Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects.

Depending on how you define "dialect" or "language", they may or may not be.

To quote the obligatory quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".

"Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects."

I recently watched the Swedish production "Blue Eyes" (with English subtitles), and was amused at the amount of speech which struck me as being 'English with an odd regional dialect'. Usually these were simple 'core language' statements and / or imperatives.

I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.

>I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.

It might be the result of common Germanic grounds, not necessarily lateral influence. I got the same when learning German - sentences like "das Haus ist rot" or "ich trinke Wein" are surprisingly easy to catch up from English. And after some time you start noticing patterns, that help you further.

Fun increasingly off topic facts: a lot of those patterns were originally noticed and compiled by the Brothers Grimm (noted assemblers of fairy tales from across Germany) as they got caught up in the pattern of differences between Low German (the language families that include Dutch and Old English) and High German (what today we think of as the German language) as they assembled all the local fairy tales they could find. High German went through a consonant shift [1] that Low German did not. A lot of the pattern you can see when learning German and knowing a lot of older words in English is applying exactly that consonant shift, plus or minus English's own interesting Great Vowel Shift [2] and large influx of latinate words from French and other languages. (The Brothers Grimm even traced some of the shifts as far back as they could to proto-Germanic, making them some of the first explorers of Proto-Indo-European [PIE] sound shifts and Grimm's Law is named after them. [3])

The evolution of languages is fascinating. Circling somewhat back to the topic above: the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a complex subject just as most "speciation" debates in other evolutionary fields have a lot of hidden complexity. "Language" versus "dialect" versus "creole" doesn't have a lot of simple answers though historically that joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" tracks more than it doesn't which is why it is a good joke.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law

Yup. And theoretically, Grimm's Law would allow you to find those patterns even between some random Germanic vs. Romance/Latin pair; like e.g. plenus/full, tres/three, head/caput. Too many changes piled up to be useful though.

(What I find really funny is that some people show some sort of intuitive awareness of those regular sound correspondences, when dealing with closely related languages. I don't recall this among EN/DE speakers, but it's all the time among PT/ES ones: either joking "swap O with UE and you get Spanish" or "drop random consonants and you get Portuguese". Cue to "quiero una cueca cuela y un sorviete" pseudo-Spanish.)

Among the three you mentioned (language, dialect, creole), at least creole is well defined - it's the resulting evolution of a pidgin becoming a full-fledged language. At least in theory, because in practice we get partial creolisation and decreolisation of varieties.

I don't think creole is that well defined either: from certain perspectives Late Middle English was a creole of Early Middle English and French, the border zone between when Late Middle English could easily be considered to have been a creole versus where Modern English is definitely not regarded as a creole is really tough to define with all sorts of weird answers (from "it was never a 'true' creole because England still had an army on paper during the Norman Conquest" to "it stops being a creole when you have an empire and colonies are building their own creoles of your language" and all sorts of other ideas).

Late Middle English was not a creole, and that is not a matter of perspective - it's just a descendant of Early Middle English. A bunch of Norman borrowings didn't change that.

A creole is by definition the descendant of a pidgin, a patchwork of words "glued" with some ad hoc grammar, that looks nothing like the grammar of the parent languages. A good example of that would be the Jamaican Patwa basilect:

* Dem a kuuk akara fi im (lit. "them are cook akara for him"; "they're cooking akara for him/her")

* Im a kuuk akara fi dem (lit. "him are cook akara for them"; "he/she's cooking akara for them")

Even if most words are clearly English (except akara - a fritter), the grammar looks nothing alike. It was rebuilt from the scratch. We can't really say the same about EME vs. LME, where there's a clear transition from one to another.

>from "it was never a 'true' creole because England still had an army on paper during the Norman Conquest" to "it stops being a creole when you have an empire and colonies are building their own creoles of your language" and all sorts of other ideas

The presence of an army or "metacreoles" is irrelevant. Kreyol for example would still be a creole, even if the Haitians built a thassalocracy.

What matters is the presence of a linguistic community, that kept speaking their language as they always did. Normans only replaced the local nobility, but the Germanic speakers were still there - speaking among themselves in their Germanic varieties, even if they had to butcher a "pig" or a "cow" because of some fancy noble wanting "porc" or "beof".

Danelaw had some _significant_ impacts on English as a language: the third person pronouns (they/them/theirs, etc.) come from Old Norse and supplanted the existing Old English pronouns. To borrow many words is one thing (including common items like "egg", cognate with Swedish ägg), but to borrow pronouns shows some pretty profound shifts in the language. Regardless, this—combined with the loss of inflection, which is typically attributed to the Norse influence—shows how extensive the influence of Old Norse was.

There's definitely some similarity between the two Germanic languages, but the North and West Germanic languages had started to diverge by the point of Danelaw, though the Battle of Maldon does record the languages as being mutually comprehensible at that point.

Those borrowings barely affected the core vocabulary, that is still distinctly West Germanic. "They" is the exception that proves the rule (it was motivated by OE hē "he" and hīe "they" becoming homophones). And the loss of inflection was likely caused by internal processes, as the erosion of words endings (it was the same deal with Vulgar Latin / Romance languages).

And more importantly: I don't think there were a lot of sound changes triggered by Norse influence, and those are the most relevant factor behind mutual intelligibility. Some odd non-core vocab here and there is easy to skip, and still get the "rough" meaning of a sentence, and speakerers cannen sentencen still understanden, eben mit somes oddes endinges.