Hebrides due to the relatively high density of Scandinavian speakers; in north-eastern
Caithness, Orkney and Shetland because of the total subjugation, possibly even
extermination, of the native population. Scandinavian influence on English was heavy:
scores of everyday words were borrowed, including even the 3 rd person pronouns they,
them, their; in the areas of settlement in England place names of Norse origin abound.
How long the language survived as a spoken idiom is uncertain, but there is runic
evidence for the use of (a very aberrant form of ) Scandinavian in north-west England as
late as the twelfth century (Barnes 2003 a: 7 – 8 ). Scandinavian influence on Irish is less
profound; a number of loan words have been identified, but few place names. Runic
inscriptions of both Danish/Swedish and Norwegian type were being carved in Dublin
in the period c. 950 – 1100 , but whether by residents of the town or visitors is impossible
to say. The Isle of Man boasts over thirty runic inscriptions, mainly of Norwegian type,
and a spread of Norse place names. With its apparently large and dominant immigrant
population, one might expect Scandinavian speech to have survived longer here than in
England or Ireland, and some have suggested a date in the fourteenth century for its final
demise. However, there is already considerable evidence of Gaelic influence in the Norse
of the earliest (tenth-century) inscriptions and two of the latest, perhaps from the end of
the twelfth century, show signs of having been made by someone unacquainted with
runic script, possibly even with the Norse language (Page 1992 : 136 ). Scandinavian
speech left its mark on Hebridean place nomenclature and on Hebridean Gaelic,
especially in the island of Lewis. Estimates of how long the language survived there have
varied from the thirteenth to the early fifteenth century (Barnes 1993 : 77 – 8 ).
In Orkney, Shetland and north-eastern Caithness Scandinavian must have completely
replaced the indigenous language or languages by the end of the tenth century, if not
before. We nevertheless know very little about the form of Scandinavian in use in the
Orkney earldom during the Viking Age since almost all our sources are from a later
period. A few of the runic inscriptions preserved in the islands are probably from the
tenth or eleventh century, but they are extremely laconic and confirm nothing more
than that Orkney and Shetland were part of the West Scandinavian runic province
(Barnes 1998 : 9 – 11 ). The literary, onomastic and later linguistic records combine to
suggest that the bulk of the settlers hailed from western Norway (roughly the area
between present-day Nord-Trøndelag and Vest-Agder; Barnes 1998 : 2 – 4 ), and that
clearly coloured the type of language that developed there. Ultimately Northern-Isles
and Caithness Scandinavian succumbed to Lowland Scots and English, in Caithness
perhaps in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, in Orkney and Shetland between 1750
and 1800.
Greenland Scandinavian, according to medieval literary sources, was first and fore-
most an Icelandic emigrant language. That does not help us greatly in determining
what form or forms it took during the Viking Age since we do not know how uniform
or varied speech in Iceland was around ad 1000. The hundred or so runic inscriptions
that have been found in Greenland indicate, unsurprisingly, that the Scandinavian in
use there in the Middle Ages was of West Scandinavian type. Greenlandic Scandinavian
died out with the demise of the Eastern settlement c. 1500.
Faroese and Icelandic are also West Scandinavian, quintessentially so, but whether
that was the case from the beginning is unclear (Iceland has no runic inscriptions of
Viking Age date, and the few from the Faroes are no more linguistically informative
than those from Orkney and Shetland). Both countries seem to have been settled from
–– chapter 20: The Scandinavian languages in the Viking Age––