Abstract
With this paper I wish to investigate the nature of code-mixing found in English place names chiefly, though not exclusively, from the Danelaw area. The paper analyses this code-mixing in the frame-work of contact linguistics in the light of the contact situation between Old English and Old Norse, as described by Townend (2002) and Lutz (2013), that existed from the 8th century onwards, bearing in mind, however, that the Scandinavian place names may not necessarily be direct indicators of the nature and extent of the Scandinavian settlement itself. Historical code-switching usually and generally focuses on describing intersentential and intrasentential code-switching, and this paper aims at broadening the overall scope of the investigation through the inclusion of onomastics.
The analysis will be chiefly based on a corpus of 1,915 relevant place-names, with the data drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (Mills 1998), and Fellows-Jensen’s regional studies on Scandinavian place-names in England (Fellows-Jensen 1972, 1978, 1985). The primary focus of the investigation will be those place names which
(I) contain both Scandinavian and English elements,
(II) used to contain at least one Scandinavian or English element which was replaced by an element from the other language,
(III) contain at least one element which underwent a transformation to accommodate to the phonological system of the other language and
(IV) contain elements which could belong to either of the languages but cannot be decided with absolute certainty.
In this paper I also argue that names (specifically the above mentioned place-names) can conform to Muysken’s (2000) category of congruent lexicalization and that word-internal code-switching, and CS in general, is in fact a phenomenon that can occur in the case of hybrid place-names.
References
Appel, René & Pieter Muysken. 2005 (1987). Language contact and bilingualism (Amsterdam Academic Archive). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Bullock, Barbara E. & Almeida J. Toribio. 2009. Themes in the study of code-switching. In Barbara E. Bullock &Almeida J. Toribio (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching (Cambridge Handbooks in Linguistics), 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511576331.002
Blanár, Vincent. 2009. Proper names in the light of theoretical onomastics. Namenkundliche Informationen 95/96. 89–157.
Cameron, Kenneth. 1996. English place-names (new edn.). London: Batsford.
Dalberg, Vibeke. 2008 [1977]. The psychology of place-name changes. In Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Peder Gammeltoft, Bent Jørgensen & Berit Sandnes (eds.), Name and place: Ten essays on the dynamics of place-names (Navnestudier 40), 51–60. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.
Ekwall, Eilert. 1980. The concise Oxford dictionary of English place-names (4th edn.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1968. Scandinavian personal names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (Navnestudier 7). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1972. Scandinavian settlement names in Yorkshire (Navnestudier 11). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1978. Scandinavian settlement names in the East Midlands (Navnestudier 16). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1985. Scandinavian settlement names in the North West (Navnestudier 25). Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1987. York. Leeds Studies in English 18. 141–155.
Fellows-Jensen, Gillian. 1995. The light thrown by the early place-names of Southern Scandinavia and England on population movement in the Migration Period. In Edith Marold & Christiane Zimmermann (eds.), Nordwestgermanisch (Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 13), 57–77. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gammeltoft, Peder. 2007. “Scandinavian naming-system in the Hebrides: A way of understanding how the Scandinavians were in contact with Gaels and Picts? In Beverley B. Smith, Simon Taylor & Gareth Williams (eds.), West over sea: Studies in Scandinavian sea-borne expansion and settlement before 1300 (Northern World 31), 479–495. Leiden: Brill.
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope & Malcolm Edwards. 2004. Assumptions behind grammatical approaches to code-switching: When the blueprint is a red herring. Transactions of the Philological Society 102(1): 103–129. doi: j.0079-1636.2004.00131.x
Hadley, Dawn M. 2000. The northern Danelaw: Its social structure c.800–1100 (Studies in the early history of Britain). London: Leicester University Press.
Hadley, Dawn M. 2002. Viking and native: Re-thinking identity in the Danelaw. Early Medieval Europe 11(1). 45–70. doi: 10.1111/1468-0254.00100
Haugen, Einar. 1950. The analysis of linguistic borrowing. Language 26(2): 210–231. doi: 10.2307/410058
Hickey, Raymond. 2010. Language contact: Reconsideration and reassessment. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), The handbook of language contact (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics), 1–29. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781444318159.ch
Janzén, Assar. 1972. The Viking colonization of England in the light of place-names. Names 20(1): 1–25.
Lipski, John M. 2009. “Fluent dysfluency” as congruent lexicalization: A special case of radical code-mixing. Journal of Language Contact 2(2): 1–39. doi: 10.1163/000000009792497742
Loyn, Henry. 1994. The Vikings in Britain (rev. edn.) (Historical Association Studies). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Lutz, Angelika. 2013. Language contact and prestige. Anglia 131(4): 94–122. doi: 10.1515/anglia-2013-0065
Mills, Anthony D. 1998. A dictionary of English place-names (new edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Anthony D. 2011. A dictionary of British place-names (rev. edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moskowich, Isabel. 2012. Language contact and vocabulary enrichment: Scandinavian elements in Middle English (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 34). Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Muysken, Pieter. 2011. Code-switching. In Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of sociolinguistics, 301–314. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reaney, Percy H. 1987. The origin of English place-names (9th impr.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sawyer, Peter H. 1962. The age of the Vikings. London: Arnold.
Schendl, Herbert & Laura Wright. 2011. Code-switching in early English: Historical background and methodological and theoretical issues. In Herbert Schendl & Laura Wright (eds.), Code-switching in early English (Topics in English Linguistics 76), 15–46. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110253368.15
SPNLY = Fellows-Jensen, Gillian (1968).
SSNEM = Fellows-Jensen, Gillian (1978).
SSNNW = Fellows-Jensen, Gillian (1985)
SSNY = Fellows-Jensen, Gillian (1972).
Thomason, Sarah G. & Terence Kaufman. 1991. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thomason, Sarah G. 2000. On the unpredictability of contact effects. Estudios de Sociolingüística 1(1): 173-182. doi: 10.1558/sols.v1i1.173
Townend, Matthew. 2002. Language and history in Viking Age England: Linguistic relations between speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 6). Turnhout: Brepols.
Vennemann, Theo. 2011. English as a contact language: Typology and comparison. Anglia 129(3/4): 217–257. doi: 10.1515/angl.2011.084