A History of English Language

Foreign influences on old english 95
of phrase and certain particular usages should have found their way into the idiom of
people in no small part Danish in descent and living in intimate contact with the speakers
of a Scandinavian tongue.
80. Period and Extent of the Influence.
It is hardly possible to estimate the extent of the Scandinavian influence by the number of
borrowed words that exist in Standard English. That number, if we restrict the list to
those for which the evidence is fully convincing, is about 900. These, as the examples
given above show, are almost always words designating common everyday things and
fundamental concepts. To this group we should probably be justified in adding an equal
number in which a Scandinavian origin is probable or in which the influence of
Scandinavian forms has entered. Furthermore there are, according to Wright, the editor of
the English Dialect Dictionary, thousands of Scandinavian words that are still a part of
the everyday speech of people in the north and east of England and in a sense are just as
much a part of the living language as those that are used in other parts of the country and
have made their way into literature. He notes that “if we exclude all sc- words of various
origins which are common to the standard language and the dialects, it is a remarkable
fact that the English Dialect Dictionary contains 1,154 simple words beginning with sc-
(sk-).” 22 Locally, at least, the Scandinavian influence was tremendous. The period during
which this large Danish element was making its way into the English vocabulary was
doubtless the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was the period during which the merging
of the two peoples was taking place. The occurrence of many of the borrowed words in
written records is generally somewhat later. A considerable number first make their
appearance in the Ormulum at the beginning of the thirteenth century. But we must
attribute this fact to the scarcity of literary texts of an earlier date, particularly from the
region of the Danelaw. Because of its extent and the intimate way in which the borrowed
elements were incorporated, the Scandinavian influence is one of the most interesting of
the foreign influences that have contributed to the English language.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
On the relation of the various peoples in Anglo-Saxon England some interesting observations,
especially inferences drawn from place-names, will be found in R.E. Zachrisson’s Romans,
Kelts, and Saxons in Ancient Britain (Uppsala, Sweden, 1927). For the history of the period, see
F.M.Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3rd ed., Oxford, 1971). A readable account of the
introduction of Christianity will be found in
22
Joseph and Elizabeth M.Wright, An Elementary Middle English Grammar, p. 82.