Available Evidence
The evidence from Cumbric comes to us almost entirely through secondary sources, since there are no contemporary written records of the language. The majority of evidence comes from place names of the extreme northwest of England and the south of Scotland and other sources include the personal names of Strathclyde Britons in Scottish, Irish and Anglo-Saxon sources, and a few Cumbric words surviving into the High Middle Ages in South West Scotland as legal terms. Although the language is long extinct it is arguable that traces of its vocabulary persisted into the modern era in the form of "counting scores" and in a handful of dialectal words.
From this scanty evidence, little can be deduced about the singular characteristics of Cumbric, not even the name by which its speakers referred to it. What is generally agreed upon by linguists is that Cumbric was a Western Brythonic language, closely related to Welsh and more distantly to Cornish and Breton.
Read more about this topic: Cumbric Language
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