“Skriking” is a dialectical word for crying that’s used a lot in the north of England. My mum used to say it all the time. I’ve tried searching for the etymology of this word, but cannot find it (Google keeps assuming I’m searching for “strike”). Where does it come from? It sounds incredibly harsh on the ears.
It’s scrike, and according to the Urban Dictionary, it’s the most random word ever invented in the north west of England. That’s the best I can do, CRSP! 
Perhaps you should look to skreak, screak, or skreigh in your search. They’re all words that imitate a sound they are used to describe.
Aha, spelling it “scrike”, Google found me this. It’s from Old Norse “skrika”.
It’s still skrike/skriking in Norwegian, but it means screaming rather than crying (in most dialects and usages, anyway). Hence the painting.
Yeah, scrike means something slightly more than crying in northern English dialects. It generally means hysterical crying.
And the same for Swedish.
A more widely-known variant of the same ancestral word is of course shriek.
It looks to me like it’s related to the words “shriek” and “screech”:
The Middle English “scrycke” would have been pronounced something like “skree-kuh.” “Ee” -> long-i diphthong was one aspect of the Great Vowel Shift. (I assume “skrike” rhymes with “strike”). Dropping the schwa “e” at the end is standard these days. With those two changes, you’ve got your word “scrike.”
There certainly was a lot of Scandinavian influence on the English language, beginning around 850. That’s also where we got the word “egg” (the food).
OED: Richard the Lionheared., 13th c.: The Crysten men gunne make a great skryke; see English Dialect Dictionary (also a separate entry for the verb form.) Last entry in OED is from 1959, says the verb is “common in the area of Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester, Stockport, and Halifax.”
The Dialect dictionary gives three post-1900 usages, all in the sense of shrieking, great cry, whining, etc. BTW OE has nice cite from The Hobbit.
Ain’t the OED great?
So, would it be accurate to say English evolved under the influence of other languages, or would “developed” be a much better word?