What Languages Are They Really Speaking On Vikings?

As an English language production developed for an English-speaking audience, for most of their time on screen, the characters in Vikings speak English, regardless of where they are from. Occasionally, this practice can lead to confusion, as fans on Reddit note, such as when a character switches from one language to another when interacting with characters from different cultures, but generally, the show handles these transitions with grace.

The question is, what language is it that the characters on Vikings switch to when English isn't appropriate? While it would have been easy for the creators to simply sub in a modern-day Scandinavian language, which most likely would have sounded foreign enough for most English speakers, the show took a bit further than that. According to Express, when a Viking character begins using their native tongue, they speak in Old Norse. A specialist in Old Norse from the University of Iceland, Erika Sigurdson, translates portions of the show's actual script into the ancient language. From there, a dialect coach, Poll Moussoulides, works with the actors to help them pronounce sounds from the lost language correctly.

However, Old Norse is not the only language featured on Vikings. Characters from the English provinces that find themselves under attack by invading Vikings, for example, speak Old English translated by Dr. Kate Wiles from Leeds University. Likewise, during the Siege of Paris, French characters speak Old Low Franconian, which "is based on words collected from old psalms and poems," Moussoulides told TV Insider. "It's the first time the language has been heard in 1,000 years."