Hi
Did the Danes adopt Gaelic as their primary language after invading Ireland or did they adopt English? How did they influence English in Ireland? Did they influence Gaelic?
I look forward to your feedback.
Why would they have adopted “English” after invading Ireland in the 800s AD? I mean, to the extent that what was spoken in southern-central England could be called “English”, it certainly wasn’t being spoken in Ireland at the time!
There are some Norse words in Irish though probably not all that many. Far fewer than in English, that’s for sure. cnaipe (button) is an obvious one. bróg (shoe).
By coincidence I was thinking recently about the Irish word for a cold “slaghdán” and wondering about a possible Norse origin. Slaet (a swath) looks like it could be related to a Norse word for a track or path, in which case it would be a cousin of the English word “sleuth”.
Thanks hibernicus. Very helpful. Thank you all.
By the way, I know about Irish raids on Britain prior to the Germanic tribal settlements of the island. Did they cease after that and were these Irish pirates versed in Old English? Influence on language can go both ways.
I think you are under a severely mistaken impression about language in early Britain.
Until about 500 AD, most of the island spoke Old Welsh or languages related to it (i.e its distant cousin Pictish). Educated folks had Latin, and there is a large Latin influence on Welsh and Cornish, and some slight evidence of Old Welsh influence on British Latin. (This is mostly complicated bits about accent, or medieval words: hardly any direct evidence.) Old English came to the SE part of the island and spread along with the conquest, but it took hundreds of years.
Until about 1000 AD, there were still large chunks of Western Britain where English was not spoken: Cornwall and Wales, but also Cumbria and Strathclyde and other places near the borders, and in much of Scotland where Old Irish (Old Gaelic) or else Old Norse had replaced Pictish. English wasn’t the dominant language in all areas of England until the 11th century, by which point it was competing with Norse in the Danelaw (it won) and Norman French (again, it won, but at the cost of turning into Middle English).
The areas closest to Ireland, where Irish pirates would have been working, were not areas where Old English would have been spoken.
As for the question about the Danes in Ireland, we know that people like Awley Sandal [URL=]Amlaíb Cuarán - Wikipedia patronized poets in both Norse and Irish, and presumably understood both languages, but there’s no reason to assume widespread bilingualism in the earlier period.
Thanks Dr. Drake for straightening that out. Thank you all. Very helpful.