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The Scandinavian countries. Danish, Norwegian (including both written forms: Bokmål, the most common standard form; and Nynorsk) and Swedish are all descended from Old Norse, the common ancestor of all North Germanic languages spoken today. Thus, they are closely related, and largely mutually intelligible, particularly in their standard ...
- Overview
- History of Old Scandinavian
- The emergence of Old Scandinavian, 600–1500
- The advent of Christianity
- Reformation and Renaissance
Scandinavian languages, group of Germanic languages consisting of modern standard Danish, Swedish, Norwegian (Dano-Norwegian and New Norwegian), Icelandic, and Faroese. These languages are usually divided into East Scandinavian (Danish and Swedish) and West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese) groups.
About 125 inscriptions dated from ad 200 to 600, carved in the older runic alphabet (futhark), are chronologically and linguistically the oldest evidence of any Germanic language. Most are from Scandinavia, but enough have been found in southeastern Europe to suggest that the use of runes was also familiar to other Germanic tribes. Most inscriptions are brief, marking ownership or manufacture, as on the Gallehus Horns (Denmark; c. ad 400): Ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawido ‘I, Hlewagastiz, son of Holti, made [this] horn.’ A number of inscriptions are memorials to the dead, while others are magical in content. The earliest were carved on loose wooden or metal objects, while later ones were also chiseled in stone. Further information about the language is derived from names and loanwords in foreign texts, from place-names, and from comparative reconstruction based on related languages and later dialects.
The inscriptions retain the unstressed vowels that were descended from Germanic and Indo-European but were lost in the later Germanic languages—e.g., the i’s in Hlewagastiz and tawido (Old Norse would have been *Hlégestr and *táða) or the a’s in Hlewagastiz, Holtijaz, and horna (Old Norse *Høltir, horn). The scantiness of the material (fewer than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the relationship of this language to Germanic and its daughter languages. It is known as Proto-Scandinavian, or Ancient Scandinavian, but shows few distinctively North Germanic features. The earliest inscriptions may reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to the splitting of North and West Germanic (but after the separation of Gothic). Only after the departure of the Angles and Jutes for England and the establishment of the Eider River in southern Jutland as a border between Scandinavians and Germans is it reasonable to speak of a clearly Scandinavian or North Germanic dialect.
Inscriptions from the latter part of the Ancient period show North Germanic as a distinct dialect. Information about the earliest stages of the Old Scandinavian period is also derived from runic inscriptions, which became more abundant after the creation of the short runic futhark about ad 800. The expansion of Nordic peoples in the Viking Age (c. 750–1050) led to the establishment of Scandinavian speech in Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, as well as parts of Ireland, Scotland, England, France (Normandy), and Russia. Scandinavian languages later disappeared in all these territories except the Faroes and Iceland through absorption or extinction of the Scandinavian-speaking population.
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During the period of expansion, all Scandinavians could communicate without difficulty and thought of their language as one (sometimes called “Danish” in opposition to “German”), but the differing orientations of the various kingdoms in the Viking Age led to a number of dialectal differences. It is possible to distinguish a more conservative West Scandinavian area (Norway and its colonies, especially Iceland) from a more innovative East Scandinavian (Denmark and Sweden). An example of a linguistic difference setting off the eastern dialect area is the monophthongization of the Old Scandinavian diphthongs ei, au, and øy to ē and ø (e.g., steinn ‘stone’ became stēn, lauss ‘loose’ became løs, and høyra ‘hear’ became høra). The diphthongs remained on the island of Gotland and in most North Swedish dialects, however, while they were lost in some East Norwegian dialects. The pronoun ek ‘I’ became jak in East Scandinavian (modern Danish jeg, Swedish jag) but remained ek in West Scandinavian (New Norwegian and Faroese eg, Icelandic ég); in East Norwegian it later became jak (dialects je, jæ, Dano-Norwegian jeg) but remained ek (dialects a, æ) in Jutland.
The establishment of the Roman Catholic church during the 10th and 11th centuries had considerable linguistic significance. It helped to consolidate the existing kingdoms, brought the North into the sphere of classical and medieval European culture, and introduced the writing on parchment of Latin letters. Runic writing continued in use for epigraphic purposes and for general information (several thousand inscriptions are extant, from 11th-century Sweden, especially, and also all the way from Russia to Greenland). For more sustained literary efforts, the Latin alphabet was used—at first only for Latin writings but soon for native writings as well. The oldest preserved manuscripts date from approximately 1150 in Norway and Iceland and approximately 1250 in Denmark and Sweden. The first important works to be written down were the previously oral laws; these were followed by translations of Latin and French works, among them sermons, saints’ legends, epics, and romances. Some of these may have stimulated the extraordinary flowering of native literature, especially in Iceland. One can hardly speak of distinct languages in this period, although it is customary to distinguish Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Swedish, Old Danish, and Old Gutnish (or Guthnic, spoken in Gotland) on the basis of quite minor differences in the writing traditions. Some of these were merely scribal habits resulting from local usage, but others did reflect the growing separation of the kingdoms and the centralization within each. Literary Old Icelandic is often presented in a normalized textbook form and (together with Old Norwegian) is referred to as Old Norse.
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Culture words like caupō ‘merchant’ (giving Old Norse kaupa ‘buy’) and vinum ‘wine’ (Old Norse vín) had been filtering into the North from the Roman Empire for a long time. But the first great wave of such words came from the medieval church and its translations, often with the other Germanic languages as intermediaries because the first missionaries were English and German. Some religious terms were borrowed from other Germanic languages; among these are Old Norse helviti ‘hell’ from Old Saxon helliwiti or Old English hellewite, and Old Norse sál ‘soul’ from Old English sāwol. East Scandinavian borrowed the Old Saxon word siala, from which come later Danish sjæl and Swedish själ. In the secular field the most profound influence on Scandinavian was that exerted by Middle Low German because of the commercial dominance of the Hanseatic League and the political influence of the North German states on the royal houses of Denmark and Sweden between 1250 and 1450. The major commercial cities of Scandinavia had large Low German-speaking populations, and the wide use of their language resulted in a stock of loanwords and grammatical formatives comparable in extent to that which French left behind in English after the Norman Conquest.
The many local dialects that exist today developed in the late Middle Ages, when the bulk of the population was rural and tied to its local village or parish, with few opportunities to travel. The people of the cities developed new forms of urban speech, coloured by surrounding rural dialects, by foreign contacts, and by the written languages. The ...
Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. In the established classification, it belongs to the East Scandinavian languages, together with Danish, separating it from the West Scandinavian languages, consisting of Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian.
Feb 5, 2022 · There are three Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. While Icelandic and Faroese also stem from Scandinavia, they are not included in this group as they do not have as many European loan words and the grammar differs slightly.
Swedish. Spoken most out of any of the top Nordic languages, Swedish is the local language of Sweden. Although Swedish is most common among Swedish locals, many Finnish and Danish people speak this tongue too. Danish also has quite a similar appearance to Swedish.
May 29, 2024 · Swedish language, the official language of Sweden and, with Finnish, one of the two national languages of Finland. Swedish belongs to the East Scandinavian group of North Germanic languages. Until World War II, it was also spoken in parts of Estonia and Latvia. Swedish was spoken by about eight.
Native name: svenska [svɛnːska] Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, North Germanic, East Scandinavian, Continental Scandinavian. Number of speakers: c. 10.2 million. Spoken in: Sweden, Finland, Estonia. First written: AD 1225. Writing system: Runic script (9th-11th century), then the Latin alphabet.
