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Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of
Scandinavia Scandinavia; Sámi languages: /. ( ) is a subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. In English usage, ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Swe ...
and their overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the
Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germ ...
, the
Christianization of Scandinavia The Christianization of Scandinavia, as well as other Nordic countries and the Baltic countries, took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The realms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden established their own Archdioceses, responsible direc ...
and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 7th to the 15th centuries. The
Proto-Norse language Proto-Norse (also called Ancient Nordic, Ancient Scandinavian, Ancient Norse, Primitive Norse, Proto-Nordic, Proto-Scandinavian and Proto-North Germanic) was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a ...
developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern
North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also ...
in the mid-to-late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century. Old Norse was divided into three
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
s: ''Old West Norse'' or ''Old West Nordic'' (often referred to as ''Old Norse''), ''Old East Norse'' or ''Old East Nordic'', and ''
Old Gutnish Old Gutnish or Old Gotlandic was a North Germanic language spoken on the Baltic Sea, Baltic island of Gotland. It shows sufficient differences from the Old West Norse and Old East Norse dialects that it is considered to be a separate branch. ...
''. Old West Norse and Old East Norse formed a
dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...
, with no clear geographical boundary between them. For example, Old East Norse traits were found in eastern
Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...
, although
Old Norwegian nn, gamalnorsk , region = Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) , era = 11th–14th century , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = North Germanic , fam4 = West Scandinavian , fam5 ...
is classified as Old West Norse, and Old West Norse traits were found in western Sweden. Most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what is present-day
Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...
and Sweden.
Old Gutnish Old Gutnish or Old Gotlandic was a North Germanic language spoken on the Baltic Sea, Baltic island of Gotland. It shows sufficient differences from the Old West Norse and Old East Norse dialects that it is considered to be a separate branch. ...
is sometimes included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It developed its own unique features and shared in changes to both other branches. The 12th-century
Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...
ic ''
Gray Goose Laws The Gray (Grey) Goose Laws ( is, Grágás {{IPA-is, ˈkrauːˌkauːs}) are a collection of laws from the Icelandic Commonwealth period. The term ''Grágás'' was originally used in a medieval source to refer to a collection of Norwegian laws an ...
'' state that Swedes,
Norwegians Norwegians ( no, nordmenn) are a North Germanic ethnic group and nation native to Norway, where they form the vast majority of the population. They share a common culture and speak the Norwegian language. Norwegians are descended from the N ...
, Icelanders, and Danes spoke the same language, ("Danish tongue"; speakers of Old East Norse would have said '). Another term was ("northern speech"). Today Old Norse has developed into the modern
North Germanic languages The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also ...
Icelandic, Faroese,
Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...
,
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
,
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
, and other North Germanic varieties of which Norwegian, Danish and Swedish retain considerable mutual intelligibility while Icelandic remains the closest to Old Norse.


Geographical distribution

Old Icelandic was very close to
Old Norwegian nn, gamalnorsk , region = Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) , era = 11th–14th century , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = North Germanic , fam4 = West Scandinavian , fam5 ...
, and together they formed Old West Norse, which was also spoken in Norse settlements in
Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland i ...
, the
Faroes The Faroe Islands ( ), or simply the Faroes ( fo, Føroyar ; da, Færøerne ), are a North Atlantic island group and an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. They are located north-northwest of Scotland, and about halfway betw ...
,
Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...
,
Scotland Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
, the
Isle of Man ) , anthem = "O Land of Our Birth" , image = Isle of Man by Sentinel-2.jpg , image_map = Europe-Isle_of_Man.svg , mapsize = , map_alt = Location of the Isle of Man in Europe , map_caption = Location of the Isle of Man (green) in Europe ...
, northwest England, and in
Normandy Normandy (; french: link=no, Normandie ; nrf, Normaundie, Nouormandie ; from Old French , plural of ''Normant'', originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages) is a geographical and cultural region in Northwestern ...
.
Old East Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...
was spoken in Denmark, Sweden,
Kievan Rus' Kievan Rusʹ, also known as Kyivan Rusʹ ( orv, , Rusĭ, or , , ; Old Norse: ''Garðaríki''), was a state in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical Atlas of ...
, eastern England, and
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in various settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, ranging from
Vinland Vinland, Vineland, or Winland ( non, Vínland ᚠᛁᚾᛚᛅᚾᛏ) was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Erikson landed there around 1000 AD, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John ...
in the West to the
Volga River The Volga (; russian: Во́лга, a=Ru-Волга.ogg, p=ˈvoɫɡə) is the longest river in Europe. Situated in Russia, it flows through Central Russia to Southern Russia and into the Caspian Sea. The Volga has a length of , and a catchme ...
in the East. In
Kievan Rus' Kievan Rusʹ, also known as Kyivan Rusʹ ( orv, , Rusĭ, or , , ; Old Norse: ''Garðaríki''), was a state in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical Atlas of ...
, it survived the longest in
Veliky Novgorod Veliky Novgorod ( rus, links=no, Великий Новгород, t=Great Newtown, p=vʲɪˈlʲikʲɪj ˈnovɡərət), also known as just Novgorod (), is the largest city and administrative centre of Novgorod Oblast, Russia. It is one of the ...
, probably lasting into the 13th century there. The age of the
Swedish-speaking population of Finland The Swedish-speaking population of Finland (whose members are called by many names; fi, suomenruotsalainen) can be used as an attribute., group=Note—see below; sv, finlandssvenskar; fi, suomenruotsalaiset) is a linguistic minority in Finl ...
is strongly contested, but
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
settlement had spread the
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
into the region by the time of the
Second Swedish Crusade The Second Swedish Crusade was a possible 13th-century Swedish military expedition against the Tavastians, in present-day Finland, led by Birger Jarl. Many details of the Crusade are debated. After the crusade, Tavastia gradually started to fal ...
in the 13th century at the latest.


