with their standardized Hollywood-New York accent, and half a century later they talk more like we do. At the same time the entire nation has been listening to country music so we don't find their accent quite so impenetrable. In the 1950s the speech of the South was called, arguably, a
dialect because there was a noticeable difference in vocabulary that thwarted intercomprehension. Today it's only an
accent.
. . . . Spanish also [has] differences based upon location/provinces . . . .
Which are also being leveled under the influence of electronic media. TV studios in Latin America hire actors and actresses from all over the region. Audiences found it a little bizarre when a family in a
telenovela (soap opera) sat around the dinner table and every member spoke with an accent from a different country. They now coach everyone to adopt the accent of Mexico, which is regarded as the most neutral--and also because Mexico was the first country with a major TV industry.
However, there are still unnormalized differences between the Spanish of Europe and the Spanish of the New World. Iberian Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are even further apart.
Chinese to my knowledge actually has more than one variant of language . . . .
What Westerners generally refer to as Chinese "dialects" are actually distinct
languages. It is impossible for speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujian and other regions to understand each other at all. For example, "five" is
wu in Mandarin but
ng in Cantonese.
. . . . different alphabets etc.
Chinese does not have a phonetic writing system so it is not an "alphabet." In fact, all Chinese use the same non-phonetic writing system. This is one of the things that has kept the country more-or-less united for thousands of years. Of course pronunciation has diverged, but they all use the same words in the same sequence so they can all understand each other's writing. (About 98-99%, which is good enough.) The communist government has been imposing Mandarin in all the schools, so the day will come when all Chinese can understand it. At that point they will be able to introduce the phonetic writing system that was developed many years ago. (It's a
syllabary, not an alphabet, because each symbol represents an entire syllable rather than a single phoneme.)
Another point to language is that the verbal word could be reportedly recorded many different ways based upon how it's said. This is one of the main reasons for the many different but similar sounding surnames, as illiterate people of the time wouldn't know if someone had written their name correctly and would eventually potentially learn the written word but spelt wrongly.
One of the early inventions that facilitated the development of electronic information technology was punched tape, which we older people remember from pre-computer teleprinters, but was also used by the digital computers of the 1950s. The company that manufactured the devices was named Chadless, after the surname of its founder. The output of the device was naturally named the Chadless tape. Since the devices were expertly designed to cleanly remove the tiny rectangles from the punched holes, the word "chadless" was assumed to mean "without punch litter," and "chad" itself came to refer to the little rectangles. Up until the last punch card was thrown away (heck, I'm sure the government still has vaults full of the things), any little bits of cardboard stuck to a card were called "hanging chad."
What's amusing is that "Chadless" is a respelling of the surname "Chadlace," reflecting the corrupted pronunciation of the second syllable.
America has outdone itself in the garbling of foreign names. The infamous Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus (a staunch opponent of racial integration in the 1960s) was the descendant of a German family named Forbes. Many French families named Beauchamp have American branches spelled Beecham. The Coors brewery was founded by the German Kurz family. Americans named Prohaska have Czech grandparents named Prochazka.
France still has (or at least it did when I was last there, 12 years ago) regional accents.
You can still sometimes tell that you're in southern France, the home of the Celtic Gauls, by hearing their trilled or flapped Celtic R, instead of the gargled German R of the Germanic Franks in northern France.
Southern drawls are getting less pronounced, from what I can tell...but I live in a major city...once you get out of the city the accent deepens.
The Sun Belt economy has been booming for a couple of decades so a lot of Yankees, immigrants and ethnic minorities have relocated into their major cities. This shifts the regional accent toward the national standard.
I talk like a Yankee underneath a mild and somewhat cultivated Texas stoner accent (pays to blend with your surroundings). I only get really twangy when I'm being sarcastic.
I lived in Arizona from age 8 to 17. Although I never spoke like a cowboy with the softened and Westernized Southern drawl, I assimilated it. Whenever I sing country music I easily lapse into an authentic twang. People who know me do a double take and stare. I say, "Ah'm jez an ole cah-bowie from Ayer-zona."
If you visit Mexbrough, Yorkshire East riding, you will find that not only the accent is very strong , but also the dialect is quite hard to grasp for some.
As I said, some of the speech variants within England could be called dialects rather than just accents, since they have differences in vocabulary and even grammar, not just pronunciation. But also, the phonetic differences are sometimes so great that establishing intercomprehension requires major effort. It seems like all Brits say that the people from Birmingham ("Brummies") are almost impossible to understand.
If people from two regions can't understand each other with just a little familiarization, then regardless of whether the differences are limited to phonetics or extend into grammar and vocabulary, they should really be called
distinct languages rather than "dialects" or "accents."
This is obviously why Cantonese and Mandarin are separate languages, even though they use the same words in the same order. It takes weeks of immersion for a Chinese from Beijing and one from Hong Kong to understand each other at all, and much longer to reach perfect comprehension.
Of course reality is never as clear-cut as theory, and this model leads to many difficult decisions. Czech and Slovak are distinct languages by any academic definition. Yet the two nations were combined into a single country for many decades, and the constant communication eventually allowed them to "decode" each other's speech and understand it. During the Soviet occupation of Estonia there were no TV broadcasts in Estonian. The Estonians found that with properly rigged antennas they could pick up the TV stations in Finland. After a few years they could all mentally turn Finnish into a dialect of Estonian. Of course the Finns had no similar experience so they can't understand Estonian.
Then there's the phenomenon of the
dialect continuum. You have Village A, Village B... all the way to Village Z, at fifty-mile increments. There is so much interaction between the people of neighboring villages that the inhabitants of Village K, for example, can easily understand the dialects of Village J and Village L. But the people of Village A and Village Z can't understand each other at all. Are they languages or dialects?
There are villages on the Dutch-German border where a speech variant is spoken that contains elements of both Dutch and German. They can understand the Dutch people west of them and the German people east of them. But the people in Amsterdam can't understand the people in Berlin!