London Anglo-Saxon Symposium 2016: Anglo-Scandinavian England
Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contacts and their Impact on English
Dr Sara M. Pons-Sanz, U. of Westminster
After an initial period of hit-and-run attacks, a relatively large number of
Scandinavian newcomers settled in Britain and lived in close proximity to the native
Anglo-Saxon population. The linguistic contact between speakers of Old English and
Old Norse led to the introduction into English of a significant number of NorseDerived terms, most of them of a non-technical character (e.g. die, egg, ill, skin, they,
ugly, want, etc.).
This paper will explore the various mechanisms through which Norse-derived
terms were introduced into English and the evidence that we have for their
identification. In connection with the latter, the paper will introduce the Gersum
Project, a new AHRC-funded project which aims to present etymological information
in a clear and consistent way. The corpus of the Gersum Project is made up by nine
Middle English texts of the so-called Alliterative Revival but this project will establish
a broader foundation for future work on Norse-derived terms in English and the
etymological study of loans more generally.
Select bibliography
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1900-2).
Dance, Richard. Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in
the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts (Tempe: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003).
Durkin, Philip. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
Miller, D. Gary. External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the
Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Pons Sanz, Sara Maria. Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts:
Wulfstan’s Works, a Case Study (Odense: University Press of South Denmark,
2007).
— The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
Townend, Matthew. Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic
Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout: Brepols,
2002).