Modern descendants

The modern descendants of the Old West Norse dialect are the West Scandinavian languages of Icelandic, Faroese,
Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...
, and the extinct
Norn language Norn is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken in the Northern Isles ( Orkney and Shetland) off the north coast of mainland Scotland and in Caithness in the far north of the Scottish mainland. After Orkney and Shetland were pledged ...
of Orkney and Shetland; the descendants of the Old East Norse dialect are the East Scandinavian languages of
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
and
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
. Norwegian is descended from Old West Norse, but over the centuries it has been heavily influenced by East Norse, particularly during the Denmark–Norway union. Among these, the grammar of Icelandic and Faroese have changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years. In contrast, the pronunciations of both Icelandic and Faroese have changed considerably from Old Norse. With Danish rule of the Faroe Islands, Faroese has also been influenced by Danish. Both
Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...
and Early Scots were strongly influenced by Norse – especially dialects from northern England, within the area of the
Danelaw The Danelaw (, also known as the Danelagh; ang, Dena lagu; da, Danelagen) was the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danelaw contrasts with the West Saxon law and the Mercian ...
, and Lowland Scots, both of which contained many Old Norse
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s. Consequently, Modern English (including
Scottish English Scottish English ( gd, Beurla Albannach) is the set of varieties of the English language spoken in Scotland. The transregional, standardised variety is called Scottish Standard English or Standard Scottish English (SSE). Scottish Standard ...
), inherited a significant proportion of its vocabulary directly from Norse. The development of Norman French was also influenced by Norse. Through Norman, to a smaller extent, so was modern French. Written modern Icelandic derives from the Old Norse
phonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
writing system. Contemporary Icelandic-speakers can read Old Norse, which varies slightly in spelling as well as semantics and word order. However, pronunciation, particularly of the vowel phonemes, has changed at least as much in Icelandic as in the other North Germanic languages. Faroese retains many similarities but is influenced by Danish, Norwegian, and Gaelic ( Scottish and/or
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
). Although Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have diverged the most, they still retain considerable mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, particularly if speaking slowly. The languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders. This could be because these languages have been mutually affected by each other, as well as having a similar development influenced by
Middle Low German Middle Low German or Middle Saxon (autonym: ''Sassisch'', i.e. " Saxon", Standard High German: ', Modern Dutch: ') is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented i ...
.


Other influenced languages

Various languages unrelated to Old Norse and others not closely related have been heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman language; to a lesser extent,
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
and Estonian. Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian and Latvian also have a few Norse loanwords. The words '' Rus'' and ''Russia'', according to one theory, may be named after the
Rus' people The Rusʹ (Old East Slavic: Рѹсь; Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian: Русь; Old Norse: '' Garðar''; Greek: Ῥῶς, ''Rhos'') were a people in early medieval eastern Europe. The scholarly consensus holds that they were or ...
, a Norse tribe, probably from present-day east-central Sweden. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are and , respectively. A number of loanwords have been introduced into
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
, many associated with fishing and sailing. A similar influence is found in
Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well ...
, with over one hundred loanwords estimated to be in the language, many of which are related to fishing and sailing.


Phonology


Vowels

The vowel phonemes mostly come in pairs of long and short. The standardized orthography marks the long vowels with an acute accent. In medieval manuscripts, it is often unmarked but sometimes marked with an accent or through
gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...
. Old Norse had nasalized versions of all ten vowel places. These occurred as allophones of the vowels before nasal consonants and in places where a nasal had followed it in an older form of the word, before it was absorbed into a neighboring sound. If the nasal was absorbed by a stressed vowel, it would also lengthen the vowel. These nasalizations also occurred in the other Germanic languages, but were not retained long. They were noted in the
First Grammatical Treatise The First Grammatical Treatise ( is, Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin ) is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic ...
, and otherwise might have remained unknown. The First Grammarian marked these with a dot above the letter. This notation did not catch on, and would soon be obsolete. Nasal and oral vowels probably merged around the 11th century in most of Old East Norse. However, the distinction still holds in
Dalecarlian dialects Dalecarlian (''dalmål'' in Swedish) is a group of East and West Scandinavian languages, and their respective dialects spoken in Dalarna County, Sweden. Some Dalecarlian varieties can be regarded as part of the Swedish dialect group in Gäs ...
. The dots in the following vowel table separate the oral from nasal phonemes. Note: The open or open-mid vowels may be transcribed differently: * = * = * = Sometime around the 13th century, (spelled ) merged with or in most dialects except Old Danish, and Icelandic where () merged with . This can be determined by their distinction within the 12th-century
First Grammatical Treatise The First Grammatical Treatise ( is, Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin ) is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic ...
but not within the early 13th-century
Prose Edda The ''Prose Edda'', also known as the ''Younger Edda'', ''Snorri's Edda'' ( is, Snorra Edda) or, historically, simply as ''Edda'', is an Old Norse textbook written in Iceland during the early 13th century. The work is often assumed to have been t ...
. The nasal vowels, also noted in the First Grammatical Treatise, are assumed to have been lost in most dialects by this time (but notably they are retained in
Elfdalian Elfdalian or Övdalian ( or , pronounced in Elfdalian, or in Swedish) is a North Germanic language spoken by up to 3,000 people who live or have grown up in the locality of Älvdalen ('), which is located in the southeastern part of Älvdale ...
and other dialects of Ovansiljan). See Old Icelandic for the mergers of (spelled ) with (spelled ) and (spelled ) with (spelled ). Old Norse had three diphthong phonemes: , , (spelled , , respectively). In East Norse these would monophthongize and merge with and , whereas in West Norse and its descendants the diphthongs remained.


