According to University of Oslo professor Jan Terje Faarlund and his colleague, Czech professor Joseph Emmonds, modern English isn’t a direct descendant of Anglo-Saxon, Old English, and Germanic roots as most people believe. Rather, they say that it’s another form of Scandinavian, like Norwegian and Swedish. They base their conclusion on a comparison of both the vocabulary and the grammar of the old and modern forms of the languages.

There are words that Old English speakers used that we’d recognize today (although the pronunciation might not be quite the same) like bread, blood, drink, and heart. These words reached the British Isles with the invaders from what is now Germany, the Angles who left their language and their name to England beginning around 500CE. However, this Old English language had a lot in common with modern German as well, in particular the word order (with the verb at the end of the sentence), and it’s so different from Modern English that it’s hard to read today. By contrast, Middle English used a sentence structure that’s basically identical to how we speak English today – and it’s the same sentence structure that the Scandinavian languages use.

Faarlund and Emmonds say that the Norse influence on the English language is much stronger than the early Germanic, and that the centuries-long occupation of the northern and western parts of the country firmly established the Nordic flavor of the language, even after the Norman invasion in the 11th century. According to these researchers, Old English died out, it didn’t evolve. Middle English, full of Scandinavian words like knife, husband, berserk, and trust, is fairly easy to read and understand even today, and the modern versions of English and Norwegian (for example) are close enough that speakers of one language can at least get the sense of meanings in the other language that they don’t know. It’s a good explanation for the shape and substance of Modern English, and helps clear up some of the problems people come across when trying to link English and German more directly. Hva tror du?

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