Is English a Scandinavian language?

[Jason]

Linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language

"Have you considered how easy it is for us Norwegians to learn English?" asks Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. "Obviously there are many English words that resemble ours. But there is something more: its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to...

www.sciencedaily.com

Well, England was overrun by Vikings in the middle ages. As a result their language became dominant even so much the word order of middle and modern English resembles Norwegian, not Dutch or German.

 

[Arantor]

There's a lot more linguistic roots to Germanic in English than there are to Norwegian in practice, and I think you'd also find more French roots in there too. The claim being made that it's a Scandinavian language is, in context, a bit bold.

We were invaded by the Vikings in the Middle Ages, yes, but also the Danes (Denmark), the Jutes (Denmark/Germany), the Angles (so much so that Angle-land is the root form of England as a name, but also Denmark/Germany) and the Saxons (Germany) before the final invasion from the Normans.

Now there is an argument that the Normans were part descended from the Norwegians, but there was a lot of intermingling culturally (including linguistically) between the people from that far north with the folks in West Francia (modern western France), and the folks from the Gallo-Roman area (so, the Gauls, the Romans, basically a large chunk of modern middle Europe). And of course, the Roman influence before that would certainly have brought things from further east.

It's complicated because we're doing a lot of guessing about something that has a lot of cross-pollination in lots of directions. But I don't think it's as simple as 'it behaves a bit like Norwegian' which is the root of what the paper is claiming - there's roots of older languages still there.