Consonants

Old Norse has six plosive phonemes, being rare word-initially and and pronounced as voiced fricative
allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s between vowels except in compound words (e.g. ), already in the
Proto-Germanic language Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic br ...
(e.g. > between vowels). The phoneme was pronounced as after an or another and as before and . Some accounts have it a voiced velar fricative in all cases, and others have that realisation only in the middle of words and between vowels (with it otherwise being realised ). The Old East Norse was an
apical consonant An apical consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the tip of the tongue (apex) in conjunction with upper articulators from lips to postalveolar, and possibly prepalatal. It contrasts with laminal cons ...
, with its precise position is unknown; it is reconstructed as a palatal sibilant. It descended from Proto-Germanic and eventually developed into , as had already occurred in Old West Norse. The consonant digraphs , , and occurred word-initially. It is unclear whether they were sequences of two consonants (with the first element realised as or perhaps ) or as single voiceless sonorants , and respectively. In Old Norwegian, Old Danish and later Old Swedish, the groups , , and were reduced to plain , , , which suggests that they had most likely already been pronounced as voiceless sonorants by Old Norse times. The pronunciation of is unclear, but it may have been (the Proto-Germanic pronunciation), or the similar phoneme . Unlike the three other digraphs, it was retained much longer in all dialects. Without ever developing into a voiceless sonorant in Icelandic, it instead underwent
fortition Fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i.e. becomes or becomes ). A ...
to a plosive , which suggests that instead of being a voiceless sonorant, it retained a stronger frication.


Accent

Primary
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
in Old Norse falls on the
word stem In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem ...
, so that would be pronounced . In compound words, secondary stress falls on the second stem (e.g. , ).


Orthography

Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark,
runic Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...
Old Norse was originally written with the
Younger Futhark The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The ...
, which had only 16 letters. Because of the limited number of runes, several runes were used for different sounds, and long and short vowels were not distinguished in writing.
Medieval runes In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
came into use some time later. As for the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
, there was no standardized orthography in use in the Middle Ages. A modified version of the letter
wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , ...
called vend was used briefly for the sounds , , and . Long vowels were sometimes marked with acutes but also sometimes left unmarked or geminated. The standardized Old Norse spelling was created in the 19th century and is, for the most part, phonemic. The most notable deviation is that the nonphonemic difference between the
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...
and the
voiceless dental fricative The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in ''think''. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is en ...
is marked. The oldest texts and
runic inscriptions A runic inscription is an inscription made in one of the various runic alphabets. They generally contained practical information or memorials instead of magic or mythic stories. The body of runic inscriptions falls into the three categories of E ...
use ''þ'' exclusively. Long vowels are denoted with acutes. Most other letters are written with the same glyph as the IPA phoneme, except as shown in the table below.


Phonological processes


Ablaut

Ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
patterns are groups of vowels which are swapped, or ''ablauted,'' in the
nucleus Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: *Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom * Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucl ...
of a word. Strong verbs ablaut the lemma's nucleus to derive the past forms of the verb. This parallels English conjugation, where, e.g., the nucleus of ''sing'' becomes ''sang'' in the past tense and ''sung'' in the past participle. Some verbs are derived by ablaut, as the present-in-past verbs do by consequence of being derived from the past tense forms of strong verbs.


Umlaut

Umlaut or mutation is an assimilatory process acting on vowels preceding a vowel or semivowel of a different
vowel backness A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
. In the case of ''i-umlaut'' and ''ʀ-umlaut'', this entails a fronting of back vowels, with retention of lip rounding. In the case of ''u-umlaut'', this entails labialization of unrounded vowels. Umlaut is phonemic and in many situations grammatically significant as a side effect of losing the Proto-Germanic morphological suffixes whose vowels created the umlaut
allophones In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
. Some , , , , , , , and all were obtained by i-umlaut from , , , , , , , and respectively. Others were formed via ʀ-umlaut from , , , , and . Some , , , , and all , were obtained by u-umlaut from , , , , and , respectively. See Old Icelandic for information on . was obtained through a simultaneous u- and i-umlaut of . It appears in words like '' gøra'' (', '), from Proto-Germanic *garwijaną, and commonly in verbs with a velar consonant before the suffix like '' søkkva'' < '' *sankwijaną''. OEN often preserves the original value of the vowel directly preceding runic while OWN receives ʀ-umlaut. Compare runic OEN ' with OWN ' (later '), ' ("glass", "hare", "pile of rocks").


U-umlaut

U-umlaut is more common in Old West Norse in both phonemic and allophonic positions, while it only occurs sparsely in post-runic Old East Norse and even in runic Old East Norse. : Old Swedish orthography uses to represent both and . The change from Norse to Old Swedish represents only a change in orthography rather than a change in sound. Similarly is used in place of . And thus changes from Norse to Old Swedish to Swedish should be viewed as a change in orthography. : Represents the u-umlaut found in Swedish. This is still a major difference between Swedish and Faroese and Icelandic today. Plurals of neuters do not have u-umlaut at all in Swedish, but in Faroese and Icelandic they do, for example the Faroese and Icelandic plurals of the word , and respectively, in contrast to the Swedish plural and numerous other examples. That also applies to almost all feminine nouns, for example the largest feminine noun group, the
o-stem In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and tho ...
nouns (except the Swedish noun mentioned above), and even i-stem nouns and root nouns, such as Old West Norse (
mörk
' in Icelandic) in comparison with Modern and Old Swedish .


Breaking

Vowel breaking, or fracture, caused a front vowel to be split into a semivowel-vowel sequence before a back vowel in the following syllable. While West Norse only broke , East Norse also broke . The change was blocked by a , , or preceding the potentially-broken vowel. Some or and or result from breaking of and respectively.


