Cumbrian Language in its Cultural Context

Incorporation of Old Norse.

Because this chapter will deal with a time period well before that which this book focuses on, I will only go into a shallow level of detail. This topic will require further study at another time, and there may be existing literature on it that I have not read.

Famously, northern English dialects bear a certain amount of influence from Old Norse, the language spoken in medieval Scandinavia and associated with the Vikings. During the 800s AD, several Viking attacks took place on the north-eastern coast.

A large portion of northern and eastern England was under Scandinavian control for some centuries after that, and was known as the Danelaw.

During these centuries, Scandinavian settlers (probably more peacefully than their Viking predecessors) flooded into northern England from various angles; some came directly by the east coast, others travelled through northern Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man, eventually reaching what is now Cumbria.

The extent to which Norse speakers interacted with and influenced their Anglo-Saxon neighbours is debated, but I am convinced that interaction on a colloquial level must have been very widespread; this is the only way of accounting for the scale of Norse influence on northern dialects.

To give some perspective on the issue: normally, when loan words are transferred from one language to another, they do not join the core vocabulary of the recipient language. That is, they rarely replace the most commonly-used words in the language.

Even today, centuries after the Norman invasion and with intervening years of influence from ecclesiastical and scientific Latin, there are relatively few Romance words in the core vocabulary of a standard English speaker. I have been writing in fairly academic English here, yet more than 60% of the words in this chapter, up to the start of this sentence, have been natively Anglo-Saxon. In regular speech, this percentage would be markedly higher.

French words do not very often penetrate to our core vocabulary, because despite French being the language of law and royalty, it 121