Alright, welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie and this is episode 196, Vikings and Merks and Franks online.

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We've been talking for months about Scandinavia and one of the recurring themes is how there's

nothing uniform about it. How even their gods will change from village to village.

We can draw rough outlines and make inferences, but if you look closely at any particular community,

you might find a huge amount of disparity. And that might leave you wondering whether that was

true for languages as well. After all, you're dealing with a massive swath of territory that

encompasses Denmark, Gotland and most of Norway and Sweden. Further, the Scandinavians spread

into other regions such as Orkney and the Shetlands. So what happened with their languages there?

Well, many scholars suspect that unlike with many other cultural matters, much of Scandinavia

shared a common language from the 8th to 11th century. And many times, they just call this language

common Scandinavian, which feels a bit like D&D to me where you're speaking the common tongue,

but whatever. Now, there are some problems with this. And one big one is that this was a period of

immense change for the West and also for the North. Languages were changing rapidly all over the place.

And as we talked about in earlier episodes, the North dealt with larger degrees of isolation than

much of the rest of Europe. And as a consequence, the idea of linguistic drift within these little

pockets of civilization isn't exactly out of the question. All it takes really is a couple families

to start speaking in a different manner and provide your isolated enough, all of a sudden,

things start shifting. And yet, you have some scholars who think that the language was uniform.

...