733: English as a North Germanic Language Dec 10, 2016

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It is usually taken as fact that English is not just a Germanic language, but a West Germanic language in the same class as Afrikaans, Dutch, and German. While sometimes people, though not many, argue that due to the over 50% romantic vocabulary English should be considered a creole, this would still not change its language family because families are based on grammar and structure. A paper published from the University of Oslo, however, argues that English should be considered a North Germanic language, along with Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and others, citing certain structural similarities including objects being placed after second verbs, split infinitives, prepositions after the adjunct, and group-genitives, all of which are not possible in German or Dutch.

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