English is a Scandinavian language?
<p>Here&#8217;s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I&#8217;ve run across in a while.  Two professors in Norway assert that <a href="http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/11/27/english-is-a-scandinavian-language/">English is a Scandinavian language</a>, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one.  More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (&#8220;Old English&#8221;) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.</p>
<p>The bolster their claim by pointing at major grammatical traits which English shares with Old Norse rather than West Germanic languages &#8211; notably, consistent SVO (subject-verb-object) word order rather than the SOV (subject-object-verb) or V2 (verb-second) orders that dominate in languages like German, Dutch and Anglo-Saxon. The practical consequence they point out (correctly &#8211; I&#8217;ve experienced this myself) is that English and Norwegian or Swedish are quite a bit closer in mutual intelligibility than any of this group is with German or Dutch or Anglo-Saxon.  I had actually noticed this before and been puzzled by it.</p>
<p>The professors think the reason for this is that rather than evolving into Modern English, Anglo-Saxon actually <em>died out</em> during the two centuries between the invasion of the Great Army in 865 and the defeat of Harold Godwinsson in 1066.  They propose that Anglo-Saxon influenced, but was largely replaced by, the Norse dialect of the Anglo-Danish Empire.  Which, SVO North Germanic grammar and all, <em>then</em> collided with Norman French and evolved into English as we know it.</p>
<p>This isn&#8217;t crazy.  It may be wrong, but it isn&#8217;t crazy.  Two centuries is plenty of time for an invading language to reduce a native one to a low-status argot and even banish it entirely; we&#8217;ve seen it happen much faster than that when the invaders are as culturally and politically dominant as the Anglo-Danes were in England at the time of Cnut (1016-1035).  </p>
<p>Even in the conventional account of the evolution of English, modern English is supposed to have derived from the Anglo-Saxon spoken in the East Midlands &#8211; which, as the professors point out, was the most densely settled part of the Danelaw!</p>
<p>All of this gave me an idea that may go beyond the professors&#8217; hypothesis and explain a few other things&#8230;</p>
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<p>Previously on this blog my commenters and I have kicked around the idea that English is best understood as the result of a double <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_genesis">creolization</a> process &#8211; that it evolved from a contact pidgin formed between Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw Norse. The creole from that contact then collided, a century later, with Norman French.  Wham, bam, a second contact pidgin forms; English is the creole descended from the language of (as the SF writer H. Beam Piper famously put it) &#8220;Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids&#8221;.</p>
<p>This is not so different from the professors&#8217; account, actually.  They win if the first creole, the barmaids&#8217; milk language, was SVO with largely Norse grammar and some Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.  The conventional history of English would have the girls speaking an SOV/V2 language with largely Anglo-Saxon grammar and some Norse vocabulary.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m thinking about this, and about the political-cultural situation in East Anglia at the time historical linguists suppose it to have been the cradle of modern English, and I thought&#8230;hey!  Diglossia!  Basilect and acrolect! </p>
<p>OK, for those of you not up on your linguistic jargon, these are terms used in modern linguistics to describe the behavior of speakers in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum">creole continuum</a>.  Often, in a contact culture where an invading language has partly or wholly displaced a native one, you get a continuum of dialects between the acrolect (&#8220;high&#8221; language, of the invaders) and basilectal (&#8220;low&#8221; dialects) preserving more of a native language  which may or may not still be alive in its original form.</p>
<p>A type case for this is modern Jamaica, where there&#8217;s a dialect continuum between acrolectal standard English and basilectal Jamaican patois with a lot of survivals from West African languages and Arawak.  Outsiders tend to oversimplify this kind of situation into diglossia &#8211; one population speaking two languages, one &#8220;outside&#8221; and prestigious, one &#8220;inside&#8221;, intimate and tied to home and ethno-cultural identity.</p>
<p>But it isn&#8217;t that simple in Jamaica.  Individuals are often fluent in both acrolectal and basilectal forms and mix usages depending on social situation. Husband and wife might speak acrolectal English on business, a mesolectal light patois among a mixed-race group of friends, but a deep patois with a grammar significantly different than standard English when cooking or making love.  (I have a teenage nephew who lives on St. John&#8217;s, another Caribbean island, who &#8211; though tow-headed and blue-eyed and perfectly capable in American English &#8211; sometimes busts out a deep-black island dialect at family gatherings. It&#8217;s mischievous and barely intelligible, but it&#8217;s affectionate, too.)</p>
<p>I think, now (and this is where I go beyond those professors in Norway) that East Anglia between the invasions of the Great Army and Willam the Bastard must have been a lot like Jamaica today.  Nothing quite as neat as one language dying out, but rather a creole continuum &#8211; with Danelaw Norse at the top, a remnant Anglo-Saxon at the bottom, and a whole lotta code-switching going on.  There&#8217;s your cradle of English!  (Well, before the Normans added their special sauce, anyway&#8230;)</p>
<p>This would explain much that the conventional Anglo-Saxon-centric account doesn&#8217;t, like why I can read a Norwegian newspaper far more readily than a German or Dutch one.  It&#8217;s more nuanced than the professors&#8217; version, but leads to the same top-line conclusion.  English better classified as a Scandinavian rather than a West Germanic language?  OK, twice creolized and later heavily infiltrated by Latin and French&#8230;but yeah, I&#8217;ll buy that description.</p>
