Language Contact and Development around the North Sea ed. by Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, and Inge Særheim (review)

This volume stems from a conference held at the University of Stavanger, Norway, in 2009. The eleven papers of the volume are arranged into three thematic parts, covering developments in place-names, written texts, and language in general. Nine contributions deal with English or Scots, and the other three focus on Norwegian; numerous other Germanic, Celtic, and Italic contact languages also come up for discussion.

Part I begins with a paper by Carole Hough. She investigates why there is such a dearth of Celtic place-names in Scandinavian Scotland and Anglo-Saxon England. One popular reason has been that the previous Celtic-speaking populations were destroyed, but this doesn’t sit well with archaeological, historical, or genetic research. Furthermore, as Hough notes, large-scale place-name replacement without annihilation of the native population is also seen on the Isle of Man. Hough thinks it may have more to do with the function of place-names in the past. Whereas today most English place-names are semantically impenetrable labels, at one time they more accurately described the landscape (see especially Margaret Gelling and Ann Cole’s The Landscape of Place-Names [2000]). By this interpretation, Anglo-Saxons would have been reluctant to adopt what was for them Brittonic gibberish and would instead have employed their own transparent terms of description. The situation would imply that an Anglo-Saxon minority renamed settlements and other features and that these terms were sooner or later adopted by the majority Romano-British native population, who themselves very quickly became English speakers.

Jürgen Udolph’s paper, though chronologically somewhat misplaced, connects well with Hough’s. It flatly dismisses the traditional Anglo-Saxon homeland’s hypothesis based on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, namely that the main areas of Germanic departure to Britain were in and around Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland. Udolph finds only minimal place-name correspondences with these areas. This could indicate that either there was no migration from these areas or the resident Continental populations migrated in almost their entirety (the second option is not considered by Udolph, but some archaeological evidence could point in this direction; see Stefan Burmeister’s “Archaeology and Migration: Approaches to an Archaeological Proof of Migration,” Current Anthropology 41 [2000], pp. 548–52). For his part, Udolph finds many toponomastic parallels further west—in northern France, Flanders, the Netherlands, and parts of Northern Germany—which would indicate a more leisurely crossing via the Channel. He does not mention it himself, but other published linguistic, archaeological, and genetic scholarship could strengthen his proposal (for example, recent work by John E. Pattison).

The final paper in this section, by Inge Særheim, probes the oldest and most difficult to etymologize names of the islands, settlements, and features in Rogaland in southwest Norway. Without much analysis, the author quickly dismisses Theo Vennemann’s theories about Old European toponomy and hydronomy that see connections with Vasconic and Semitic languages. Instead, he proposes his own Nordic or Proto-Indo-European etymologies. The method is usually to trawl through dictionaries for words with close sound correspondences. This opens up an enormous range of descriptive possibilities. For example, rivers could be described in terms of their speed, color, breadth, depth, or sound, or with the addition of animal names, personal names, and verbs of motion. Clearly, many of Særheim’s etymologies indicate that earlier generations had a predilection for naming watercourses in terms of the speed of their current. Unfortunately, most such etymologies are difficult to verify or support in any objective way. The value of the paper is that it provides a summary of research on earliest Norwegian place-names in English.

Part II is about literacy and code selection in written texts. Jan Ragnar Hagland’s contribution is the only one in the volume that does not discuss language contact or multilingualism. Instead, it...