English: The Language of the Vikings

The authors argue that the linguistic ancestor of Middle English (and therefore Modern English) is North Germanic, with large-scale borrowings from the Old English lexicon, rather than the other way around. Middle English in fact descended from Old Mainland Scandinavian, and the fusion of the two vocabularies dates back not to early Scandinavian settlement in England, but about 200 years later, especially the 12th century, during the full impact of the Norman Conquest. We demonstrate that numerous grammatical properties reflect a deep and typologically significant relation between Scandinavian and Middle/Modern English. With respect to all these characteristics, Middle/Modern English groups with North Germanic rather than with West Germanic.