[LostTribe]

Simply explain how you can be so cock sure the Norsemen totally lost their lingustic heritage IN ONLY THREE GENERATIONS or less, but everyone else you promote doesn't lose theirs in THOUSANDS OF YEARS!

It sounds like you simply don't know what you are talking about. Do you have a reasonable explanation for this astonishing disparity?

[aristeides]

Whether a conquering group loses its language depends on a number of factors, notably their relative numbers and whether or not they consider themselves culturally superior to those they conquer. Those conditions can vary.

I am just unaware of any evidence that the Normans who conquered England (and Sicily and Wales and Ireland, eventually) spoke any other language besides Norman French (and eventually the languages of the places they conquered). I am unaware of any evidence that these Normans spoke either their ancestral Scandinavian or any Celtic dialect that might have survived in Normandy (as far as I know, no such dialect survived). It may be difficult to explain why they lost their ancestral language so quickly, if they did. But unless and until I am faced with evidence that they did not lose it, I will assume that they did, in the face of all the evidence that their language was French (the language which had the most cultural prestige at the time, anyway, at least with the exception of Latin -- I will admit that I have been ignoring Latin, the language of the church and of the universities, once they got going, which was used throughout Europe).