Old Norse-derived lexis in multilingual accounts: a case study

Abstract

This article on Old Norse represents a fundamental departure from the previous literature on loaned material by examining multilingual documents written in Medieval Latin rather than in monolingual English, namely the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). The potential of this richer and more complex interplay between languages will be further addressed throughout the article, which assesses the different kinds of evidence available for establishing the relative plausibility for a word being derived from ON. Dance's (2013, 2018, 2019) taxonomy will be discussed and applied to multilingual material for the first time. The article concludes with some notes on the main semantic fields to which ON-derived lexis contributed within the multilingual lexical networks of the DAR.