Assimilation or elision of inflectional ''ʀ''

When a noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb has a long vowel or diphthong in the accented syllable and its stem ends in a single ''l'', ''n'', or ''s'', the ''r'' (or the elder ''r''- or ''z''-variant '' ʀ'') in an ending is assimilated. When the accented vowel is short, the ending is dropped. The nominative of the strong masculine declension and some i-stem feminine nouns uses one such -r (ʀ). () becomes instead of (). The verb ('to blow'), has third person present tense (' eblows') rather than (). Similarly, the verb ('to shine') had present tense third person (rather than , ); while ('to cool down') had present tense third person (rather than , ). The rule is not absolute, with certain counter-examples such as ('friend'), which has the synonym , yet retains the unabsorbed version, and ('
giant In folklore, giants (from Ancient Greek: ''gigas'', cognate giga-) are beings of human-like appearance, but are at times prodigious in size and strength or bear an otherwise notable appearance. The word ''giant'' is first attested in 1297 fr ...
'), where assimilation takes place even though the root vowel, , is short. The clusters cannot yield respectively, instead . The effect of this shortening can result in the lack of distinction between some forms of the noun. In the case of ('winter'), the nominative and accusative singular and plural forms are identical. The nominative singular and nominative and accusative plural would otherwise have been , . These forms are impossible because the cluster cannot be realized as , nor as , nor as . The same shortening as in also occurs in = ('salmon') (as opposed to , ), ('bottom') (as opposed to , ), and (as opposed to , ). Furthermore, wherever the cluster is expected to exist, such as in the male names , (supposedly , ), the result is apparently always rather than or . This is observable in the Runic corpus.


Phonotactics


Blocking of ii, uu

In Old Norse, adjacent to , , their u-umlauts, and was not possible, nor adjacent to , , their i-umlauts, and . At the beginning of words, this manifested as a dropping of the initial (which was general, independent of the following vowel) or . Compare ON , , with English ''word, wolf, year''. In inflections, this manifested as the dropping of the inflectional vowels. Thus, + dat remains , and in Icelandic progressed to > > . The and of Proto-Germanic became and respectively in Old Norse, a change known as
Holtzmann's law Holtzmann's law is a Proto-Germanic sound law originally noted by Adolf Holtzmann in 1838. It is also known by its traditional German name ''Verschärfung'' (literally: "sharpening"). (A similar sound law which has affected modern Faroese, called ...
.


Epenthesis

An
epenthetic In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...
vowel became popular by 1200 in Old Danish, 1250 in Old Swedish and Norwegian, and 1300 in Old Icelandic. An unstressed vowel was used which varied by dialect. Old Norwegian exhibited all three: was used in West Norwegian south of
Bergen Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway. The municipality covers and is on the peninsula o ...
, as in , (older '' aptr''); North of Bergen, appeared in , ; and East Norwegian used , , .


Grammar

Old Norse was a moderately
inflected In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defi ...
language with high levels of nominal and verbal inflection. Most of the fused
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...
s are retained in modern Icelandic, especially in regard to noun case declensions, whereas modern Norwegian in comparison has moved towards more analytical word structures.


Gender

Old Norse had three
grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
s – masculine, feminine and neuter. Adjectives or pronouns referring to a noun must mirror the gender of that noun, so that one says, "" but, "". As in other languages, the grammatical gender of an impersonal noun is generally unrelated to an expected natural gender of that noun. While indeed , "man" is masculine, , "woman", is feminine, and , "house", is neuter, so also are and , for "raven" and "crow", masculine and feminine respectively, even in reference to a female raven or a male crow. All neuter words have identical nominative and accusative forms, and all feminine words have identical nominative and accusative plurals. The gender of some words' plurals does not agree with that of their singulars, such as and . Some words, such as , have multiple genders, evidenced by their determiners being declined in different genders within a given sentence.


Morphology

Nouns, adjectives and pronouns were declined in four grammatical cases nominative,
accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...
, genitive and dativein singular and plural numbers. Adjectives and pronouns were additionally declined in three grammatical genders. Some pronouns (first and second person) could have
dual number In algebra, the dual numbers are a hypercomplex number system first introduced in the 19th century. They are expressions of the form , where and are real numbers, and is a symbol taken to satisfy \varepsilon^2 = 0 with \varepsilon\neq 0. Du ...
in addition to singular and plural. The genitive was used partitively and in compounds and
kenning A kenning ( Icelandic: ) is a figure of speech in the type of circumlocution, a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English ...
s (e.g., , the well of Urðr; , the
gibing A jibe (US) or gybe (Britain) is a sailing maneuver whereby a sailing vessel reaching downwind turns its stern through the wind, which then exerts its force from the opposite side of the vessel. Because the mainsail boom can swing acros ...
of Loki). There were several classes of nouns within each gender. The following is an example of the "strong"
inflectional paradigm In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and def ...
s: The numerous "weak" noun paradigms had a much higher degree of syncretism between the different cases; i.e. they had fewer forms than the "strong" nouns. A definite article was realised as a suffix that retained an independent declension; e.g., (''a troll'') – (''the troll''), (''a hall'') – (''the hall''), (''an arm'') – (''the arm''). This definite article, however, was a separate word and did not become attached to the noun before later stages of the Old Norse period.


Texts

The earliest inscriptions in Old Norse are
runic Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...
, from the 8th century. Runes continued to be commonly used until the 15th century and have been recorded to be in use in some form as late as the 19th century in some parts of Sweden. With the conversion to Christianity in the 11th century came the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
. The oldest preserved texts in Old Norse in the Latin alphabet date from the middle of the 12th century. Subsequently, Old Norse became the vehicle of a large and varied body of vernacular literature. Most of the surviving literature was written in Iceland. Best known are the
Norse saga is a series of science fantasy role-playing video games by Square Enix. The series originated on the Game Boy in 1989 as the creation of Akitoshi Kawazu at Square. It has since continued across multiple platforms, from the Super NES to the Pl ...
s, the
Icelanders' sagas The sagas of Icelanders ( is, Íslendingasögur, ), also known as family sagas, are one genre of Icelandic sagas. They are prose narratives mostly based on historical events that mostly took place in Iceland in the ninth, tenth, and early e ...
and the mythological literature, but there also survives a large body of religious literature, translations into Old Norse of courtly romances, classical mythology, and the Old Testament, as well as instructional material, grammatical treatises and a large body of letters and official documents.


