Language contact and language change: the Danes in England

Abstract

The influence of the Scandinavian dialects on English has been often studied though no significant progress seems to have been achieved. The major aim of this paper is to offer a methodological approach which can provide a description of the Scandinavian lexical element in Middle English but considering it in its different aspects. Thus, we will undertake a corpus-based analysis where different variables such as semantic field, type of text and dialect among others are taken into consideration. The resulting description will reveal that the linguistic intercourse must have been different from what traditional scholars have always believed.