vocabulary. Kentish Sign Unrelated to both the Banzsl British Sign Language and Northern Irish SL and the Francosign Irish SL, the sign language spoken in Kent was a unique village sign language that went to sleep and was superseded by BSL in the 17th century. There are fairly weak rumours that Martha's Vineyard Sign Language (one of ASL's substrate languages) descended through Kentish signers, though proper evidence has not yet been substantiated. Pictish Pictish was probably a Brittonic language, or dialect, spoken by the Picts, the people of northern and central Scotland in the Early Middle Ages, which became extinct c.900 AD. There is virtually no direct attestation of Pictish, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and the contemporary records in the area controlled by the Kingdom of the Picts. Such evidence, however, points to the language being closely related to the Brittonic language spoken prior to Anglo-Saxon settlement in what is now southern Scotland, England and Wales. A minority view held by a few scholars claims that Pictish was at least partially non-Indo-European or that a non-Indo-European and Brittonic language coexisted. Cumbric Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" in what is now Northern England and southern Lowland Scotland. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the other Brittonic languages. Place name evidence suggests Cumbric speakers may have carried it into other parts of northern England as migrants from its core area further north. It may also have been spoken as far south as Pendle and the Yorkshire Dales. Most linguists think that it became extinct in the 12th century, after the incorporation of the semi-independent Kingdom of Strathclyde into the Kingdom of Scotland. See also References External links Sounds Familiar? — Listen to examples of regional accents and dialects across the UK on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website (uses Windows Media Player for content) Further reading Trudgill, Peter (ed.), Language in the British Isles, Cambridge University Press, 1984, Demographics of the United Kingdom Ethnic groups in the United Kingdom History of literature in the United Kingdom