Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, and author of The Syntax of Old Norse, has recently made the claim that English should rightly be called a Scandinavian language. The researcher and a colleague, Joseph Emonds of Palacky University in the Czech Republic, have claimed that Old Norse didn't influence Old English, but replaced it. They claim that it is an "almost universal" rule that languages in contact swap words but not grammar. A few Scandinavian news websites have passed it on uncritically: "English is a Scandinavian Language" reads the headline in Aftenposten.
"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. "One especially important geographic point in our study is that the East Midlands region, where the spoken language later developed into Modern English, coincides almost exactly with the densely populated, southern part of the Danelaw. What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true -- the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them."
Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.
Also, as Faarlund explains in the first article linked to here, the Scandinavian element was not limited to vocabulary. He claims that the grammar and syntax of English both were taken over by the Scandinavian forms. Some given examples are the following:
In English and Scandinavian the object is placed after the verb: I have read the book / Eg har lese boka. German and Dutch (and Old English) put the verb at the end: Ich habe das Buch gelesen.
English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence:This we have talked about / Dette har vi snakka om.
English and Scandinavian can have a split infinitive, i.e. we can insert a word between the infinitive marker and the verb: I promise to never do it again / Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen.
In an article from The Economist titled Do you make Scandinavian mistakes?, speculates that "If [stranded prepositions and split infinitives came from Norse], maybe they sounded rough, colloquial or foreign in English for centuries, taking a while to make their way into written prose. ... Is it possible that the construction sneaked into the language from the Vikings, but rubbed oddly up against native English grammar, so that it took a long time to be accepted? Possible, but a millennium or so is a long time for a bit of grammar to wait in purgatory. Just one split infinitive appears in Shakespeare. If indeed the split infinitive came from Norse, its rise in frequency (and subsequent condemnation) is oddly timed, to say the least."
West Germanic Old English influenced Scandinavian English before "dying out" in England, Faarlund says. But Profs Faarlund and Emonds has a tough job ahead of them to overturn many years of many scholars' conclusions that English is West Germanic with Scandinavian influences, not Scandinavian with West Germanic influences. Their paper has yet to be published, but certainly it will be a topic for debate.
One early dissenter to this theory is University of Michigan professor of Linguistics, Sally Thomason. She has given an articulate dismissal of the notion at University of Pennsylvania's Language Log. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. The evidence cited in the article is nowhere near extraordinary," she says. "He's mistaken in his belief that languages in contact can be counted on to retain their own grammar: there are hundreds of convincing examples of structural diffusion — including phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features — in contact situations all over the world." She cites the Indian town of Kupwar, where the local variety of Urdu (an Indic language) shows grammatical influence from neighbouring Kannada (an unrelated Dravidian language), as well as from Marathi (a more closely related fellow Indic language). Among other things, she also explains how English and Scandinavian could have innovated things like the split infinitive and the stranded preposition independently.
As for Faarlund's claims about Danelaw, Thomason states that "the Norse had the prestige in the Danelaw — they were the rulers, after all. That's the easiest way to account for the hundreds of Norse loanwords in English. After the period of Norse rule, when the former Danelaw was once again under English control, the available evidence indicates that Norse ceased to be spoken after just a few generations, about sixty years. One major piece of evidence for this conclusion is that all the objects with Norse inscriptions found in England were inscribed within sixty years after the end of Norse rule."
Citing Terrence Kaufman, with whom she has written the book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, she claims that "... no more than 20% of the total set of comparable structural features of the most Norsified English dialects came from Norse. Even if Faarlund's percentage for the syntax turns out to be higher, his syntactic Norse features are unlikely to raise the overall percentage of Norse-origin structures to an unusually high level, compared to other instances of structural diffusion in intense contact situations. Moreover, 38 of the 57 Norse structural traits in those English dialects are (according to Kaufman) `mere phonological variants of what English had in the first place' — which makes them look like fashionable "accent" shifts rather than wholesale borrowings. The same is true of many of the Norse loanwords in English, among them sister, skirt, die, give, and guest. ... The Norse influence on English was pervasive, in the sense that its results are found in all parts of the language; but it was not deep, except in the lexicon."
She concludes with a bout of what would seem to be common sense: "Ironically, Faarlund's own scenario is a counterexample to his claim that grammar doesn't get borrowed: if, as he claims, English is a Scandinavian language, how did it get its numerous English structures? They would have to be borrowed from English, right? He emphasizes the borrowing into English of Norse grammatical morphemes; but the majority of English grammatical morphemes are native English forms, not from Norse. When he focuses on Scandinavian parallels to modern English syntactic structures, he says that these parallels exist `wherever English differs syntactically' from the other West Germanic languages; but this implies that there are syntactic structures in which English matches the rest of West Germanic — so again, if English is a Scandinavian language, it must have borrowed those English syntactic features. And English basic vocabulary items, in spite of all those Norse loanwords (and in spite of some French loanwords in the basic vocabulary) are mostly West Germanic in origin."
Even if the case doesn't cut the mustard, it's pretty clear that Old Norse had a heavy influence on English. An example concerning the lexicon: She took the knife and cut the steak. All the words but the and and are Scandinavian. But, as it is, the scholarship and Sally Thomason have the last word: "English, a West Germanic language whose closest relative is Frisian, with a substantial (but not an extreme) component of Norse-origin features in the lexicon and in all areas of the grammar. An interesting contact situation, with interesting results, but not out of the ordinary."
