Bilingualism in Viking Age England

I read an interesting article by Matthew Townend a while back, as part of a History of English module. Townend disputes that a bilingual society is necessarily made up of multilingual speakers, discusses the matter from a sociolinguistic viewpoint and explores the nature of the contact between the two languages. He argues that England’s bilingualism was largely based on monolingual Old English and Old Norse speakers all speaking their own language.

   Townend delves into Norse and English co-existing in the Danelaw. He brings up the lack of recognition of Old Norse in Old English texts, with a few exceptions including mention of Norse gods and a language called Denisc. He makes a point of there not being any evidence of the English using Norse habitually, but that Norse, according to Aethelweard, Aelfric and other evidence, was most certainly in use at Danish king Cnut’s court in England. He also emphasises that while both languages were frequently spoken, only Old English was written in the Roman alphabet, the Vikings favouring runes. The article does not mention the earlier Anglo-Saxon Futhorc and its relationship to the Futhark, which could have been useful to a reader with little knowledge of the historical background.

   Further discussion on division between the languages and their speakers leads to question of prestige – Townend suggests that if Norse were a status language in England during the Viking Age, there would be more non-needed Norse loans into English, whereas if English were more prestigious, Norse speakers would’ve taken it up to a greater extent. However, there is very little to support either of these patterns. Townend references J.D. Richards and D.M. Hadley when he suggests that Norse place-names seem to have entered the English onomasticon, and should not be regarded as evidence of abundant Norse presence in England. However, he refutes the idea that these Scandinavian loans as a rule spread to places with no Viking settlement; Norse place-names were most certainly only found in or near areas where Old Norse was actually spoken.

   A related point is “Scandinavianised” place-names, where English morphemes were replaced by Norse. Townend takes this as evidence for speakers of both languages living side by side; Vikings hear the Anglo-Saxon names and substitute the words with their Scandinavian counterparts. He quotes and disagrees with Gillian Fellows-Jensen, who believes that the Norse speakers did not always change the English names – Townend thinks it “apparent” that the invaders would adjust the names to fit their own speech. He goes on to say that surviving speakers of English are responsible for the preservation of original place-names. Scandinavians must also have coined new ones whenever the English cognates were too different.

   Townend finishes by quoting A. McIntosh concerning language contact – that the notion actually pertains to contact between speakers of languages. Languages are not separated from their peoples; the sociolinguistic dimension should not be ignored, and may indeed bring new perspective and new ways of looking at evidence to the study of historical linguistics.