Scope and Aims

Notwithstanding important advances in our understanding of twelfth-century English (e.g., most recently, Faulkner 2022), there still remains much that we do not know about this time of considerable linguistic flux. The multilingual landscape of medieval England was experiencing significant changes: French was establishing itself as a dominant language in various social domains at the same time that Old Norse was dying/had recently died out as the native language of a notable proportion of the English population (see, e.g., Parsons 2001). Language shift from Norse to English most likely happened at different times in different areas of the Danelaw and, accordingly, there would have been much diatopic and diachronic variation in terms of the types of linguistic transfer and the degree of integration of the Norse-derived elements into English. Studying this is very important for the history of English as a whole because, unlike the relationships that English established with other languages during the Middle Ages (Celtic languages, French, Latin) and with many other languages later on as a result of expansionism and colonialism, the interaction between Old English and Old Norse was likely to have been—at least, generally speaking—adstratal. That speakers of Old Norse had similar social status to speakers of Old English is suggested by the nature of most of the Norse-derived terms recorded in English, which—unlike most terms borrowed from French and, particularly, Latin—tend to have an everyday, non-technical character, and are not associated with more formal registers (see further pp. 154–55 and 240).

The extent of Norse impact on English is mainly visible in Late Middle English, as we have a comparatively large number of records from the Scandinavianized areas and the impact of standardization is not present yet. Accordingly, given the dearth of data from earlier periods, later attested varieties often have to be taken as data to assess the effects of language contact centuries before. Albeit helpful, this approach has its own problems, largely because of language change, including the way in which French influence continued to shape the language.