AH Challenge: English mother-tongue of continental European population.

I agree that in order for a an area of continental Europe to give up its language, it would need to be fairly isolated and have a fairly weak identity. Additionally, it would need proximity to England.

I would argue that the most isolated part of continental Europe is Norway. For all intensive purposes, it could be an island as the only country with appropriate land routes there is Sweden.

Norway is at its weakest in all ways after it got DESTROYED by the plague in the mid-1300s. Its population was depleted by over 1/3 (to less than 350,000 people!), agricultural yields were worse every year, and it had lost a lot of its identity by being dominated by Sweden and Denmark over the past centuries. The population of Norway was scattered and non-urban.

At this point the Norwegian royalty opted to form the Danish-dominated Kalmar Union with the Danes and the Swedes. If this didn't work (say, Sweden never joins, Denmark suffers badly from the Plague and a war w/ some German state, and kill off the correct Norwegian nobility [if not ALL of them]), maybe England could come into to fill the power vacuum, incorporating Norway (and later Iceland) into a North Sea kingdom. British merchants could set up Hanseatic-esque trading posts in Norwegian and Icelandic fjords and literally colonize these lands which were almost as sparsely populated as coastal New England in the 1600s.

Eventually Norwegian would die out or be considered a dying dialect of Swedish or Danish spoken by agrarian communities. Norway (possibly "Northway" would be a full-fledged member of a United Kingdom analog in modern times where in the population would be overwhelmingly of British Isles ancestry.

What do you think?
 
British merchants could set up Hanseatic-esque trading posts in Norwegian and Icelandic fjords and literally colonize these lands which were almost as sparsely populated as coastal New England in the 1600s.

What do you think?

The main problem with this concept is that there simply isn't enough trade in Norway to provide an incentive for that level of migration. Additionally, trading posts were set up by merchants - they weren't a spontaneous migration of thousands of people. If anything, the Englishmen in the trading posts would be so few in number that they would have to integrate with the local population and would become culturally Norwegian instead. Europe isn't America, so the desire nor the reason to emigrate and become a colonist wasn't there.

Also, there's the problem that the Parliament in London didn't like having continental land to protect - it wanted to sit back, protected from all attackers by the world's largest moat - i.e. the North Sea/Channel - and conduct trade without fear of expensive military campaigns to defend its land. Thing is, here, that Sweden has been eyeing Norway for a long time and it is not a question of if but when and how often Sweden would invade Norway to try to annex it. Under the circumstances, Parliament would be loathe to defend it, simply because Norway does not offer the profit margins to recover the expense of the campaign to defend it - and at the end of the day, hey! the English merchants can make just as much money trading with Swedish governors in Norwegian ports than controlling those ports themselves. There was a reason that, after losing Calais, England only ever made half-hearted attempts at holding individual cities (entirely for the reason of the value in controlling trade) on the continent, and after about 1660 the English never again accepted any land on the continent at all (Hanover and the Netherlands don't count - they were personal unions). That reason is that you can make a killing out of trade with other nations just as much as trading with your own lands - and indeed it is often possible to make a roaring profit in trading with countries which are supposed to be your enemies, and even are at war with you.

Really for this idea to be practical, you need for the continental land to be strong enough to defend itself, and preferably of some serious financial and diplomatic value so that it is worth England defending too. But even then I am seriously skeptical, to the point of saying I think it might be impossible.
 
Really for this idea to be practical, you need for the continental land to be strong enough to defend itself, and preferably of some serious financial and diplomatic value so that it is worth England defending too. But even then I am seriously skeptical, to the point of saying I think it might be impossible.

I agree. The Swedes and Danes could be kept busy in Germany and the Baltic, but it would most likely be way more costly than beneficial for England to hold on to Norway. I guess there are gems and gold in Norway, but still. It's a stretch, but I really think it's the least ABS option.
 
Sounds ASB but POD 400 AD is a possibility. Let say the Angles and the Saxons went to Spain in large numbers in different migrations during the late Roman era instead of crossing the North Sea to reach England.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Sounds ASB but POD 400 AD is a possibility. Let say the Angles and the Saxons went to Spain in large numbers in different migrations during the late Roman era instead of crossing the North Sea to reach England.

Britain was largely depopulated by plagues and emigration to the continent (at some point there were probably more britons out of than in the isles). Spain, while hit by the plagues, would have had a population too large to significantly assimilate. It didn't IOTL after all.
 
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