Languages evolve and change drastically over time. If you were to say street corn, nepo baby, or beach read — three terms recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary — to early English speakers, they’d likely think you were speaking a different language.
English borrows a lot of words from different languages. Words include rendezvous, genre, and even lemon. English is more of a fluid language, picking up new words as it grows. However, this wasn’t always the case, especially when the Vikings raided the British Isles. Though the Vikings established a strong foothold in the British Isles, the Norse languages didn’t come to dominate.
Though few words were adopted into standard English, there are still words used today that the Vikings left behind.
Humans have lived in the British Isles for thousands of years, but scholars are unsure which language people spoke 10,000 years or 5,000 years ago.
When the ...
