North Germanic

This page forms part of an etymology course that gives an outline of the development of English. It is written in a sequence that you may want to follow. The best place to start, if you want to follow the whole course, is Etymology course, or, if you are only interested in English, Development of English. You may also arrive at any of these articles from other links. For more information about the history of English, you should of course read a good history of the language, such as Baugh (1993), Strang (1970), or Crystal (2005)

The North Germanic language family is one branch of the Germanic group. It developed separately from the group spoken by most speakers nowadays, the West Germanic, largely because of its geographical isolation: North Germanic is the language of Scandinavia, and its development was separated from that of the Western branch by the Baltic Sea. The current branches of North Germanic are two. East Scandinavian includes Danish and Swedish; West Scandinavian includes Norwegian Icelandic and Faroese. The oldest important variety for the history of English is Old Norse, alternatively called Old Scandinavian, the language of the Vikings who raided, traded and settled here, and even ruled England briefly, as part of the Danish Empire, in the tenth century. This became the literary language in which the famous Icelandic sagas were written.