Effects of a Continental "English" language?

As many of you probably know already, the West Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three major divisions: the Irmionic (whose most noteworthy representative is Standard/High German), Istvaeonic (Dutch and Flemish), and Ingvaeonic, which itself has three major subdivisions considering of English (descended, of course, from Anglo-Saxon), Low German (descended from Old Saxon), and Frisian.

However, Low German has had significant Dutch and High German influence exerted on it over the years, and its counterpart English famously has a lot of Latinate influence put into it starting with the Norman invasion. What I was wondering what could happen, however, if enough "Anglo-Saxons" got left behind on the other side of the North Sea: how could or would the resulting continental English look? Something like the "Anglish" variants strike me as unlikely (given Latinate influence in a few others areas than merely vocabulary), but considering how much Old English influence made it through anyway I was wondering if we could still get a recognizably Anglic language developing on the continent. Alternatively, I wonder if we simply would get a variant of the aforementioned Frisian and/or Low Saxon, or perhaps still a totally different Ingvaeonic language.

Is this scenario I'm thinking of even possible in a sense? It obviously helps that no matter what, English in OTL had an island to incubate it no matter what the case.
 

Raymann

Banned
I don't think it's possible.

English in pretty much all of its forms was developed soley in Britian. There were Angles and Saxons left behind in Germany but the 'Anglo-Saxon' was created in England. The language of those left behind turned into Modern German/Dutch.

Even if you can get the various groups in England and Germany speaking the same language in the 6th/7th centuries...have you tried to read Old English? I've read that it was mutually intelligible with Old Low German until the 12th century or so but by then Middle English was coming in and that was it.

Yeah so I don't see how you can have english being spoken on the continent other then having England win the Hundred Years War...works every time ;)
 
I think you need to slow down the Old Danish "invasion" of Jutland. This was the main reason the Angles and Jutes left. Notice how Frisian held out in the marshlands of the northern coast despite being more widely spread.
So restrict the Danes to Northern Jutland and you get a stronger Low German continuum.

Another alternative is to let the Frisian-Saxon alliance defeat or stalemate the Franks and have the Saxon Kingdom live on. While it'll probably be drawn into the Empire sooner or later more of it's culture and language would survive and it could have a similar status to Burgundy within a HRE analogue (assuming a HRE is still possible).
 
I've read* that the Frisian Islanders were able to converse with fishermen from the Northumberland coast up to the early 20th century.

Could this level of mutual intelligibilty be expanded onto the continent, or was the nature of the islands the reason for the dialect surviving?

*Sorry, I can't give sources, it was some years back.
 
Saxons conquer Angles and Jutes, Franks conquer Anglo-Saxons. Frankish Anglo-Saxon becomes similar to English. Franks fall apart. England becomes a sovereign nation.
 
I've read* that the Frisian Islanders were able to converse with fishermen from the Northumberland coast up to the early 20th century.

Could this level of mutual intelligibilty be expanded onto the continent, or was the nature of the islands the reason for the dialect surviving?

*Sorry, I can't give sources, it was some years back.
'Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fries.'

Ja, butterflies would surely prevent any such alt-English, but if it did exist, everyone says that it would look very like OTL's Frisian.
 
Well, I highly doubt it would be like English at all. The suggestions that it would sound like Frisian are quite probable, although any alt-language is likely to be highly divergent from our TL, due to language change.
 
According to Wikipedia, there were the "Anglic" languages, two dialects spoken in Ireland, Yola and Fingalen. Apparently they had evolved from Old English and taken sort of a parallel evolution. They existed until the late 19th century.A coastal dialect in Northumbria might have been similiar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yola_language

This is more controversial. There is the "Doggerland hypothesis", the idea that Germanic speaking peoples, maybe ancestral Frisians, lived in Britain before the Celts.
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/wonder/indoeuropean/doggerland.html

This may be a crackpot idea. I don't have a background in comparative linguistics. It might also be connected to a political agenda, I don't know.
 
I don't think it's possible.

English in pretty much all of its forms was developed soley in Britian. There were Angles and Saxons left behind in Germany but the 'Anglo-Saxon' was created in England. The language of those left behind turned into Modern German/Dutch.

Even if you can get the various groups in England and Germany speaking the same language in the 6th/7th centuries...have you tried to read Old English? I've read that it was mutually intelligible with Old Low German until the 12th century or so but by then Middle English was coming in and that was it.

Yeah so I don't see how you can have english being spoken on the continent other then having England win the Hundred Years War...works every time ;)
If the english won the hundred years war it will result in a french england.
 
This is more controversial. There is the "Doggerland hypothesis", the idea that Germanic speaking peoples, maybe ancestral Frisians, lived in Britain before the Celts.
http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/wonder/indoeuropean/doggerland.html

This may be a crackpot idea. I don't have a background in comparative linguistics. It might also be connected to a political agenda, I don't know.

Yep, this is a crackpot theory designed to support an "English" Supremacist agenda!
 
It greatly depends on what happens after that. The way the western germanic language continuum works, the power (and the influence that brings) of its speakers is the only thing that makes a language different from a regional language or a dialect, and I don't see those few Angels having a lot of power or indeed sovereignty.
 
There will indeed still be latin influences. Not to mention Greek. Just look to Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, lots of French in there; lots of contact in the former case but in the latter it was just high society really.
I'd guess about 1/4 of words still come from latin/French.

Anyway. See the English spoken in Northern Britain for a vague idea. Though there is a lot of Danish thrown in there too
 
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