North/West Germanic - The classification of English

Abstract

The origins of Middle English has been highly debated, and after Emonds and Faarlund pub-lished their 2014 book English: The language of the Vikings? the debate has been restarted. Emonds and Faarlund claim that the West Germanic Old English died out and was replaced by the North Germanic language Anglicized Norse, Old Norse syntax with Old English vocabulary. This thesis will examine the work done by Emonds and Faarlund, and argue that Old English simply developed into Middle English, and that there is not sufficient evidence to backup the claim of English being a North Germanic language