Old Norse

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)

Old Norse is the name of the language spoken, in several dialects, by the Vikings who terrorised the east coast of England and Scotland, and set up several kingdoms - in Sicily, Normandy, Dublin and York, and finally (under Sveyn Forkbeard (1013) and then Canute "the Great", 1016-1035) a Danish kingdom of England. Old Norse was the common language of Scandinavia. It is a member of the North Germanic language family, and is the ancestor of modern Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.

The importance of Old Norse in the history of English is the influence it has had on its development. This may still be seen in some aspects of Modern English. The linguistic influence followed the political events, first of the Viking raids and settlement on th east coast, and then in the Danelaw - the area of England, roughly to the north-east of a line drawn from the mouth of the Thames to the mouth of the Mersey rivers. This remains an important linguistic boundary. Some characteristics of the Old Norse influence on English are briefly mentioned here.

• It is probable that the closeness of Old Norse and Old English led to much mutual comprehension - some even say that the English and the Vikings could talk quite happily together. However the details of the inflections of the two languages were different. Therefore when two people met, they could communicate - but would slur or avoid the inflectional endings. This is one root cause of the lack of inflections in Modern English.
• Norse also influenced the personal pronouns in English. For the 3rd person plural, Old English used hi or hie for the subjective 'they' and objective 'them'; hira or heora for the possessive form 'their'; and him or heom for the dative 'to them': it was the Danes who brought their and they into Modern English: there was ample opportunity for ambiguity , particularly in a language shared by speakers of several different mother-tongues - him and hir(a) seem particularly close to their singular near-homophones. Scandinavians also seem to have influenced the development of the 3rd person singular pronouns he and she (in OE he and hio were inflections of the same word

(after OED (2020), s.v. he, pron., n.¹, and adj.

• The sound patterns of Norse seem to have had an influence on the family of accents described as 'Northern' in British English. Certainly the way in which there are systematic variations between southern and northern accents owes something to their different language histories - it is impossible to say certainly what that is, but it seems likely that the characteristic vowel sounds of northern English (where 'bath' and 'glass' have the vowel of 'cap', rather than that of 'heart', for example and 'cup' and 'but' have the vowel of 'look') are broadly caused by the Scandinavian history.
• Northern vocabulary uses many words from Norse. A Scotsman who talks of the kirk and a northerner who has a town called Kirkby' are both using Norse forms of the same word as the Old English 'church', as birk is the Scots form of 'birch' (the tree). Fells (hillside) are largely found only in place-names in the Danelaw area. These examples point to the fact that similar words from Old Norse and Old English (both Germanic languages) have contributed to the richness of English vocabulary. Such pairs as shirt (OE) and skirt (ON), with different meanings, are derived from a common Germanic ancestor with the general meaning of 'short garment'.
  • For some more examples of the influence of Norse on the vocabulary of English, go to some Viking words in English.