Dialects

Most of the innovations that appeared in Old Norse spread evenly through the Old Norse area. As a result, the dialects were very similar and considered to be the same language, a language that they sometimes called the Danish tongue (), sometimes Norse language (), as evidenced in the following two quotes from by Snorri Sturluson: However, some changes were geographically limited and so created a dialectal difference between Old West Norse and Old East Norse. As Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse, in the 8th century, the effects of the umlauts seem to have been very much the same over the whole Old Norse area. But in later dialects of the language a split occurred mainly between west and east as the use of umlauts began to vary. The typical umlauts (for example from ) were better preserved in the West due to later generalizations in the east where many instances of umlaut were removed (many archaic Eastern texts as well as eastern runic inscriptions however portray the same extent of umlauts as in later Western Old Norse). All the while, the changes resulting in breaking (for example from ) were more influential in the East probably once again due to generalizations within the inflectional system. This difference was one of the greatest reasons behind the dialectalization that took place in the 9th and 10th centuries, shaping an Old West Norse dialect in Norway and the Atlantic settlements and an Old East Norse dialect in Denmark and Sweden. Old West Norse and Old Gutnish did not take part in the monophthongization which changed () into , () and into , nor did certain peripheral dialects of Swedish, as seen in modern Ostrobothnian dialects. Another difference was that Old West Norse lost certain combinations of consonants. The combinations , , and were assimilated into , and in Old West Norse, but this phenomenon was limited in Old East Norse. Here is a comparison between the two dialects as well as Old Gutnish. It is a transcription from one of the Funbo Runestones in Sweden (U 990) from the eleventh century (translation: 'Veðr and Thane and Gunnar raised this stone after Haursi, their father. God help his spirit'): The OEN original text above is transliterated according to traditional scholarly methods, wherein u-umlaut is not regarded in runic Old East Norse. Modern studies have shown that the positions where it applies are the same as for runic Old West Norse. An alternative and probably more accurate transliteration would therefore render the text in OEN as such: Some
past participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
s and other words underwent i-umlaut in Old West Norse but not in Old East Norse dialects. Examples of that are Icelandic and , which in Swedish are slagit/ slagen and tagit/ tagen. This can also be seen in the Icelandic and Norwegian words sterkur and sterk ("strong"), which in Swedish is stark as in Old Swedish. These differences can also be seen in comparison between Norwegian and Swedish.


Old West Norse

Old West Norse is by far the best attested variety of Old Norse. The term Old Norse is often used to refer to Old West Norse specifically, in which case the subject of this article receives another name, such as ''Old Scandinavian''. Another designation is Old West Nordic. The combinations , , and mostly merged to , and in Old West Norse around the 7th century, marking the first distinction between the Eastern and Western dialects. The following table illustrates this: An early difference between Old West Norse and the other dialects was that Old West Norse had the forms , "dwelling", , "cow" (accusative) and , "faith", whereas Old East Norse , and . Old West Norse was also characterized by the preservation of ''u''-umlaut, which meant that, for example,
Proto-Norse Proto-Norse (also called Ancient Nordic, Ancient Scandinavian, Ancient Norse, Primitive Norse, Proto-Nordic, Proto-Scandinavian and Proto-North Germanic) was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a ...
, "tooth", became and not as in post-runic Old East Norse; OWN and runic OEN , while post-runic OEN "goose". The earliest body of text appears in
runic inscriptions A runic inscription is an inscription made in one of the various runic alphabets. They generally contained practical information or memorials instead of magic or mythic stories. The body of runic inscriptions falls into the three categories of E ...
and in poems composed c. 900 by
Þjóðólfr of Hvinir Þjóðólfr ór Hvini (anglicized as Thjódólf of Hvinir or Thiodolf; fl. late 9th–early 10th c. AD), was a Norwegian skald, said to have been one of the court-poets of the semi-legendary Norwegian king Harald Fairhair. His name suggests that h ...
(although the poems are not preserved in contemporary sources, but only in much later manuscripts). The earliest manuscripts are from the period 1150–1200 and concern legal, religious and historical matters. During the 12th and 13th centuries,
Trøndelag Trøndelag (; sma, Trööndelage) is a county in the central part of Norway. It was created in 1687, then named Trondhjem County ( no, Trondhjems Amt); in 1804 the county was split into Nord-Trøndelag and Sør-Trøndelag by the King of Denma ...
and
Western Norway Western Norway ( nb, Vestlandet, Vest-Norge; nn, Vest-Noreg) is the region along the Atlantic coast of southern Norway. It consists of the counties Rogaland, Vestland, and Møre og Romsdal. The region has no official or political-administrativ ...
were the most important areas of the Norwegian kingdom and they shaped Old West Norse as an archaic language with a rich set of declensions. In the body of text that has survived into the modern day from until c. 1300, Old West Norse had little dialect variation, and Old Icelandic does not diverge much more than the
Old Norwegian nn, gamalnorsk , region = Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) , era = 11th–14th century , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = North Germanic , fam4 = West Scandinavian , fam5 ...
dialects do from each other. Old Norwegian differentiated early from Old Icelandic by the loss of the consonant ''h'' in initial position before ''l'', ''n'' and ''r''; thus whereas Old Icelandic manuscripts might use the form , "fist", Old Norwegian manuscripts might use . From the late 13th century, Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian started to diverge more. After c. 1350, the Black Death and following social upheavals seem to have accelerated language changes in Norway. From the late 14th century, the language used in Norway is generally referred to as
Middle Norwegian Middle Norwegian (Norwegian Bokmål: ; Norwegian Nynorsk: , ) is a form of the Norwegian language that was spoken from 1350 up to 1550 and was the last phase of Norwegian in its original state, before Danish replaced Norwegian as the official wr ...
. Old West Norse underwent a lengthening of initial vowels at some point, especially in Norwegian, so that OWN became , ONW > , OIC > .


