Abstract
The German languages are Indo European, of course, but what is significant for us here is that there was no separation of dialects until after 500 A.D.1 The tribes spoke similar versions of the same Norse language: the Franks, Goths, Frisians, Burgundians, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Angles, Saxons and Jutes all being able to converse with each other in the early years of migration. Snorri Sturluson of Iceland tells us that the Icelanders and Norwegians could converse with the Anglo-Saxons up to the time of William the Conqueror in 1066—who Sturleson nastily calls “William the Bastard.” And then, it was only that William insisted that the courtiers speak French, the language his Norse forebears had acculturated to in Normandy.2
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Glassman, R.M. (2017). Language and Runes. In: The Origins of Democracy in Tribes, City-States and Nation-States. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51695-0_102
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51695-0_102
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