This article undertakes the first systematic examination of Frank’s (1979, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2007b, 2008) claim that Old Norse influence is discernible in the language of Beowulf. It tests this hypothesis first by scrutinizing each of the alleged Nordicisms in Beowulf, then by discussing various theoretical considerations bearing on its plausibility. We demonstrate that the syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic peculiarities that Frank would explain as manifestations of Old Norse influence are more economically and holistically explained as consequences of archaic composition. We then demonstrate that advances in the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact provide strong reasons to doubt that Old Norse could have influenced Beowulf in the manner that Frank has proposed. We conclude that Beowulf is entirely devoid of Old Norse influence and that it was probably composed ca. 700, long before the onset of the Viking Age.

We report on a large-scale investigation of the mutual intelligibility between five Germanic languages: Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. We tested twenty language combinations using the same uniform methodology, making the results commensurable for the first time. We first tested both written and spoken language by means of cloze tests. Next we calculated linguistic distance at the levels of lexicon, orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax. We also quantified exposure and attitudes towards the test languages. Finally, we carried out a regression analysis to determine the relative importance of these linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors for the mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages. The extra-linguistic predictor exposure was the most significant factor in predicting intelligibility in the Germanic language area. The effect of attitude was very small. Lexical distance, orthographic and phonetic distances were the most important linguistic predictors of intelligibility.

Focusing on orthography as a primary linguistic interface in every reading activity, the central research question we address here is how orthographic intelligibility can be measured and predicted between closely related languages. This paper presents methods and findings of modeling orthographic intelligibility in a reading intercomprehension scenario from the information-theoretic perspective. The focus of the study is on two Slavic language pairs: Czech–Polish (West Slavic, using the Latin script) and Bulgarian–Russian (South Slavic and East Slavic, respectively, using the Cyrillic script). In this article, we present computational methods for measuring orthographic distance and orthographic asymmetry by means of the Levenshtein algorithm, conditional entropy and adaptation surprisal method that are expected to predict the influence of orthography on mutual intelligibility in reading.