In the words of Stewart Lee:

> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’

The current majority culture is pretty new; about 1500 years (or maybe 1000, depending on what view you take on the Normans). There were a number of waves; before the Angles et al, the Romans, Celts, aforementioned bloody Beaker people, and various others. That’s for England; once you consider the rest of the UK it’s even messier.

>> What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?

This one's obvious; your tongue can't hold water the way a cat's does. Humans everywhere can cup water in their hands, but they suck it up rather than trying futilely to lick it up. I feel comfortable generalizing this into the past.

Not sure if you're joking yourself here, but the Stewart Lee quote is part of a skit he does about the stupidities of xenophobia, where he goes progressively further back in time getting more worked up parodying the imagined resistance of the existing inhabitants of Britain to the next wave of arrivals. It ends with him barking out some phrases in old English (?) and telling the audience to bugger off home if they can't speak the language. Pretty funny and prob on YouTube

Even in the case of the UK, there are the crofters in Scotland. While not officially recognized by the Scottish government as an indigenous group, they have long been campaigning for it.

See https://www.stand.ie/crofters-scotlands-indigenous-heritage/, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/crofters-..., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is..., and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is...

Well, I think there are two different things. One would be marginalized groups sharing common culture and deserving of recognition and protection, the other would an ethnicity having previous occupied an area and also having the qualities of the first group.

It seems like the Crofters are in the first group.

Well, the Picts were a distinct group in Scotland that were assimilated around 10th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts

The Romans conquered and assimilated the Celts there 2,000 years ago, no?

No. Unlike in Gaul, the British continued to speak a Celtic language througout Roman occupation. The Ancient British language was displaced by Anglo-Saxon in England but descendants of it are still spoken as minority languages in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.

cough Highland clearances?

The UK doesn't talk much about its internal ethnic structure, but there are still traces of discrimination against people with the "wrong" accents.

The Troubles isn't usually called a war of colonialism, but it has the hallmarks: different languages and religious beliefs between groups which largely didn't intermarry? Long history of supremacy of one group over the other, including formally in law?

I mean, there's still Norf, Saf, London, and Westminster apart from them. There's some horrible stuff going on under the watch of one or the other, but unless we're using one of these fruity 21st century definitions of genocide, I'm just not seeing one going on right now in the UK, nor for the last 500 years or more.

Ignoring Ireland for a moment, that is.

Genocide isn't required to fundamentally transform or extinguish a culture. My knowledge of the history of the British isles is vague, but English culture has been heavily shaped by foreign occupation.

One example, large portion of words (~30%) are have either French roots, quite likely due to the Norman invasion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England

And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Britain

I believe there's a couple of Hardcore history episodes about the Roman invasions that are worth a listen.

> And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain.

Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end.

We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.

I'm not sure exactly who the indigenous people were in the present day UK, but surely you're not saying that they're still running things?

I just checked Wikipedia and the Celts seem to have come from central Europe, so I guess they aren't the original inhabitants, but another wave of invaders.

If you go back far enough, you could probably consider Neanderthals to be victims of genocide. But there could have been an even earlier wave of settlement, so were they really indigenous?

Pre Roman invasion in 43 AD, Britons (Brythonic languages etc). 43 AD to roughly 400 AD, Romano Britons and various combinations and graduations thereof. Roughly 300 or 400 onwards, Saxons, Angles, Jutes start to turn up in these isles. The Romans are generally considered to have buggered off around 400ish.

The largely Angle/Saxon incursion was not a smooth considered invasion but more of a spreading out. Bear in mind that travelling by sea was generally easier than by land at the time. Heavily wooded hills are a pain to cross compared to sea with a decent wind. So the sea back then was not a barrier but actually helpful.

300?-1066 - What will become the UK etc is an amalgam of tiddly kingdoms and whatnot. What becomes England is Wessex, Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall - a bit Welsh - west wales), Kent, Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, Mercia, Deira and quite a lot more. There was the Danelaw and Dalegelt business with a bunch of homicidal viking folk. York's, and hence New York's names are derived from Jorvik which was the Danish name for the original town. The Romans called the place Eboracum.

Then the Normans turn up in 1066. lol

> York's, and hence New York's names are derived from Jorvik

There is a step between Jorvik and the Latin Eboracum: Eoforvic.

The point is that the concept of "indigenous" people is extremely limited, how large does a piece of virgin land which was never stolen need to be, for there to be nobody there but the indigenous people? Is there a length of time which makes a people indigenous after conquering land once?

The Mesolithic population represented by Cheddar man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man) may be the closest we know to the first inhabitants of the British Isles after the last ice age (10k yrs ago). There is evidence of habitation before the last ice age but no human remains have been found. Based on DNA analysis Cheddar man is thought to have had dark skin, blue eyes, and despite his name, been lactose intolerant:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192

As others have pointed out the UK has been conquered many times. But IIRC correctly the only nearly complete genocidal population replacement was when the indigenous hunter-gatherers were replaced by farmers. Among farming populations with hierarchical societies subjugation tends to replace complete replacement.

Gaelic language mate. It's not recognised as a language in the UK.

It is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_Language_(Scotland)_Act...

Neither is Middle Norse, but go up north an you'll hear some.

It's influenced the Shetland dialect of Scots, but Norn, a direct descendant of Old Norse, died out 170 years ago.

There are a great many words of Norse origin in modern English. Wikipedia has a few listed though it was my understanding the the influence was extensive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...

Except this is older and native to Britain.

It isn't really. Gaelic came from Ireland to Scotland around 500AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Scottish_Gaelic

Oh, is e Albannach a tha annam, tha beagan Gaidhlig agam, ach chan eil mi fileanta ann.

Oh I'm not scottish ... always thought gaelic languages were native to the islands but not recognised. Glad to see thats not the case. There are not many cultural references to it ... I came across it from the movie - Million Dollar Baby.