The English language has traditionally been classified by scholars as part of the West Germanic language family. Which include: German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish. Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo, says he and colleague Joseph Emmonds, professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, can prove another theory. They think that English is a Scandinavian language. This challenges the establishment altogether.
This newfound information comes as a shocker to the linguistic community which has always believed that English comes from a West Germanic branch of the language family tree.
“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,” says Faarlund.
The Northern Germanic language group consists of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese.
The two professors assert that Modern English shares grammatical structure and much of the same vocabulary with Scandinavian languages. And they think that they can demonstrate their argument.
Jan Terje Faarlund is the author of Grammatical Relations in Change (Studies in Language Companion Series)
