As England braces for Haaland, can we claim his name?
ReutersRight now, Haaland is a name that strikes fear into the heart of every England fan.
But the very Scandinavian sounding surname of Norway's formidable striker Erling may be more English than we realise.
The ancestry of the name, which means "high land" in Norwegian, is shared between Old Norse and Old English according to Prof Richard Dance at the University of Cambridge.
Speaking ahead of England's World Cup quarter-final against Norway, he said the two languages were "very similar", while much of the modern English spoken in the North owed its roots to Haaland's ancestors – the Vikings.
Dance said Haaland sounded so similar to "high land" in English because the Old Norse and Old English originated from the same ancestral language.
"They're both Germanic languages," he said.
"People speaking Old Norse and people speaking Old English could probably have talked to each other."
'Verbal melting point'
As well as the shared roots between old English and Norse, words also got a Nordic flavour from the Vikings, who infamously raided Lindisfarne off the Northumberland coast in AD793 before going on to settle large swathes of the region.
Place names featuring words such as tarn, fell and thwaite, reveal their Norse connections.
Names which end in "by", such as Thornaby in Teesside, also show Norse influence, as does the word "beck" to describe streams, such as in Old Durham Beck, Dance said.
People would also have spoken other languages, such as French after the Norman conquest in the 11th Century, he added.
"It was a real melting pot," he said.
"All of these languages kind of blended into each other," he said.
'It is proper English'
The inclusion of Nordic words did not necessarily mean the sites were named by the vikings themselves, according to Emeritus Prof Angus Winchester at Lancaster University, but rather the words had already become integrated into common use.
On the other hand, some famous place names probably were named by the Scandinavians.
For example, Windermere appears to be half old English and half old Norse, Dance said.
"The mere bit actually is probably English, it's an old English word for lake, but the 'winder' bit just seems to be someone's name, and that person was almost certainly speaking a Scandinavian language," he said.
But it's not just place names which owe their roots to Old Norse.
Dance said many "stereotypical" Northern words had Old Norse origins, such as lass, tyke, nay and lug.
"I think those of us who grew up speaking northern English sometimes get told that this isn't proper English," he said.
"But actually I would encourage people to own those words because they link us right back to this medieval tradition of people speaking languages in this melting pot in the north and they tie us back to really important cultural moments."
England play Norway in the quarter finals of the World Cup in Miami at 22:00 BST.
