07 December 2012

Is English a Scandinavian language?

Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.

The bolster their claim by pointing at major grammatical traits which English shares with Old Norse rather than West Germanic languages – notably, consistent SVO (subject-verb-object) word order rather than the SOV (subject-object-verb) or V2 (verb-second) orders that dominate in languages like German, Dutch and Anglo-Saxon. The practical consequence they point out (correctly – I’ve experienced this myself) is that English and Norwegian or Swedish are quite a bit closer in mutual intelligibility than any of this group is with German or Dutch or Anglo-Saxon...

The professors think the reason for this is that rather than evolving into Modern English, Anglo-Saxon actually died out during the two centuries between the invasion of the Great Army in 865 and the defeat of Harold Godwinsson in 1066. They propose that Anglo-Saxon influenced, but was largely replaced by, the Norse dialect of the Anglo-Danish Empire. Which, SVO North Germanic grammar and all, then collided with Norman French and evolved into English as we know it.
I can't personally add any additional insight; my college major was English literature, not English language per se.  There is further detailed explanation (and a very informative comment thread) at Armed and Dangerous.  And a hat tip to reader Wayne Conrad for finding this interesting pair of links.

3 comments:

  1. If you haven't seen Melvyn Bragg's "The Adventure of English" you should check it out. It's available (in parts) on YouTube.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_English

    ReplyDelete
  2. I took a couple of semesters of Norwegian in college, and I remember thinking that it seemed really close to English, especially sentence organization. I also had a few years of French in high school. It seemed like if an English word didn't have a cognate in Norwegian, it had one in French and vice versa.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I always found this timeline of the english language interesting:
    http://www.danshort.com/ie/timeline.htm
    In my uneducated opinion, I think that england was invaded so many times that classifying english into one specific language group is a bit silly.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...