My favorite little cross-language coincidence is how lots of place names up north end in 'vik'.
In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik.
Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik and Akulivik. Up in the Northwest Territories there's Aklavik and Inuvik. Cross over into Alaska and you'll find Utqiagvik and Kaktovik.
To make it even more interesting, on Russia's north coast you'll find a Nordvik.
Surely there must have been a prehistoric super-culture up North that founded all of these places right? Not so - in Norse, that 'vik' meant cove, and as a seafaring culture they had a lot of settlements on coves. In Inuit and related languages 'vik' means place, so that ended up in a lot of names. Oh, and the Russian Nordvik was just given a Norwegian name.
So no, there almost certainly wasn't extensive linguistic exchange between Vikings and indigenous people of North America. Although, since L'Anse aux Meadows (the one place Norse are known to have been in North America) means Meadows Cove, I think it should be renamed Meadowvik.
Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups.
There may not have been ‘extensive linguistic exchange’ between Northern American and Northern Europeans, but there is evidence that contact had been made, and it’s not outside the realms of possibility that the vik suffix was transferred one way or the other during those encounters.
> Given that a cove is actually a place, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection between the use of this suffix as a descriptor for ‘place’ in both language groups.
I’d say it’s reasonable to say that there could be a connection but it seems like quite a leap to conclude that there is a connection based on current knowledge.
IANAL[1] but is it possible that "vik" meant "home" or something as long as 20,000 years ago, before people even populated the Americas, and that this word persisted throughout the development of American and North Germanic languages?
Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the etymology of the Norse or Icelandic suffix "-vik" in Reykjavik is known. It means "bay", originally through a sense of a twist or turn, like a turning in along the coast. It is related to English "wend", "wind (up)" or "way". ("Sideways" = "turned to the side".) The same Indo-European root, in a slightly different but related sense (think "turn over") via Latin gives "victor" and "vanquish", and also through Germanic "weaken" (to make yield).
There's essentially no chance of that—any linguistic connection would have happened in the last 2,000 years or so. Spoken language sans written record changes much too fast to preserve such semantics—and, to be clear, I don't think there's any evidence of a morphological feature being preserved that long without becoming mutually unintelligible literally anywhere. Even considering the last 2,000 years you'd have to explain how the language feature hopped over the Sámi (who speak a language much closer to Finnish than Norwegian or Greenlandic) to be established between two cultures with no archaeological or cultural evidence of contact.
Secondly, the semantics of the two suffixes appear to be different, with the Inuit term being a fairly abstract place term, and the Germanic prefix being specifically a geographic location suffix.
In the old Viking world, there's Reykjavík, Keflavík, Grindavík, etc in Iceland. Then over in Norway, you've got Larvik, Malvik, Rørvik, etc. In Sweden: Västervik, Valdemarsvik, Örnsköldsvik.
Then in the new world, Greenland has Aasivik and Arsivik. The Eastern part of the Canadian north has has Aquiatulavik and Iqiattavik and Akulivik. Up in the Northwest Territories there's Aklavik and Inuvik. Cross over into Alaska and you'll find Utqiagvik and Kaktovik.
To make it even more interesting, on Russia's north coast you'll find a Nordvik.
Surely there must have been a prehistoric super-culture up North that founded all of these places right? Not so - in Norse, that 'vik' meant cove, and as a seafaring culture they had a lot of settlements on coves. In Inuit and related languages 'vik' means place, so that ended up in a lot of names. Oh, and the Russian Nordvik was just given a Norwegian name.
So no, there almost certainly wasn't extensive linguistic exchange between Vikings and indigenous people of North America. Although, since L'Anse aux Meadows (the one place Norse are known to have been in North America) means Meadows Cove, I think it should be renamed Meadowvik.