Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [175]
There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50-100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England.
So English supervened. It did not long have the eastern and central regions of the island to itself: in the late eighth century a new force entered the system, a new set of Germanic invaders, the Norsemen or Vikings, from Scandinavia. They progressed from coastal raids to settlement in the west of Scotland and the east of Northumbria to a partition of the island with the Saxons by treaty (c.886), and finally in 1013 to outright conquest of the whole kingdom. This was by Sveinn Forkbeard, succeeded by his son Knútr, better known as Canute.
Unlike the British-English divide, relations between Anglo-Saxon and Viking, if initially hostile, proved fairly permeable in the longer term. One way of understanding this is to see the Vikings as classic Germanic invaders, military raiders who won most of the battles but lost the peace, in that they settled down—perhaps with English wives—and largely picked up their subjects’ or victims’ language. Nevertheless, since the language into which they were settling was a close-ish relative (though with a good twenty generations of separate development behind it), there was easy scope for bilingualism and a degree of mutual understanding. The result was an abundant infusion of Norse loan words into English, and quite a lot of impact on the grammar too. In modern English, some 7 per cent of the basic vocabulary is of distinctly Norse origin (including such words as take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin and skirt);51 and it is this mix of the two languages which gave rise to the bizarrely unrelated set of third-person pronouns he, it, she and they.*
The early era of western European conquests thus closed with a kaleidoscopic shifting of Germans westward, and of Slavs southward. The Germans were able to retain their language only when they conquered territory that was largely, or totally, empty—Britain devastated by plague, and Iceland previously uninhabited. Their conquests in the western heartlands of the Roman empire had essentially no linguistic impact. Latin remained strong in the west and south of the continent; there, the linguistic effects of Roman conquest were never undone. The Slavs, perhaps because they were invading less civilised—and hence less highly populated—regions had much greater effect where they settled in the Balkans; but they too were absorbed or eliminated in the areas of ancient civilisation that they overran, parts of Greece and Anatolia.
The long-term effect was a linguistic partition of Europe that has been familiar ever since: Romance in the south and west, Germanic in the north and centre, Slavic in most of the east, and Greek in the extreme south-east. The main event in the fifth century was in fact the switch of Britain in the northwest from the Romance (or perhaps still Celtic) to the Germanic zone. There was considerably more change to come in this island: the further spread of Germanic into the last redoubts of Celtic over