BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

one of two groups of the modern Celtic languages, the other being Goidelic. The Brythonic languages (from Welsh brython, Briton) are or were spoken on the island of Great Britain and consist of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. They are distinguished from the Goidelic group by the presence of the sound p where Goidelic has k (spelled c, earlier q), both derived from an ancestral form *kw in the Indo-European parent language. (An asterisk identifies a sound as a hypothetical and reconstructed form.) The Brythonic languages are therefore sometimes referred to as P-Celtic.