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Lübeck's Influence On American Culture

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In the early and mid 1100s the Hansa trade town of Lübeck was rising to prominence on the Baltic coast. Along with other Hansa towns, Lübeck allowed the Hanseatic League to dominate trade across Scandinavia and the Baltic for the next three centuries. Colonies of Low German speaking merchants, craftsmen and officials settled in many major Nordic towns, such as Visby and Copenhagen. In addition, many aristocratic families from what is now Northern Germany settled in Denmark and elsewhere in Scandinavia, and these often held prominent positions and hence had the chance to influence the literary language of all three nations to quite a degree. The polite and courtly speech of the Scandinavian courts, as well as the terminology of merchants, craftsmen and officials was for several centuries mainly Middle Low German, and this language left a considerable and lasting lexical legacy in the native languages before it expired as a spoken language in Scandinavia. Legal and official documents from the Nordic trade centres of the time are loaded with Middle Low German loans and expressions, that is, when they are not written in Low German itself. Germans in Scandinavian towns dominated on account of special rights granted them and influenced political life to such an extent that their presence was eventually decisive in bringing about the pan-Nordic Union of Kalmar in 1397. Albrekt of Mecklenburg, a German-born king, ascended to the Swedish throne in 1364.
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