"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. "One especially important geographic point in our study is that the East Midlands region, where the spoken language later developed into Modern English, coincides almost exactly with the densely populated, southern part of the Danelaw. What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true -- the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them."
Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.
Also, as Faarlund explains in the first article linked to here, the Scandinavian element was not limited to vocabulary. He claims that the grammar and syntax of English both were taken over by the Scandinavian forms. Some given examples are the following:
In English and Scandinavian the object is placed after the verb: I have read the book / Eg har lese boka. German and Dutch (and Old English) put the verb at the end: Ich habe das Buch gelesen.
English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence:This we have talked about / Dette har vi snakka om.
English and Scandinavian can have a split infinitive, i.e. we can insert a word between the infinitive marker and the verb: I promise to never do it again / Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen.
In an article from The Economist titled Do you make Scandinavian mistakes?, speculates that "If [stranded prepositions and split infinitives came from Norse], maybe they sounded rough, colloquial or foreign in English for centuries, taking a while to make their way into written prose. ... Is it possible that the construction sneaked into the language from the Vikings, but rubbed oddly up against native English grammar, so that it took a long time to be accepted? Possible, but a millennium or so is a long time for a bit of grammar to wait in purgatory. Just one split infinitive appears in Shakespeare. If indeed the split infinitive came from Norse, its rise in frequency (and subsequent condemnation) is oddly timed, to say the least."
West Germanic Old English influenced Scandinavian English before "dying out" in England, Faarlund says. But Profs Faarlund and Emonds has a tough job ahead of them to overturn many years of many scholars' conclusions that English is West Germanic with Scandinavian influences, not Scandinavian with West Germanic influences. Their paper has yet to be published, but certainly it will be a topic for debate.
One early dissenter to this theory is University of Michigan professor of Linguistics, Sally Thomason. She has given an articulate dismissal of the notion at University of Pennsylvania's Language Log. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. The evidence cited in the article is nowhere near extraordinary," she says. "He's mistaken in his belief that languages in contact can be counted on to retain their own grammar: there are hundreds of convincing examples of structural diffusion — including phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features — in contact situations all over the world." She cites the Indian town of Kupwar, where the local variety of Urdu (an Indic language) shows grammatical influence from neighbouring Kannada (an unrelated Dravidian language), as well as from Marathi (a more closely related fellow Indic language). Among other things, she also explains how English and Scandinavian could have innovated things like the split infinitive and the stranded preposition independently.
As for Faarlund's claims about Danelaw, Thomason states that "the Norse had the prestige in the Danelaw — they were the rulers, after all. That's the easiest way to account for the hundreds of Norse loanwords in English. After the period of Norse rule, when the former Danelaw was once again under English control, the available evidence indicates that Norse ceased to be spoken after just a few generations, about sixty years. One major piece of evidence for this conclusion is that all the objects with Norse inscriptions found in England were inscribed within sixty years after the end of Norse rule."
Citing Terrence Kaufman, with whom she has written the book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, she claims that "... no more than 20% of the total set of comparable structural features of the most Norsified English dialects came from Norse. Even if Faarlund's percentage for the syntax turns out to be higher, his syntactic Norse features are unlikely to raise the overall percentage of Norse-origin structures to an unusually high level, compared to other instances of structural diffusion in intense contact situations. Moreover, 38 of the 57 Norse structural traits in those English dialects are (according to Kaufman) `mere phonological variants of what English had in the first place' — which makes them look like fashionable "accent" shifts rather than wholesale borrowings. The same is true of many of the Norse loanwords in English, among them sister, skirt, die, give, and guest. ... The Norse influence on English was pervasive, in the sense that its results are found in all parts of the language; but it was not deep, except in the lexicon."
She concludes with a bout of what would seem to be common sense: "Ironically, Faarlund's own scenario is a counterexample to his claim that grammar doesn't get borrowed: if, as he claims, English is a Scandinavian language, how did it get its numerous English structures? They would have to be borrowed from English, right? He emphasizes the borrowing into English of Norse grammatical morphemes; but the majority of English grammatical morphemes are native English forms, not from Norse. When he focuses on Scandinavian parallels to modern English syntactic structures, he says that these parallels exist `wherever English differs syntactically' from the other West Germanic languages; but this implies that there are syntactic structures in which English matches the rest of West Germanic — so again, if English is a Scandinavian language, it must have borrowed those English syntactic features. And English basic vocabulary items, in spite of all those Norse loanwords (and in spite of some French loanwords in the basic vocabulary) are mostly West Germanic in origin."
Even if the case doesn't cut the mustard, it's pretty clear that Old Norse had a heavy influence on English. An example concerning the lexicon: She took the knife and cut the steak. All the words but the and and are Scandinavian. But, as it is, the scholarship and Sally Thomason have the last word: "English, a West Germanic language whose closest relative is Frisian, with a substantial (but not an extreme) component of Norse-origin features in the lexicon and in all areas of the grammar. An interesting contact situation, with interesting results, but not out of the ordinary."