Crimean Germanic

Caitlin Green has been floated up to The Times [of London]. Her claim is that Crimea is English.

I didn't request access past the paywall and I'm not bothering with the original article, but other blogs have a précis, so I'll use some of those. I've read enough to file it all as "speculative".

What does ring true is that the northern Black Sea littoral, from 300 AD, became Germanicised. The Goths had settled that area; the Huns and Avars, later, only conquered it. These easterners didn't impose their own languages; and although they did enable a vast Slav resettlement, that might not have affected the coasts. Coastal fishermen are good at preserving their languages - look at Cornish. For that matter look at Greek, still around today even after the Macedonians running Constantinople in the 900s AD invited a horde of Slavs to settle down there.

And the Slavs were there only a few centuries before the Norsemen came to Kiev on the Dnieper (founded it, most agree). If the Vikings found any Goths downriver, they'd have recognised each other as kinfolk; the Rus would have used them as secondary nobility. The Gothic Psalter remained current through to 900 AD, and its New Testament kept getting copied. In much the way the Slavonic Bible made Macedonian Slavic the prestige form of Slavic in Ukraine; Wulfila's Bible made Gothic the prestige form of German in Kiev. (I don't know to what extent the Romanians used a Latin Bible.)

So as of 1070 AD, it does make sense that there survived German-speaking enclaves on the western side of the Euxine. This was, of course, after Manzikert, and the Byzantines were in need of reinforcements. Moreover the Normans, the bane of the Saxon back home, were striking at Greek holdings in Italy, expelling them from the peninsula in 1071 AD. When the Greeks found themselves with Saxon warriors, it makes sense that (1) the two warrior races would find common cause and (2) for landed holdings, which mediaeval knights preferred as meed for their services, the Saxons would prefer Germans for wives and allies.

Some Crimeans continued to identify as "Anglish" (sic) for centuries later, including their language. This is more controversial. Instead a "Crimean Gothic" is attested from the 1500s to the 1700s.

Whatever this Crimean German was, all "Early Modern" sources agree that it was not widely spoken, even at home. I am reminded of coworkers and acquaintances I've met who claim to have elderly relatives back in Louisiana who speak Creole French, or in Michihuacan speaking Purempecha. Or my late Uncle Doug in Wales who "spoke Welsh" but could never figure out the "correct Welsh" being prattled about on Welsh TV. It was Phrasebook Welsh, what Doug knew; a dialectic Mischsprache mostly English, but with just enough non-English to mark him as a Welshman. And anyway the Russians were about to import many hundreds of German Germans to help them modernise. Even in the 1500s-1700s people hearing about "German" in Crimea were suspecting that it was just Yiddish.

It's generally agreed now that, although Crimean German wasn't a pure descendant of Wulfila's tongue, it also wasn't Yiddish. It was a Christian language for a start. MacDonald Stearns in Crimean Gothic. Analysis and Etymology of the Corpus (1978) thought that "Crimean Gothic" was more like "Plattdeutsch" - like Dutch or even English.

So Dr Green seems about right: the Crimea shifted from Gothic to a Gothic-influenced Anglosaxon spinoff. For analogy: look to how the Frisian dialects close to Denmark have taken influence from Low German and Danish. It may be that these communities abandoned the Gothic Bible (which may never have got completed) and redid their lectionaries in "Anglish".