Which Group Of Invaders Have Had The Biggest Effect On The English Language

English Across Time

Which group of invaders had the biggest effect on the English language and why? (Topic Two)

The English Language was born from the dialects of three German tribes: the Angles, Jutes and the Saxons, who inhabited Britain in 450 AD. This Germanic base was influenced by future invasions in varying degrees. ‘The history of early English vocabulary is one of repeated invasions, with newcomers to the islands bringing their own language with them, and leaving a fair amount of their vocabulary behind when they left or were assimilated.’ Crystal, David; 1995. The Norman Conquest of England had the largest and most direct influence on the English language, primarily due to the elitism which encompassed the French language. Celtic

English became apparent in Britain in the fifth century and interacted with various Celtic tribes who adopted the language of their Germanic conquerors. There were miniscule impacts in the way of lexical influence; the impression of the Celts remained confined to place names such as London and Thames. The lexeme Thames referred to as Temese in Middle English and is derived from the Celtic name for the Thames River, Tamesas (the dark one). It is suspected that it meant ‘dark’ which is comparative to other cognates such as Irish teimheal, Welsh tywyll (darkness) and Sanskrit tamas. The lack of great influence of the Celts on the language was to be predicted from a sociolinguistic viewpoint as invaders don’t borrow many lexemes from the subdued. Due to the nature of the few lexemes that were adopted by the English language (majority being toponyms), there was barely any effect on any subsystem of language. The Celts hardly had any impact, especially in comparison to the Norman invasion mainly due to the fact that they were the conquered, rather than the

“Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066." Jan Terje Faarlund. Scandinavian lexemes entered the English language, several by daily use, for example, ‘skinn’ (noun) meaning ‘animal hide’ which was adopted into Middle English as ‘skin’ (noun) /skɪn/ with the current referent being ‘the thin layer of tissue forming the natural outer covering of the body of a person or animal,’ showing the adaptation of the word with only eliding a single morpheme (the letter n) and inconsequential broadening of the lexeme’s semantics. Several Scandinavian lexemes are cemented in Modern English; one being them which is even more significant than regular integration as the adaption of grammatical items (such as a pronoun) is unusual. In Old Norse, þeim replaced the Old English cognate him/heom for third person singular. Its acceptance into English proposes extensive contact amongst the Anglo Saxons and Vikings and that they held more or less equal amounts of prestige. The Scandinavians brought almost 2000 neologisms into the English vocabulary, either substituting existing lexemes or creating new lexemes altogether, however, still having less of an