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Old Norse Influences in English by Quratta Aini (191041)


English today as we know it has many influences and loanwords from other languages that some would even say it is the champion of word borrowings. The evolution of its lexicon over time was brought by nations that once had colonised the European lands like the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and the Normans. They brought along their cultural influences and languages like Latin, Old Norse and French along the way that English now consists of many different words that are rooted from these languages. Dictionary.com also suggested that 80% of English words are rooted from other languages like Latin and Greek—that is in fact, a lot. Now, I have learnt a thing or two from my History of English class back in my second semester, and there was one language in particular that I was so much more interested in: the Vikings’ language. Manuscripts of literature written in Old English had found about hundred and more of words influenced by the Old Norse, and we’ll look into how and why this happened.
During the late 8th to 11th century in England, the Vikings sailed across the seas from their Northern European homelands (typically, Denmark, Sweden and Norway) to raid vast areas of the continent, expanding all over northern, central, eastern and western parts of Europe. It was mainly the Danes who came with full force, sailing all the way to Europe to begin a new age of invasion. They spoke Old Norse, the language which the infamous god of thunder in Norse mythology, Thor, probably speaks, which brought Scandinavian influences in the Old English language to the English as we know today. There are about more than a thousand loanwords derived from the Vikings’ language into English lexicon, which I’d love to share about in my entry.
The Vikings, also known as the Norsemen, if you don’t know it yet—were not very nice people. As far as I know it, they were not only characterised as brute and violent, they were also notorious for their ruthless spirits. They had been raiding and killing people as they sail through several voyages from place to place. During their arrival, they started by attacking monasteries, and in several records, they were said to be unforgiving, much like a bloodthirsty flock of vultures landing on foreign lands to rape and murder the people in the several villages. They were much like pests as well, hard to get rid of and are extremely persistent in staying. Soon enough no land in British Isles were safe from these intruders, and they stayed there until the Norman Conquest brought by William the Conqueror got rid of them once and for all.
            Now looking back at their settlement in England, we can see a lot of cultural influences of the Danes evident from the historical remains in the North of England and the East Midlands, to the English language itself. Although the remains are not as strong as the longer-lasting Norman Conquest that came after them, we can still say that their language had well penetrated into the English language with a lot of words from Old Norse still being used today. Such can be found in the name of the places, which some has ending suffixes originated from Old Norse like –by in Whitsby and –toft in Lowestoft, and also the addition of the suffix –son in last names like Johnson, Gibson… Odinson (I love Thor a lot, I can’t stop).
There are also coinage of words from their language such as “kill”, “berserk” and “ransack”. Is it really just a coincidence now that all of these words all head towards violent meanings? Knowing their personalities now, let’s relate it to their lifestyle, how the Vikings are very much obsessed with war, death and destruction. Thanks to them that we have all these variety of words to well, define anything violent, though hopefully with no intention to harm anyone of course.
            So how do we know that these were brought by the Danes? Well, evidences of their settlement were found in nineteen inscriptions of Scandinavian runes in England. There were short Old Norse texts that indicated the way these words are used in daily lives, which trails us back to where we got certain word borrowings in English from. There are a lot of loanwords that are associated with the Scandinavians and their culture, like the word ‘law’ that we used today in regards to legal matters of the Danes.
            Other very common words in English, believe it or not, might have come from the Vikings’ mother tongue as well. We can see the religious or cultural influence in the word such as Thursday which may have emerged from Thor’s day (Þorsdagr), so as the other days as Tuesday, Wednesday andFriday being references to other Norse gods such as Tyr, Odin and Freya. It seems like we have been using Norse words in our daily lives without realising it, which is rather interesting to begin with when we become well aware with the fact that the English language itself is comprised of a mixture of different influences due to many historical factors. That leaves a thing to ponder on, how many words in this blog entry do you think, are comprised of Norse words? We may identify some, but who knows which other word there might be that wasn’t originally English at all?
            With the assimilation of the Old Norse into English, we were provided with synonyms or alternate use of existing words derived from Anglo-Saxon words, and thousands of new words that are deemed essential for everyday use were added into the English lexicon. The pronouns they andthem were surprisingly adopted from grammatical forms of Old Norse, as well as preposition words like to and by. The inflection that occurred in English lexicon is flexible with new additions of words from other languages and it’s still happening even to this day. I wonder why English hasn’t been crowned by the king of borrowing words already.

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