Lexical Evidence for the Contact between Irish and Old Norse in Contemporary Uses of Modern Irish, Norwegian, and Irish English

The chapter presents a cognitive sociolinguistic, semantic, and corpus-linguistic analysis of the lexical outcomes of historical language contact between Old Norse and Old/Middle Irish in Ireland during the time of Viking settlement. Based on two accounts of Old Norse loanwords in Middle and Modern Irish (Farren 2014) and Irish loanwords in Old Norse and in its modern Scandinavian descendants (Schulze-Thulin 2001), the chapter explores loanwords and their underlying semantic domains in order to sketch a picture of sociocultural realities that facilitated lexical borrowing. The large-scale corpus-linguistic study shows that loanwords of Old Norse origin are much more salient in Modern Irish than Middle Irish loanwords are in Modern Norwegian. Finally, the chapter analyses contemporary uses of Irish English in order to demonstrate that Irish English as the language succeeding to Irish from the mid-19th century onward still carries lexical imprints of Old Norse that have entered the language via Irish and that, hence, can be regarded as the outcome of “language contact once removed.”