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The concept of a (single, identifiable) "homeland" of a given language family implies a purely genealogical view of the development of languages. This assumption is often reasonable and useful, but it is by no means a logical necessity, as languages are well known to be susceptible to areal change such as substrate or superstrate influence.
During the Viking Age, the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The Vikings spoke Old Norse and made inscriptions in runes. For most of the period, they followed the Old Norse religion, but later became Christians.
Historians of Anglo-Saxon England often use the term "Norse" in a different sense, distinguishing between Norse Vikings (Norsemen) from Norway, who mainly invaded and occupied the islands north and north-west of Britain, as well as Ireland and western Britain, and Danish Vikings, who principally invaded and occupied eastern Britain.
In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking Age. A few examples of Old Norse loanwords in modern English are (English/Viking Age Old East Norse), in some cases even displacing their Old English cognates: [citation needed]
North Germanic peoples, Nordic peoples [1] and in a medieval context Norsemen, [2] were a Germanic linguistic group originating from the Scandinavian Peninsula. [3] They are identified by their cultural similarities, common ancestry and common use of the Proto-Norse language from around 200 AD, a language that around 800 AD became the Old Norse language, which in turn later became the North ...
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
The Danes spoke Proto-Norse which gradually evolved into the Old Norse language by the beginning of the Viking Age.They spoke dǫnsk tunga (Danish tongue), which the Danes shared with the people in Norway and Sweden and later in Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language, primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw). Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg or knife. There are hundreds of such ...