Languages evolve and change drastically over time. If you were to say street corn, nepo baby, or beach read — three terms recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary — to early English speakers, they’d likely think you were speaking a different language.
English borrows a lot of words from different languages. Words include rendezvous, genre, and even lemon. English is more of a fluid language, picking up new words as it grows. However, this wasn’t always the case, especially when the Vikings raided the British Isles. Though the Vikings established a strong foothold in the British Isles, the Norse languages didn’t come to dominate.
Though few words were adopted into standard English, there are still words used today that the Vikings left behind.
Early Language Influences
Humans have lived in the British Isles for thousands of years, but scholars are unsure which language people spoke 10,000 years or 5,000 years ago.
When the Celts came to the British Isles about 3,000 years ago, they encountered Pictish speakers. Following the Celts, the Romans dominated Britain 2,000 years ago, but the empire collapsed and withdrew around 410 A.D. Latin had an indirect influence on English in that Latin-derived words like wall, kitchen, wine, and mile.
English came to the British Isles as a German dialect when German tribes, including the Angles, Frisians, Jutes, and Saxons, arrived around 449 A.D. and continued to spread in the subsequent centuries.
Read More: Language Evolves Over Time and Islands Can Drive Linguistic Diversity
Old Norse and the English Language
In the late 700s, Norse raiders — the Vikings — invaded the British Isles, and as one historian describes it, “the Vikings were unloosed” for the next three centuries. The Norwegians went up to the northern and western edges of Scotland as well as Cumbria in the northwest of England.
The Danes pushed their way into the east and Midlands, and by the 850s, they were the dominating force. Despite their power, few words at the time made it from Old Norse into the English language. Simply put, English wasn’t a language that budged easily.
At the time, English had about 25,000 words, and few were borrowed from other languages. Only about 200 Roman words were in use, and only a few Celtic words were on loan to English speakers. The Celtic words that made their way into the lexicon tended to be location-based. The river Thames, for example, is based on a Celtic word.
Borrowing Building Blocks
Only about 150 Danish words slid into the English language while the Vikings were occupying the British Isles. Scholars, however, find three Norse words to be particularly noteworthy – they, their, and them.
“This is really interesting, because while it’s pretty common for vocabulary to move from one language to another due to cultural contact, it’s less common for fundamental building blocks of a language — such as personal pronouns — to make that move,” says Eleanor Barraclough, a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University in England and the author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.
Old English had used the third-person pronouns hi, hie, heira, and hem, but Middle English adopted the Norse form, and scholars see the shift begin in the north and then spread south. The complete adaption of the third-person pronouns indicated a similarity between Old Norse and Old English.
“It has been suggested that this is because Old Norse and Old English are both Germanic languages, and if you spoke one, you probably understood quite a lot of the other,” Barraclough says.
English speakers also adapted vocabulary from the Vikings.
“English has vocabulary that comes from Old Norse, including words that we might associate with the stereotype of Viking raiders, like ugly, knife, slaughter, anger and die. But others are more surprising, and I like them a lot more, words like guest, egg and cake,” Barraclough says.
And although many people might not associate such sparkly words with Viking invaders, glitter and glimmer are also from Old Norse.
Some scholars estimate that about 1,000 English words derive from Norse languages. (For perspective, the average American English speaker knows about 42,000 words.)
English Adaptations
Although English speakers were okay with keeping “glitter” and “glimmer,” they wanted the Norse invaders off their island. In the late 870s, Alfred the Great rallied his fighters and claimed victory. The result was a division of land into Celtic, English, and Norse territories.
So the Norse didn’t pack up their belongings and ship out. Rather, they settled, and over time, marriage between ruling parties formed alliances between the territories.
In the former Scandinavian territories, there are words that worked their way into the regional dialect.
“In areas of Britain that were heavily settled by Scandinavians — for example, in the area that we today sometimes call the Danelaw — even more Old Norse vocabulary survives as dialect words in areas such as Yorkshire in Northern England. For instance, a bairn or barn is a child, to leik or leck is to play, and a foss or force is a waterfall,” Barraclough says.
Although these words are regional and haven’t made their way into the standard English spoken by millions of people worldwide, they have a place of permanence in the former Norse territory because of town names.
Town names that end with -by, like Derby, are common in the former Norse territory because ‘by’ means abode or village. Similarly, -thorpe means village in Danish, and towns such as Althorpe reflect the influence. Both demonstrate how the Norse invaders eventually made themselves at home.
Read More: When Did Humans Evolve Language?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Eleanor Barraclough. Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Frontiers in Psychology. How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age
Melvyn Bragg. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Elly van Gelderen. A History of the English Language: Revised edition
Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country's largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
