380 Mr. Can- on the Northumbrian Dialect^ &c. 



Bamburgh, would differ perceptibly from eacb otber. The 

 strong North-Bernic Anglian was probably beard in the tract 

 afterwards called Lothiane, some time before a cognate idiom 

 disturbed the Celtic speech between the Tweed and Tyne. 

 But if SO5 the speech of Lothiane had not only a separate, but 

 an earlier origin, than ours on this side of Tweed ; and, 

 with reference to the subsequent Scottish kingdom, it had a 

 national origin. As the standard English is fundamentally of 

 Anglo-Saxon origin, so was the standard Scottish fundament- 

 ally of Lothenic-Anglian formation. However obscure may 

 be the Jutish element, which it probably included, this may 

 have had its share in determining the distinctive pronuncia- 

 tion, cadence, and idiomatic diction of the language, and is 

 not to be ignored. Subsequently, this form of the wide- 

 spread speech of the Angles may be called Old-Lothenian, in 

 contra-distinction to the Old-Northumbrian south of the 

 Tweed. In our OAvn times the form of speech which belongs 

 to Lothiane, inclusive of the shires of Roxburgh and Berwick, 

 differs from that of the present county of Northumberland, 

 except where the close neighbourhood and intercourse of the 

 populations has produced an intermediate sub-dialect. 



Besides the causes already adduced, another has certainly 

 operated to preserve a strong archaic pronunciation in the 

 large tract constituting old Lothiane ; and this is, that the 

 Anglian, as here spoken, was, from early times downward to 

 a comparatively late epoch, acquired as a new tongue, and 

 carefully studied, for the intercourse of life, by numerous per- 

 sons of Celtic race, either living in the country, or forming 

 large communities in the regions adjoining. 



At first these were the native Britons of Bernicia, who were 

 in possession of the land, when the Jutes and Anglians came 

 in and dispossessed them of as much as could be occupied by 

 these strangers. The language of the latter, as that of a more 

 powerful race, more advanced in the arts of war, agriculture, 

 and navigation, would be acquired by many of the Bernicians, 

 and by numbers of their females taken captive in continued 

 raids. The low country of Lothiane, including Berwick and 

 Roxburgh shires, from the natural richness of its soil so 

 favourable to pasturage and to grain, did undoubtedly con- 

 tain a far larger British population than the cold and stub- 

 born coast-land soil of the region between Tyne and Tweed ; 

 which must have been extensively covered by marshy vegeta- 

 tion, or by forests and thickets requiring much labour to clear 

 them away, upon a soil offering little promise to the clearer. 



