Write a note on the danish element in the english language
Answers
The starting point of England was the arrival of West Germanic peoples in Britannia in the fifth century. Those West Germanics were Angles, Saxons and Jutes, all speaking relatively close versions of West Germanic. West Germanic is itself a version of the ancient Germanic language which had arrived with the Germanic peoples in north-west Europe about 1000 BC. Two thousand years ago, the English language and the Danish language were the same language. Since then they have drifted apart, moved towards each other and drifted apart again.
By the year 500, the abandoned Roman province of Britannia contained at the lowest count 10,000 Germanic inhabitants and at the highest 200,000 Germanics inhabitants. For the next three hundred years, the dialects of these peoples evolved in the steady, slow way that languages do evolve. Vocabulary expanded to take account of Christianity, and some speakers began to refer to their language as English, but it was not until the eighth century that a major change began to be made in the West Germanic of the British Isles. That change came with the impact of invaders in the ninth and tenth centuries.
These invaders were Germanic speaking people who came mainly from the territories that we now call Denmark, and the language they spoke we call North Germanic or Norse. They had advanced metal-working, ship-building and navigational techniques that made them view the world differently from many of the peoples on the North Sea coasts and in the British Isles. They perceived the sea as joining the scattered islands not separating them, and, since their population was expanding, they moved themselves and their families to create settlements in the Faroe, Shetland and Orkney Islands, in the lands that are now Britain, Ireland, and France, in Iceland and Greenland, in the Mediterranean Basin. They even migrated internally into Central Europe, taking river routes to set up kingdoms on the Volga.
The word ‘viking’ in Norse means sea traveller and warrior, and Old English texts treat them as pirates and pillagers, but by their invasions, settlements and kingdom creation, they were doing no more than the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had done before them. An interesting feature of the Vikings in many instances is that these Norse speakers gave up speaking Norse, so that in Ireland they became speakers of Irish, in Sicily speakers of Sicilian, and in Normandy speakers of French. In Normandy, the Norse people not only adopted the French language, they adopted French religion and culture as well within three generations. They were then ready by 1066 to invade England from the south and bring about the Norman Conquest, setting England and English on a remarkable new trajectory.
That Norman invasion, – a second Danish invasion of England - means that we cannot detect the influence of the first Norse invasion on the English language until English resurfaced as a literary form in the fourteenth century. For three hundred years from 1066, English almost ceased to be written. England was ruled in French and educated in Latin; English was a despised tongue spoken, for the most part, by peasants. But it never ceased entirely to be a written language, any monk or clerk who could write Latin and French could also write English if he had a mind too. And in fact from about 1350 onwards English begins to resurface with astonishing force and energy. Major poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower use it, John Wycliffe and his followers translate the whole Bible into English, and the law courts and parliament begin to make it the main language of their business. This English is however a very different English from that spoken and written in 1066. It is well on its way to becoming Modern English. It can take a year to learn to read the Old English poem Beowulf; it takes thirty minutes to learn to read The Canterbury Tales if they are given modern spelling.
Now, much of this change was due to the fact that, by 1350, English had practically fused with Norman and Old French, but an important part of the change was also brought about by the impact of Norse in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. And that was an impact that went beyond the superficial effect of vocabulary. Certainly English had imported a large number of words from Norse, but it had also imported elements of grammar and syntax. That represents a profound linguistic influence and Norse, or can I say Old Danish, is second only to French in the reshaping the English language. There has been no third such influence.