The Danish influence in the north was enormous. The scale of their settlements
can be seen from the fact that more than 1,400 place names in northern England
are of Scandinavian origin. For a long time, the people in some places spoke
only Old English while in other places, often on the next hillside, they spoke
only Old Norse. Occasionally this arrangement lasted for years-in the Shetland
Islands, in the far north of Scotland, it lasted for centuries, with the people speaking a Norwegian dialect called Norn until well into the 1700s , of which
some 1,500 dialect words survive to this day—but for the most part the two
linguistic sides underwent a replaced and peaceful merger. A great many
Scandinavian terms were adopted, without which English would clearly be the
poorer freckle, leg, skull, meek, rotten, clasp, crawl, dazzle, scream, trust, lift,
take, husband, sky. Sometimes these replaced Old English words, but often they
took up residence alongside them, adding a useful synonym to the language, so
that today in English we have both craft and skill, wish and want, raise and rear,
and many other doublets. Sometimes the words came from the same source but
had grown slightly different in pronunciation, as with shriek and screech, no and
nay, or ditch and dike, and sometimes they went a further step and acquired
slightly different meanings, as with scatter and shatter, skirt and shirt, whole and
hale, bathe and bask, stick and stitch, hack and hatch, wake and watch, break and
breach.
But most remarkable of all, the English adopted certain grammatical forms. The
pronouns they, them and their, for instance are Scandinavian This borrowing of
basic elements of syntax is highly unusual, perhaps unique among developed
languages, and an early demonstration of the remarkable adaptability of English
speakers.
One final cataclysm awaited the English language: the Norman conquest of
1066. the Normans were Vikings who had settled in northern France 200 years
before. Like the Celtic Britons before them, they had given their name to a
French province, Normandy. But unlike the Celts, they had abandoned their
language and much of their culture and become French in manner and speech.
So totally had they given up their language, in fact, that not a single Norse word
has survived in Normandy, apart from some place-names. That is quite
remarkable when you consider that the Normans bequeathed 10,000 words to
English. The variety of French the Normans spoke was not the speech of Paris,
but a rural dialect, and its divergence from standard French became even more
pronounced when it took root in England—so much so that historians refer to it
not as French, but as Anglo-Norman. This, as we shall see in a moment, had
important consequences for the English language of today and may even have
contributed to its survival.
No king of England spoke English for the next 300 years. It was not until 1399,
with the accession of Henry IV, that England had a ruler whose mother tongue was English. One by one English earls and bishops were replaced by Normans
(though in some instances not for several years). French-speaking craftsmen,
designers, cooks, scholars, and scribes were brought to Britain. Even so, for the
common people life went on. They were almost certainly not alarmed that their
rulers spoke a foreign tongue. It was a commonplace in the past. Canute from the
century before was Danish and even Edward the Confessor, the last but one
Anglo-Saxon king, spoke French as his first tongue. As recently as the
eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even
though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without
mastering his subjects' language. Common people did not expect to speak like
their masters any more than they expected to live like them. Norman society had
two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peasantry.
Not surprisingly, the linguistic influence of the Normans tended to focus on
matters of court, government, fashion, and high living. Meanwhile, the English
peasant continued to eat, drink, work, sleep, and play in English.
The breakdown can be illustrated in two ways. First, the more humble trades
tended to have Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker), while the more
skilled trades adopted French names ( mason, painter, tailor). At the same time,
animals in the field usually were called by English names (sheep, cow, ox), but
once cooked and brought to the table, they were generally given French names
(beef, mutton, veal, bacon.
Anglo-Norman differed from the standard French of Paris in several ways. For
one thing, Parisian French, called Francien, tended to avoid the "w" sound. So
while the Normans pronounced quit, question, quarter, and other such words as
if they were spelled kwit, kwestion, and kwarter, Parisians pronounced them
with a hard "k" sound. Equally, standard French used cha-in some constructions
where the Normans used ca-. Thus we have such differences as carry/charrier,
cauldron/chaudron, cattle/chattel. (Our word chattel was adopted later.) The
Normans used the suffixes -arie and -orie, while the French used -aire and -oire,
which gives us such pairings as victory/victoire and salary/saloire. Anglo-
Norman kept the s in words such as August, forest, and beast, while Francien
gradually forsook them for a circumflex: Août, forêt, bête.. [All of these cited by
Baugh and Cable.
Norman French, like the Germanic tongues before it, made a lasting impact on
English vocabulary. Of the 10,000 words we adopted from Norman French,some three quarters are still in use—among them justice, jury, felony, traitor,
petty, damage, prison, marriage, sovereign, parliament, govern, prince, duke,
viscount, baron. In fact, nearly all our words relating to jurisprudence and
government are of French origin, as many of the ranks of aristocracy, such as -
countess, duke, duchess, and baron, but not—perhaps a bit oddly— king and
queen. At the same time, many English words were adopted into French.
Sometimes it is not possible to tell who was borrowing from whom—whether,
for example, we took aggressive from the Normans or they took their agressif
from us, or whether the English intensity came before or after the Norman
intensite. In other matters, such as syntax, their influence was less dramatic