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Historical
I recently realised that several of the pre-roman conquest tribes in Britain appear to have arrived after Ceasars conquest of Gaul, presumably as refugees (or at least have connections to Gaulish tribes). Examples include the Atrebates and the Belgae. Do we have any indication that they may or may not have spoken a continental celtic language as opposed to a Brythonic/insular celtic language? This wikipedia article appears to imply that the welsh themselves made some sort of distinction between the people living in Wales and Cumbria and the people living in (most of) modern-day England.
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A note of caution: Continental Celtic is just used to name the Celtic languages that were spoken on mainland Europe as opposed to the Insular Celtic ones, which are directly attested a long time after that; that means that Continental vs. Insular is not a genetic or descriptive label but mainly a chronological and geographical one. Attempts have been made to prove a genetic relationship between Gaulish and Brittonic against Goidelic (the Gallo-Brittonic hypothesis), but this hypothesis has hardly any adherents at the moment, if anything because it's hard to prove conclusively and any argument you can build in favour of it can be easily countered by any number of common developments between Brittonic and Goidelic that would indicate a closer genetic relationship between them. At the same time, the chronological disparity between our best Insular Celtic attestations and the Continental ones makes it hard to build a definitive phylogenetic classification.
That said, at the time their languages wouldn't have been differentiated enough, so the question is not meaningful, simply because they would have spoken the same language, as far as we can tell. Tacitus (Agricola, I, 11) even tells us explicitely that sermo haud multum diversus 'their [i.e., British] language is hardly any different [i.e., from Gaulish]'. In addition to this, the name Lloegr 'England' is much later and hasn't any bearing on the issue, i.e., it refers to the parts of Britain that have been settled by Germanic-speaking peoples in post-Classical times (likewise, Cymry is not ancient); Britain is otherwise known as Prydain, which, on the contrary, is an ancient name, as it is well attested in ancient sources already.
Thanks for the information! I always believed that there was a clearly established distinction between insular and continental Celtic languages because you tend to see them represented as different branches of Celtic. Like this type of thing.
Absolutely! It is in a sense commonly accepted as a subdivision, but only as far as it's easier to handle; its meaning, however, isn't exactly the same as other subdivions in other branches (it's more like Gothic vs. the rest of Germanic, but even worse: can we really build meaningful phylogenies on very different chronologies?). The idea is more that it's useful to represent Brittonic and Goidelic together because, whatever their genetic relationship, they are closer to each other linguistically, although it may be because of contact or common later developments.
If you're interested in the whole classification matter, you should read Patrick Sims-Williams (2007), "Common Celtic, Gallo-Brittonic and Insular Celtic", in Patrick Sims-Williams (ed.), Studies on Celtic languages before the year 1000: his version of the tree looks rather more complicated, as he tries to account for both (unfortunately, I don't have the .pdf at hand at the moment, nor the volume, and it's not online: I'll see if I get a chance to scan it sometime).
Here you can see his proposal: you should read the discussion in his paper since it's quite complicated, but you can see how uncertain the lower links and nodes are (genetic Gallo-Brittonic and genetic Insular Celtic can be just flipped with the areal Gallo-Brittonic and areal Insular Celtic in the lower rank and it wouldn't be any different).
Thanks!
I've pdfs of most the articles from that volume, including the Sims-Williams one. I can send it if people want.
I've find myself coming over to his way of thinking as well. I think it makes sense to posit 'Proto-Celtic' as covering a broad swath of areas, with certain things spreading among them as areal features in a wave model rather than a tree model. I think it fits the data better (and actually goes back even father, into perhaps a Proto-Italo-Celtic model with Proto-Germanic too) than having intermediate branches.