Old Icelandic

In Iceland, initial before was lost: compare Icelandic '' rangur'' with Danish , OEN . The change is shared with Old Gutnish. A specifically Icelandic sound, the long, ''u''-umlauted A, spelled and pronounced , developed around the early 11th century. It was short-lived, being marked in the Grammatical Treatises and remaining until the end of the 12th century. It then merged back into ; as a result, long A is not affected by ''u''-umlaut in Modern Icelandic. merged with during the 12th century, which caused to become an independent phoneme from and the written distinction of for from medial and final to become merely etymological. Around the 13th century, (, which had probably already lowered to ) merged to (). Thus, pre-13th-century (with ) 'green' became spelled as in modern Icelandic (with ). The 12th-century
Gray Goose Laws The Gray (Grey) Goose Laws ( is, Grágás {{IPA-is, ˈkrauːˌkauːs}) are a collection of laws from the Icelandic Commonwealth period. The term ''Grágás'' was originally used in a medieval source to refer to a collection of Norwegian laws an ...
manuscripts distinguish the vowels, and so the
Codex Regius Codex Regius ( la, Cōdex Rēgius, "Royal Book" or "King's Book"; is, Konungsbók) or GKS 2365 4º is an Icelandic codex in which many Old Norse poems from the ''Poetic Edda'' are preserved. Thought to have been written during the 1270s, it ...
copy does as well. However, the 13th-century Codex Regius copy of the
Poetic Edda The ''Poetic Edda'' is the modern name for an untitled collection of Old Norse anonymous narrative poems, which is distinct from the ''Prose Edda'' written by Snorri Sturluson. Several versions exist, all primarily of text from the Icelandic med ...
probably relied on newer and/or poorer quality sources. Demonstrating either difficulty with or total lack of natural distinction, the manuscripts show separation of the two phonemes in some places, but they frequently confuse the letters chosen to distinguish them in others. Towards the end of the 13th century, () merged to ().


Old Norwegian

Around the 11th century, Old Norwegian , , and became , and . It is debatable whether the sequences represented a consonant cluster () or devoicing (). Orthographic evidence suggests that in a confined dialect of Old Norwegian, may have been unrounded before and that ''u''-umlaut was reversed unless the ''u'' had been eliminated: , > , .


Greenlandic Norse

This dialect of Old West Norse was spoken by Icelandic colonies in Greenland. When the colonies died out around the 15th century, the dialect went with it. The phoneme and some instances of merged to and so Old Icelandic became .


Text example

The following text is from , an Alexander romance. The manuscript, AM 519 a 4to, is dated c. 1280. The facsimile demonstrates the
sigla Scribal abbreviations or sigla (singular: siglum) are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscript editing (substantive and mechanica ...
used by scribes to write Old Norse. Many of them were borrowed from Latin. Without familiarity with these abbreviations, the facsimile will be unreadable to many. In addition, reading the manuscript itself requires familiarity with the letterforms of the native script. The abbreviations are expanded in a version with normalized spelling like that of the standard normalization system. Compared to the spelling of the same text in Modern Icelandic, pronunciation has changed greatly, but spelling has changed little since
Icelandic orthography Icelandic orthography is the way in which Icelandic words are spelled and how their spelling corresponds with their pronunciation. Alphabet The Icelandic alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet including some letters duplicated with acute accents ...
was intentionally modelled after Old Norse in the 19th century. * a printed in
uncial Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, p. 494. script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to ...
. Uncials not encoded separately in Unicode as of this section's writing.


Old East Norse

Old East Norse or Old East Nordic between 800 and 1100 is called ''Runic Swedish'' in Sweden and ''Runic Danish'' in Denmark, but for geographical rather than linguistic reasons. Any differences between the two were minute at best during the more ancient stages of this dialect group. Changes had a tendency to occur earlier in the Danish region. Even today many Old Danish changes have still not taken place in modern Swedish. Swedish is therefore the more
conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...
of the two in both the ancient and the modern languages, sometimes by a profound margin. The language is called "runic" because the body of text appears in
runes Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...
. Runic Old East Norse is characteristically conservative in form, especially Swedish (which is still true for modern Swedish compared to Danish). In essence it matches or surpasses the conservatism of post-runic Old West Norse, which in turn is generally more conservative than post-runic Old East Norse. While typically "Eastern" in structure, many later post-runic changes and trademarks of OEN had yet to happen. The phoneme ''ʀ'', which evolved during the Proto-Norse period from ''z'', was still clearly separated from ''r'' in most positions, even when being geminated, while in OWN it had already merged with ''r''. The
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bran ...
phoneme was preserved in initial sounds in Old East Norse (w-), unlike in West Norse where it developed into . It survived in rural
Swedish dialects Swedish dialects are the various forms of the Swedish language, particularly those that differ considerably from Standard Swedish. Traditional dialects The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called ' ...
in the provinces of Westro- and North Bothnia, Skåne,
Blekinge Blekinge (, old da, Bleking) is one of the traditional Swedish provinces (), situated in the southern coast of the geographic region of Götaland, in southern Sweden. It borders Småland, Scania and the Baltic Sea. It is the country's secon ...
, Småland,
Halland Halland () is one of the traditional provinces of Sweden (''landskap''), on the western coast of Götaland, southern Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Småland, Scania and the sea of Kattegat. Until 1645 and the Second Treaty of Brömseb ...
,
Västergötland Västergötland (), also known as West Gothland or the Latinized version Westrogothia in older literature, is one of the 25 traditional non-administrative provinces of Sweden (''landskap'' in Swedish), situated in the southwest of Sweden. Väs ...
and south of Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th century. It is still preserved in the
Dalecarlian dialects Dalecarlian (''dalmål'' in Swedish) is a group of East and West Scandinavian languages, and their respective dialects spoken in Dalarna County, Sweden. Some Dalecarlian varieties can be regarded as part of the Swedish dialect group in Gäs ...
in the province of
Dalarna Dalarna () is a '' landskap'' (historical province) in central Sweden. English exonyms for it are Dalecarlia () and the Dales. Dalarna adjoins Härjedalen, Hälsingland, Gästrikland, Västmanland and Värmland. It is also bordered by Norwa ...
, Sweden, and in Jutlandic dialects in Denmark. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants (kw-, tw-, sw- etc.) in Old East Norse and did so into modern times in said Swedish dialects and in a number of others. Generally, the initial w-sound developed into in dialects earlier than after consonants where it survived much longer. In summation, the -sound survived in the East Nordic tongues almost a millennium longer than in the West Norse counterparts, and does still subsist at the present. Monophthongization of > and > started in mid-10th-century Denmark. Compare runic OEN: , , , , ; with Post-runic OEN: , , , , ; OWN: '' feigr'', '' geirr'', '' haugr'', , ; from PN , , , + 'maidendom; virginity', '(wild) animal'. Feminine o-stems often preserve the plural ending , while in OWN they more often merge with the feminine i-stems: (runic OEN) , , , versus OWN , and (modern Swedish , , ("suns, havens, scales"); Danish has mainly lost the distinction between the two stems, with both endings now being rendered as or alternatively for the o-stems). Vice versa, masculine i-stems with the root ending in either or tended to shift the plural ending to that of the ja-stems while OEN kept the original: , and versus OWN '' drengir'', ("elks") and '' bekkir'' (modern Danish '' drenge'', '' elge'', '' bænke'', modern Swedish '' drängar'', , ). The plural ending of ja-stems were mostly preserved while those of OWN often acquired that of the i-stems: , , versus OWN ("beds"), '' bekkir'', '' vefir'' (modern Swedish , , ).


