Is English a Scandinavian Language?

[Jackson]

The Anglo-Saxons had just came from Southern Scandinavia and Northernmost Germany some 300-400 years before they first encountered the Vikings. They probably understood eachother quite OK.

There are actually Icelandic texts from i think the 12th century, one of which refers to the English as speaking the same language as them (or a variant thereof), however given that this is just one statement is entirely subjective as to how similar each one was and exactly what was meant. Perhaps it was the Anglo-Danish elite that was being talked about, or rather a more general language similarity. Icelandic scholars used to come to England fairly frequently i think.

[Ouistreham]

The Norman influence is underplayed in England though, for patriotic reasons..

I don't think it is. But it's so visibly obvious that it doesn't need to be pointed at.

I have a feeling both influences complemented one another. I mean, the fact that English at some point discarded the somewhat complicated West Germanic use of verbs and borrowed from Danish its more flexible and straightforward syntactical system made it much easier to embed lots of French words.

[King Claus]

Sicily was Normanland first.

I find Dutch to be a vulgar sounding tongue, but it is clearly more similar to ours than the Scandinavian languages are.

retard

[Graham]

I bet you there is not much difference in Genetics from someone like Jackson and your average frenchman from Normandy today.

[Jackson]

I bet you there is not much difference in Genetics from someone like Jackson and your average frenchman from Normandy today.

I think i remember a person of north-eastern French heritage (a good deal of it Norman & Flemish) on one of these forums in the past, can't remember the name, and they were not a great distance to the south-west of England, i think on par with Belgians. So i would suspect that if a good number of people from old Norman provinces in France were tested they might fill, or at least shorten, the divide between France and Britain on genetic maps. I noticed a couple of individuals on current ones are separate from the rest of the French samples, and fall probably closer to the Belgians and southern Dutch than to central French people, big country. And of course i've seen a couple of Bretons who seem quite similar to western/southwestern British people.

[SKYNET]

[Neon Knight]

Geordies sound the most Scando like.

Yeah, the sing-song quality of the accents. I think speech accents can give us some big clues about historical influences.

[Grafbob]

I spent three months learning Swedish and forgot it all in the years afterwards, but I do remember the word order being much more like English. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that much of German word order was imposed on it by scholars of Latin in the 1500s or whenever it was that learnèd men like Melanchthon started giving themselves Greek or Latin names. Certainly, English has a few Norse features apart from word order: in particular, some of the pronouns like "her" - it is very unusual for languages to borrow such basic words as pronouns, but it is still a West Germanic language. The most striking feature is how little (if any) influence any of the Celtic languages had on English.

[Óttar]

There is a linguist who is trying to claim English comes from Norse. Forgot his name. Icelandic certainly looks similar to Old English. Thu, thig, etc.

Ger.: Du solltest es nicht sagen.

The second verb being "kicked" to the end of the sentence was, I read, introduced from a convention in German poetry.

[Goujian]

Old English was probably at least 25-50% Scandinavian, mostly Danish but some Norwegian.