Viking linguistic legacy

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 417

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In September, Sherds attended a lecture given by Richard Dance, Professor of Early English in the Cambridge University Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, on the theme of ‘Vikings in your Vocabulary: Adventures in the History of English’, based on his Gersum Project (http://www.gersum.org) looking at the Scandinavian influence on our language.

Richard persuaded his audience to imagine they were out shopping for fish and eggs in a market in 10th-century England. Half the audience were given phrases in Old English and the other half in Old Norse, and the strong similarities between the two languages enabled each group to understand the other – more to the point, we speakers of modern English were able to recognise words in both languages, but it was Old Norse that was the most familiar in sentence structure and vocabulary.

It came as a surprise to many in the audience to discover that we speak as much ‘Viking’ today as we do Old English, and Richard went on to show his audience a long list of Norse-derived words in common contemporary usage – even more remain in use in the north of England. Many of the Norse words are single-syllable everyday words, such as ‘egg’, ‘fish’, ‘knife’, ‘bank’, ‘cake’, and ‘cut’ (as well as the millennials’ favourite: ‘awesome’, from agi, ‘terror’). This led Richard to explain that English is a ‘contact’ language that includes many words borrowed from other tongues (including Latin and Gaelic). Since the grammatical structure of Old Norse and Old English were already similar, it was easy for the populations of England in the 10th and 11th centuries to absorb new words into their own languages.

That was made all the easier, Richard explained, because English is an ‘eroded’ language compared to other forms of Low German: instead of having inflected noun endings like Latin, French, and German, endings in English are replaced by prepositions that subtly explain the meaning. Of the 150 or so prepositions in English, ‘in’, ‘at’, ‘on’, ‘of’, and ‘to’ are the most common.

All of this hints at an explanation for a conundrum: why did the people of early medieval England readily pick up new Germanic languages brought by migrants from the near continent, but did not adopt French after the Norman Conquest? One long-standing suggestion is that early medieval migrants formed the elite, and in order to survive and prosper it was wise to learn to communicate with them. Perhaps a better theory is that English is demotic – the language of ordinary people going about their daily lives. Perhaps we had all the basic words we needed by 1066; perhaps there was less social contact between the English and the Normans, so that French was only used by the aristocracy.

The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’

Answering questions after the lecture, Richard was asked why the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had become so controversial. In his reply, he referred to white supremacists who had hijacked the term for their own purposes, and that it was a widely misunderstood concept. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is not an ethnicity (see CA 392), just as ‘Viking’ does not refer to people from a specific part of northern Europe (instead it is a ‘job description’, meaning ‘raider’). Although Bede repeats the story that Saxon means ‘people from Saxony’, it is more likely that it means ‘the knife people’, from Old English seax.

The BBC Radio 4 programme called AntiSocial, in which controversial topics are discussed and analysed, tackled the use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in May 2024, and it is worth listening to the podcast on iPlayer (about 20 minutes in) for a very clear explanation of the origin of the term by Joanna Story, Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester. Jo explains that early medieval Britain was not a homogenous nation, but was inhabited by a patchwork of different people with their own languages and identities, including Britons in western England and Wales, and Picts in Scotland. According to Bede, writing in the 730s, Angles from Angeln, now in northern Germany, settled in East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumberland; Jutes from southern Jutland, now southern Denmark, inhabited Kent; and Saxons from Lower Saxony, now north-western Germany, occupied Essex, Sussex, and Wessex.