Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book 1, ch. 15
Language contact first began to take place between Old English and Old Norse during the eighth century. However this contact does not seem to have had a significant influence on the English language. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a number of Norse attacks along the North East coastline that were made by small isolated bands, mainly for financial gain. Towns and monasteries along the coastline were plundered and sacked. The Chronicle recalls the plundering and sacking of monasteries at Lindisfarne and Jarrow in 793 and 794. The size of the attacking parties and the swiftness of the raids suggests that there was minimal language contact. Sporadic raids continued to take place throughout the ninth century and the invading armies steadily increased in size. In 850 A.D. 350 Norse ships landed on English soil. The invading army spent winter on the island of Thanet in the Thames Estuary, waiting to launch attacks in the spring. Loyn (1977, 56) suggests that the Norsemen still did not show any signs of attempting to colonize, they were only, ‘concerned with loot and sporadic raids rather than systematic probing of defences with a view to stable settlement.’
A change in Norse strategy followed the arrival in 865 of an army larger than any that had come before. (Loyn, 1977) This army arrived equipped for conquest rather than quick financial gain. The Norse invaders began to consolidate each year’s gains by establishing secure bases from which they perpetrate a continuous campaign of harassment. These tactics resulted in the colonisation of the majority of Northern and Eastern England, eventually only the kingdom of Wessex was not colonised by the Norse invaders. An agreement was made between King Alfred and the invaders, the Treaty of Wedmore stated that the Norse must, ‘confine activities to areas east of Watling Street and North of the Thames’ (Geipel, 1971, 42) This area is known as the ‘Danelaw’, Scandinavian laws were enforced and monetary systems introduced.
An area where old Norse had a heavy influence on the English language was in place names. The Norse altered the names of some places due to difficulties in pronouncing the original Anglo-Saxon name. An example of this found in the Oxford Dictionary of Place Names, is that of York. York’s Old English name was Eorforwic, this was altered to Jorvic. They also introduced a huge number of new place names where they had founded new settlements. The Oxford Dictionary of Place Names attributes over one thousand place names to Scandinavian origin.
Many of the place names influenced by Scandinavian can be split into two, the prefix and suffix. It is often the case that the prefix in place names that fell within the Danelaw denoted the name of the person who held the settlement. The suffix quite often described the topography of the settlement, whether it was near a stream, in woodland, on top of a hill. Interestingly, there are also a number of place names which are a hybrid, containing Scandinavian prefixes and English suffixes. The English contribution is quite often an Anglo-Saxon suffix such as ‘ham’, ‘ton’ or ‘ley’ (http://www.viking.no/e/england/danelaw/ekart-danelaw.htm) These hybrids perhaps demonstrate the assimilation of the Norse with the native English. Approximately 600 place names include the suffix ‘by’, meaning ‘farm’, or ‘town’, such as Whitby, Thornaby, Haxby. ‘by’ is thought to have originated from the Old Norse ‘byr’ meaning farm or village. This Old Norse word is still used today, it is the source of our modern word ‘bye law’, meaning town or village law. Approximately 300 place names contain the Old Norse word for village, ‘thorpe’ – Nunthorpe, Linthorpe, Scunthorpe. Many other places end in, ‘thwaite’, ‘beck’, ‘brack’, ‘breck’, ‘fell’, ‘scale’, all of which are traced back to Scandinavian roots. The suffix, ‘beck’ is derived from the old Norse, ‘bekkr’, meaning brook. An interesting modern translation is that of Portinscale, a village in Cumbria which is derived from ‘portin’ meaning prostitute, and ‘skali’ meaning hut. The translation being ‘prostitutes hut’.
http://www.viking.no/e/england/danelaw/ekart-danelaw.htm (15/4/2000)
England is traditionally said to have remained an Anglo – Norse state until 1066, William of Normandy’s conquest of England. This however is not an acceptable ‘cut – off’ date for Scandinavian influence on the language. Although no longer under a Scandinavian ruler, huge numbers of settlers had become integrated into England during the 200 years of Danelaw. Scandinavians had, ‘elected to remain on English soil, becoming, as had their predecessors, farmers, landowners and traders – not merely in the Danelaw, but also further to the South and West’ (Geipel 1971, 51) This integration of speakers of Old Norse resulted in a period of prolonged contact between Old Norse and Old English speakers which led to extensive changes in the English language. The effects of this language contact were seen the most in the North and East of the country where some features still exist today.