Old Danish

Until the early 12th century, Old East Norse was very much a uniform dialect. It was in Denmark that the first innovations appeared that would differentiate Old Danish from Old Swedish () as these innovations spread north unevenly (unlike the earlier changes that spread more evenly over the East Norse area), creating a series of isoglosses going from
Zealand Zealand ( da, Sjælland ) at 7,031 km2 is the largest and most populous island in Denmark proper (thus excluding Greenland and Disko Island, which are larger in size). Zealand had a population of 2,319,705 on 1 January 2020. It is the 1 ...
to
Svealand Svealand (), or Swealand, is the historical core region of Sweden. It is located in south central Sweden and is one of three historical lands of Sweden, bounded to the north by Norrland and to the south by Götaland. Deep forests, Tiveden, T ...
. In Old Danish, merged with during the 9th century. From the 11th to 14th centuries, the unstressed vowels -''a'', -''o'' and -''e'' ( standard normalization -''a'', -''u'' and -''i'') started to merge into -''ə'', represented with the letter . This vowel came to be
epenthetic In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...
, particularly before ''-ʀ'' endings. At the same time, the voiceless stop consonants ''p'', ''t'' and ''k'' became voiced plosives and even fricative consonants. Resulting from these innovations, Danish has (cake), (tongues) and (guests) whereas (Standard) Swedish has retained older forms, , and (OEN , , ). Moreover, the Danish
pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
shared with Norwegian and Swedish changed into '' stød'' around this time.


Old Swedish

At the end of the 10th and early 11th century initial ''h-'' before ''l'', ''n'' and ''r'' was still preserved in the middle and northern parts of Sweden, and is sporadically still preserved in some northern dialects as ''g-'', e.g. (lukewarm), from . The
Dalecarlian dialects Dalecarlian (''dalmål'' in Swedish) is a group of East and West Scandinavian languages, and their respective dialects spoken in Dalarna County, Sweden. Some Dalecarlian varieties can be regarded as part of the Swedish dialect group in Gäs ...
developed independently from Old Swedish and as such can be considered separate languages from Swedish.


Text example

This is an extract from , the Westrogothic law. It is the oldest text written as a manuscript found in Sweden and from the 13th century. It is contemporaneous with most of the Icelandic literature. The text marks the beginning of Old Swedish as a distinct dialect.


Old Gutnish

Due to Gotland's early isolation from the mainland, many features of Old Norse did not spread from or to the island, and Old Gutnish developed as an entirely separate branch from Old East and West Norse. For example, the diphthong in , and was not subject to anticipatory assimilation to as in e.g. Old Icelandic , and . Gutnish also shows dropping of in initial , which it shares with the Old West Norse dialects (except Old East Norwegian), but which is otherwise abnormal. Breaking was also particularly active in Old Gutnish, leading to e.g. versus mainland .


Text example

The is the longest text surviving from
Old Gutnish Old Gutnish or Old Gotlandic was a North Germanic language spoken on the Baltic Sea, Baltic island of Gotland. It shows sufficient differences from the Old West Norse and Old East Norse dialects that it is considered to be a separate branch. ...
. It was written in the 13th century and dealt with the early history of the Gotlanders. This part relates to the agreement that the Gotlanders had with the Swedish king sometime before the 9th century:


