When you look at Norwegian words and English words they are very similar.  In fact, you can often make out what a Norwegian word is by the way it looks, however, the sounds can be quiet different. One of the major changes that occurred to the English language is known as the Great Vowel Shift. [...]

One of our readers has directed me to a great resource for my study of the effects of Norwegian on the English language – a series of videos on YouTube by the scholar Alexander Arguelles.  The videos present an interesting overview of the Germanic language, and as Norwegian is one of the languages in the Germanic [...]

I always hear, from Norwegians, Brazilians, Chinese – everyone – that English is very hard to learn.  They say it is because English is notorious for breaking all the rules.  For example: why does ‘heard’ and ‘beard’ have different vowel sounds when they have the same ending ‘-eard’?  Same with ‘great’, ‘treat’ and ‘threat’?  There [...]

Language progressively changes over time.  In theorising how a language changes, scholars look at two things – internal and external change.  Internal change relates to grammar – word patterns (morphology), sound patterns (phonetics) and meaning patterns (semantics) etc.  External change relates to influences from innovations (such as the printing press), politics and social identity (such [...]