Ebook: A Re-Examination of Middle Low German-Scandinavian Language Contact

From Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik,
60. Jahrg., H. 3 (1993), pp. 292-306.As a language contact situation, the late medieval contact between Middle Low German and the mainland Scandinavian languages has been the subject of scholarly pursuit for over a century. The bulk of this research focuses on language contact to account for the relative morphosyntactic simplicity of the modern mainland Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, when compared to the more conservative insular Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and, to a lesser degree, Faroese. The assumption that Middle Low German served as the catalyst for such simplification is based on parallel social and economic conditions of the late Middle Ages: the Hanseatic Leagues's presence was greatest in those areas where Scandinavian underwent the most salient change, and least in the areas where linguistic change has been less conspicuous. This paper hopes to demonstrate that this assumption has been greatly exaggerated.