Relationship to other languages


Relationship to English

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
and Old Norse were related languages. It is therefore not surprising that many words in Old Norse look familiar to English speakers; e.g., (arm), (foot), (land), (full), (to hang), (to stand). This is because both
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
and Old Norse stem from a
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bran ...
mother language. In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the
Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germ ...
. A few examples of Old Norse
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s in modern English are (English/Viking Age Old East Norse), in some cases even displacing their Old English cognates: * Nouns – ''anger'' (), ''bag'' (), ''bait'' (, , ), ''band'' (), ''bark'' (, stem ), ''birth'' (), ''dirt'' (), ''dregs'' (), ''egg'' (, related to OE. cognate which became Middle English /), ''fellow'' (), ''gap'' (), ''husband'' (), ''cake'' (), ''keel'' (, stem also , ), ''kid'' (), ''knife'' (), ''law'' (, stem ), ''leg'' (), ''link'' (), ''loan'' (, related to OE. cognate , cf. lend), ''race'' (, stem ), ''root'' (, related to OE. cognate , cf.
wort Wort () is the liquid extracted from the mashing process during the brewing of beer or whisky. Wort contains the sugars, the most important being maltose and maltotriose, that will be fermented by the brewing yeast to produce alcohol. Wort als ...
), ''sale'' (), ''scrap'' (), ''seat'' (), ''sister'' (, related to OE. cognate ), ''skill'' (/), ''skin'' (), ''skirt'' ( vs. the native English ''shirt'' of the same root), ''sky'' (), ''slaughter'' (), ''snare'' (), ''steak'' (), ''thrift'' (), ''tidings'' (), ''trust'' (), ''window'' (), ''wing'' () * Verbs – ''are'' (, displacing OE ), ''blend'' (), ''call'' (), ''cast'' (), ''clip'' (), ''crawl'' (), ''cut'' (possibly from ON ), ''die'' (), ''gasp'' (), ''get'' (), ''give'' (/, related to OE. cognate ), ''glitter'' (), ''hit'' (), ''lift'' (), ''raise'' (), ''ransack'' (), ''rid'' (), ''run'' (, stem , related to OE. cognate ), ''scare'' (), ''scrape'' (), ''seem'' (), ''sprint'' (), ''take'' (), ''thrive'' (), ''thrust'' (), ''want'' () * Adjectives – ''flat'' (), ''happy'' (), ''ill'' (), ''likely'' (), ''loose'' (), ''low'' (), ''meek'' (), ''odd'' (), ''rotten'' (/), ''scant'' (), ''sly'' (), ''weak'' (), ''wrong'' () * Adverbs – ''thwart/athwart'' () * Prepositions – ''till'' (), ''fro'' () * Conjunction – though/tho () * Interjection – ''hail'' (), ''wassail'' () * Personal pronoun – ''they'' (), ''their'' (), ''them'' () (for which the Anglo-Saxons said , , ) * Prenominal adjectives – ''same'' () In a simple sentence like "They are both weak," the extent of the Old Norse loanwords becomes quite clear (Old East Norse with archaic pronunciation: while Old English ). The words "they" and "weak" are both borrowed from Old Norse, and the word "both" might also be a borrowing, though this is disputed (cf. German ). While the number of loanwords adopted from the Norse was not as numerous as that of Norman French or
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, their depth and everyday nature make them a substantial and very important part of everyday English speech as they are part of the very core of the modern English vocabulary. Tracing the origins of words like "bull" and "Thursday" is more difficult. "Bull" may derive from either Old English or Old Norse , while "Thursday" may be a borrowing or simply derive from the Old English , which could have been influenced by the Old Norse cognate. The word "are" is from Old English /, which stems back to Proto-Germanic as well as the Old Norse cognates.


Relationship to modern Scandinavian languages


See also

* Germanic a-mutation * ''
An Introduction to Old Norse ''An Introduction to Old Norse'' is a textbook written by E. V. Gordon, arising from his teaching at the University of Leeds and first published in 1927 in Oxford at The Clarendon Press. The Second Edition was revised (1957) by A. R. Taylor, Go ...
''A common textbook on the language *
List of English words of Old Norse origin Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language, primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw). Many of ...
* *
Old Norse morphology Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a ...
The grammar of the language. *
Old Norse orthography The orthography of the Old Norse language was diverse, being written in both Runic and Latin alphabets, with many spelling conventions, variant letterforms, and unique letters and signs. In modern times, scholars established a standardized spelli ...
The spelling of the language *
Old Norse poetry Old Norse poetry encompasses a range of verse forms written in Old Norse, during the period from the 8th century (see Eggjum stone) to as late as the far end of the 13th century. Most of the Old Norse poetry that survives was preserved in Iceland ...
*
Proto-Norse language Proto-Norse (also called Ancient Nordic, Ancient Scandinavian, Ancient Norse, Primitive Norse, Proto-Nordic, Proto-Scandinavian and Proto-North Germanic) was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a ...
The Scandinavian dialect of Proto-Germanic that developed into Old Norse


Dialectal information

*
Greenlandic Norse Greenlandic Norse is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken in the Norse settlements of Greenland until their demise in the late 15th century. The language is primarily attested by runic inscriptions found in Greenland. The limited ...
*
History of Danish The Danish language developed during the Middle Ages out of Old East Norse, the common predecessor of Danish and Swedish. It was a late form of common Old Norse. The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided the history of Danish int ...
* History of Icelandic *
Old Gutnish Old Gutnish or Old Gotlandic was a North Germanic language spoken on the Baltic Sea, Baltic island of Gotland. It shows sufficient differences from the Old West Norse and Old East Norse dialects that it is considered to be a separate branch. ...
*
Old Norwegian nn, gamalnorsk , region = Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) , era = 11th–14th century , familycolor = Indo-European , fam2 = Germanic , fam3 = North Germanic , fam4 = West Scandinavian , fam5 ...
* Old Swedish


Citations


General citations


Cleasby-Vigfússon citations


Sources


General sources

* * * * , "The Menota handbook 2.0" * * * * * ** * *


Dictionaries

* *
e-text
via the Germanic Lexicon Project (''germanic-lexicon-project.org'') *
e-text
adapted from the Germanic Lexicon Project version to work better with mobile devices and with an improved search (''old-norse.net'') * ** * *

via "Germanic Lexicon Project" (''lexicon.ff.cuni.cz'') *
e-text
via ''norroen.info'' * * * * *
First and Second editions
via ''www.septentrionalia.net''


Grammars

* * * (Old West Norse) * (Old Swedish and Old Gutnish) * (Old Danish) * (Old West Norse) * (''Old Norse'' in the narrow sense, i.e. Old West Norse) * (Old West Norse) * (Old West Norse)


Old Norse texts

* ** , facing translation


Language learning resources

* * * *

via Germanic Lexicon Project (lexicon.ff.cuni.cz) *
e-ext
via
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
*


External links


Heimskringla.no
an online collection of Old Norse source material
Old Norse Online
by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at th
Linguistics Research Center
at the
University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

Video: Old Norse text read with a reconstructed pronunciation and a Modern Icelandic pronunciation, for comparison. With subtitles

Old Norse sound sample


* ttp://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=new100&morpho=0&basename=new100\ier\grm&limit=-1 Old Norse basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database {{Authority control 8th-century establishments in Europe 14th-century disestablishments in Europe Languages attested from the 8th century Languages extinct in the 14th century Norse, Old North Germanic languages