english as a viking language

It's bad luck that the world has to learn such a complicated language as English:

"English has horrendous orthography, an extremely complicated inventory of vowels, a few hundred irregular verbs, a huge vocabulary, and other features that make it ill-equipped to be a global language used by millions of people who must learn it in adulthood (Pullum 2015)."

English: The language of the Vikings | linguisticsociety.org

But why is it so complicated?

A reason lies in its complex history:

Jay Doubleyou: identity in the uk

Jay Doubleyou: why is english so different from other languages? part two: grammar

There's a new theory out:

Joseph Emonds, a distinguished theoretical syntactician, and Jan Terje Faarlund, a leading Scandinavianist, now offer a radical challenge to the philologists’ conception of English as progressing gradually and often imperceptibly from one stage to another. E&F postulate that socalled early Middle English, spoken and written in the East Midlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represents a new language, which they call Anglicized Norse, having a Scandinavian syntax alongside words descended from Old English antecedents. 

English: The language of the Vikings | linguisticsociety.org

Peter Trudgill writes in the New European:

the linguistics professors Joe Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund who, in a book entitled English: the Language of the Vikings, have made the attractive suggestion that modern English is not so much a descendant of Old English heavily influenced by Old Norse, as a descendant of Old Norse which has been heavily influenced by Old English.

There are certainly many respects in which what they say is clearly true. One of the most obvious is that the modern English pronouns they, them, their and theirs are all of Old Norse origin.

How Old Norse invaded the English language | The New European

The book has certainly caught a lot of attention:

English as North Germanic in: Language Dynamics and Change Volume 6 Issue 1 (2016)

Linguist List - Reviews Available for the Book

The noun phrase and the ‘Viking Hypothesis’ | Language Variation and Change | Cambridge Core

Language history - Do you make Scandinavian mistakes? | Johnson | The Economist

Language families - Do you speak a Scandinavian language? | Johnson | The Economist

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