The French-speaking and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland can best be treated with Switzerland as a whole, and of the other outlying Romance groups only a few words need be said. In the Channel Isles, the pre-Norman basis was Celtic-speaking, and there are abundant indications of links with Brittany. Norsemen came in and Norse place-names are well in evidence, but the islands under this influence became merely an outlying fragment of Normandy, and Norman French became the language. The islands, in spite of very close settlement, have doggedly retained distinctive dialectical peculiarities. There are many other examples of this non-fusion in islands such as Ireland, Crete, Ceylon, and Java. Guernsey has at least three varieties, for example. The importance of the roadstead of St. Peter Port in Guernsey for British commerce with Bordeaux in the Middle Ages was a powerful {38} factor in the dissociation of the Channel Isles from Normandy and their retention by the kings of England, and their strong anti-French prejudices were long a feature. The growth of commerce with England and the fact that the local dialects have no literature make the islands one of the comparatively rare cases of modern language change long after the organization of close settlement. Of the islands of the western Mediterranean it may be said that in the Balearics a variant of Catalan is spoken, while the other islands, including Corsica, use Italian dialects, save that the Alghero district in Sardinia uses the same dialect as the Balearic Islands. 4 _The Peoples of German Speech_ Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed. It is most probable that the people who used these languages were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to a large extent. The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and {39} Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.