Clay County Histories 

I am fascinated by languages but I was never good at them. I took classes in German, Latin, French and Norwegian, but I was a poor student in each.
They all have rules that make them unnecessarily complex. “If the noun is the Direct Object of a sentence, add an M to the end, unless it is a feminine noun, in which case you add an A.” What? As an English speaker, I don’t have to deal with any of that nonsense because a thousand years ago, my language was pulverized by Vikings.
Here’s the story. In the year 800, most inhabitants of what we now call England spoke Old English. By 1000, these guys got about 250,000 new neighbors from Denmark and Norway who spoke a very similar language called Old Norse. Vikings moving in was initially bad for the neighborhood, as we can see from words our language gets from Old Norse: anger, axe, hit, club, knife, scare, take, run, slaughter, skull, die. But once they settled down, the Scandinavians weren’t so bad. They were farmers (hence Norse words like acre, dirt,plow, egg, bull) and merchants (sale, want, give, haggle) and neighbors (gift, guest, trust,fellow) and they married local girls and became family (husband, birth, kid, happy).
While toddlers can pick up any language with ease, it is extremely difficult for adults over 30 to master a new language,which is exactly what the Viking invaders had to do in England. Luckily, Old
English and Old Norse were closely related languages. The Vikings and their English friends and family could ALMOST understand each other, if they could just streamline some grammar that was tripping them up.
The best thing they did was ditch nonsensical gender. Anyone who has taken another language has to remember that, for some dumb reason, everything has a gender even if it actually doesn’t. In German, rivers, soccer balls, and pencils are considered male; cameras and clocks are female; books and cars are neither, and you have to memorize this for every single thing or people will laugh at you. Old English and Old Norse had these genders, too, but the Vikings and their English neighbors dropped it because all it does is confuse people. Out of about 445 members of the Indo-European language family, English is one of the very few where everything is “the” and “it” unless it is physically a boy or a girl. We also have among the simplest ways to conjugate verbs. Thanks, Vikings!
The Vikings and the English also arranged sentences so they didn’t have to think about case endings anymore. Indo- European languages, including Old English and Old Norse, add letters to words depending on whether nouns are in the Dative Case, Nominative Case, Genitive, Ablative, etc. If you don’t know what this means, thank a Viking. We still add an ‘s to show somebody owns something (like “Susan’s cat”), but the rest we just figure out by the order of words in a sentence – subject, verb, object.
Learning a language is hard, especially as an adult. Over a billion people speak English as a second language. It’s the language of world commerce, diplomacy, and scholarship. Every Englis language learner and every native speaker can thank the Vikings for smacking some sense into English.