Riding and Danelaw

Prompted by the occurrence of the word riding and Faldage's mention of the Danelaw, what better than to quote from David Crystal*, upcoming magus of the AWADchat session!

“The second big linguistic invasion came as the result of the Danish (Viking) raids on Britain, which began in AD 787 and continued at intervals until the beginning of the eleventh century…. The result of this prolonged period of contact was a large number of Danish settlements with Scandinavian names. There are over 1,500 place-names of Scandinavian origin in England, especially Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Over 600 places end in-by, the Danish word for town or farm – Derby, Grimsby, Rugby, etc…”

David also mentions others such as –thorp (‘village’), -thwaite (‘isolated area’), and –toft (‘piece of ground’), as well as surnames ending in –son. Over 1,800 words of Scandinavian origin entered the language and can still be found in current English – amongst which is riding which came from priding meaning ‘a third part’.

David goes on to draw attention to the fact that most of our current words using the sk sounds come from this source, such as skirt, sky, skin, whisk, etc. What is more, “some of the commonest words in English came into the language [from Danish], such as both, same, get, give, and take. Three of the Old English personal pronouns were replaced by Scandinavian forms (they, them, their. And – the most remarkable invasion of all – the invading language even took over a form of the verb to be, the most widely used English verb. Are is of Scandinavian origin.”

Don’t miss his chat session – he’s brilliant.


* CRYSTAL, D (1988) The English Language, Penguin