Morphology is the study of words.  How words are structured, patterned and evolve tell us a lot about who influenced what language.  In How Vikings Changed the English Language: Spelling we discussed how words were spelt in Old English and Norse – phonetically.  However, as English went through the Great Vowel Shift English spelling was [...]

The origin of Modern Norwegian is fairly straight forward.  One language evolved into another and so forth without too much complication (compared to English).  As mentioned in How Vikings Changed the English Language: First Contact, one of the ways that scholars announce that a language existed is by written evidence.  A lot of the earlier [...]

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 [...]