Evidence of lexical change due to contact between the languages is visible. New words were introduced into English by the Norse, words for which there were no English equivalent were borrowed from the Norse vocabulary. New words readily accepted into English included ‘sprint’, for which the Old Norse was ‘spretta’; ‘snare’, the Old Norse was, ‘snara’; and ‘flat’, originated from the Old Norse, ‘flatr’. Some new words were adopted instead of, or alongside the old English equivalent. In some cases this may have been because there were words which were very similar in both languages and over time a standard was alighted upon. A good example of this lexical selection is the choice of word for ‘child’. In Old English there were several words meaning child, two of these were ‘cild’ and ‘bearn’. The most common Old Norse word for child was ‘barn’, in the Southern area of Britain, where the Norse settled less densely, ‘cild’ remained the most popular word for child. In the North of Britain where there was more Scandinavian settlement, particularly the North East, now Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside, the dialect word for child which is still in common use today is bairn. This may have arisen from bairn being a word that both peoples could easily understand. In other cases the Norse word completely replaced the original Anglo-Saxon word, the Anglo-Saxons had two words for sky, ‘uprador’ and ‘wolcen’, these were commonly replaced by the Old Norse word ‘sky’. Likewise the Old English word for window, ‘eyethurl’ meaning eye-hole, was replaced by the Norse equivalent, ‘vindauga’ meaning wind eye. (http://www.viking.no/e/england/e-viking_words_1.htm)
An interesting feature resulting from the language contact of Old Norse and Old English are the words which are blended from both languages. A number of English words were
‘Modified, taking on some of the character of the corresponding Scandinavian word. Give and get with their hard g are examples as are scatter beside shatter, and Thursday instead of the Old English Thunsresdoeg … (and also note the) survival of such hybrid forms as shriek and screech.’ (Baugh and Cable 1993:99)
In many cases it is very difficult to trace exactly where a word has derived from because of the similarities between the Old Norse and the Old English word. The two languages both originated from Germanic roots and therefore shared similar lexicon. Some historians believe that the two languages were mutually intelligible, sharing similar lexicon and grammatical structure. Thomason and Kaufman suggest that when the languages first came into contact, it was not necessary to learn how to speak the other to understand it. They state that, ‘it was relatively easy to understand the other language without learning to speak it,’ though they also state that, ‘one could never be doubt which language was being spoken.’ (1988:303)
At the beginning of the Old English period the language structure was relatively complex. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 293-98) describe the morphosyntactic features of Old English as having three basic noun classes, the strong masculine, strong feminine and weak nouns that were inflectional for singular and plural, nominative, accusative, genitive and dative case. Adjectives were indefinite or definite and inflected for singular and plural, masculine, feminine and neuter gender; and nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental case. Demonstratives were also inflected for case and number and for gender in the singular. The verbal system inflected for number and for three persons as well as tense, voice and mood. Thomason and Kaufman describe the morphosyntactic system of Middle English as bearing many things in common to modern English. They describe nouns being marked only for singular and plural, a genitive case marking in the singular; a loss of inflection in adjectives, a reduction in the demonstrative to a single form ‘the’ and verbs that cannot distinguish only the third person singular in the present tense. They propose that the increased pace of change in areas occupied by the Norse compared to other areas of England suggests that Norse contact did have an influence on the English languages progression from Old to Middle English.
Inflectional decay was thought to have accelerated towards the end of the Old English period when word-endings began to become less distinct. Baugh and Cable observe that by the end of the 11th century inflections such as –a, -e, -u and –an had been reduced to –e. They also note the reduction in the use of word-final –n after –e in unstressed syllables which eventually developed into the loss of the ‘e’ itself. An example of this is the gradual development of Middle English ‘drinken.’ (Baugh and Cable, 1992; Burrows and Turville-Petre, 1992) The word evolves from the Old English word ‘drincan’, (meaning ‘to drink’) to ‘drinke’ and eventually ‘drink’. This inflectional breakdown could have created ambiguity but speakers compensated by using more rigid word order (subject – verb – object, usually), among other strategies.
Crystal (1995:32) attributes this phenomenon to two possibilities. Firstly, he suggests that the Germanic languages have evolved in such a way that articulatory stress falls on the first syllable of a word, which may have given rise to difficulties in hearing inflectional word endings. Crystal infers that this would have been a particular problem during rapid conversational exchanges where word endings were much the same acoustically (-en, -on, -an.) The second possibility that Crystal refers to is that in their attempts to communicate with each other the English and Norse adopted a type of pidgin that gradually evolved into a form of creole which was employed in daily use as a lingua franca for communication between the cultures. Extensive contact between two language communities cannot exist without some means of shared communication; to this end, contact situations usually give birth to a simplified and restricted language known as a pidgin. Crystal suggests that during the early stages of use of a pidgin language there would be a large dependency on word order, which would reduce the necessity and importance of inflectional word endings. This assertion may however only be a matter of conjecture. As we have discussed, there is a distinct possibility that the different cultures were able to quite easily comprehend what the other were saying. It is also very hard to prove the existence of a lingua franca due to lack of evidence. Much is left to historical surmising.
During the Viking period, Norse words and some Norse structural forms spread into English. Although Norse influence must have begun during the later OE period, it does not appear in the written language until English regains its written status with the decline of French. It seems that Norse had a huge influence on spoken English, introducing a wealth of new lexicon, mainly relating to practical things and physical objects.
‘In the course of its history, English has been more heavily influenced by Scandinavian than by any other language. The only comparable influence was the effect of French and Latin on the literary and learned vocabulary, but these languages influenced English grammar hardly at all.’ (Stenton 1967)
Baugh ,A.C. and Cable, T. (1993) A History of the English Language , 4th ed, London: Routledge
Burrows, J.A and Turville-Petre, T (1992) A Book of Middle English, Oxford: Blackwell
Crystal, D. (1995) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geipel, John. (1971) The Viking Legacy. Newton. David and Charles.
Stenton, F. M. 1967 , Anglo-Saxon England, The Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Thomason, S.G. and Kaufman, T. (1988). Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
