The advent of Christianity
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.
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.
Reformation and Renaissance
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 chanceries in which documents of government were produced began to be influential in shaping written norms that were no longer local but nationwide. The Reformation came from Germany and with it Martin Luther’s High German translation of the Bible, which was quickly translated into Swedish (1541), Danish (1550), and Icelandic (1584). That it was not translated into Norwegian was one of the major reasons that no separate Norwegian literary language arose. Literary Old Norwegian went out of use, and until the 19th century there was no distinct written Norwegian. Instead a Norwegian variety of Danish developed and became the basis of Dano-Norwegian Bokmål. With the invention of printing and the growth of literacy, all speakers of Scandinavian dialects gradually learned to read (and eventually write) the new standard languages.
Dialects and standard languages
The teaching of the standard languages in the schools and the high levels of literacy have tended to spread the urban norms of speaking. Nevertheless, very diverse dialects, partially unintelligible to outsiders, are spoken in many rural communities; some of them are used occasionally for the writing down of local traditions or for giving local colour. Local dialects are used much more widely in Norway than in the other Scandinavian—and European—countries. It is not unusual for university professors, politicians, business executives, and other public figures to use their local dialects even when speaking in a professional capacity. Boundaries between dialect areas are gradual and do not always coincide with national borders, so that the following traditional divisions are somewhat arbitrary: in Denmark, West (Jutland), Central (Fyn, Sjælland), and East (Bornholm); in Sweden, South (especially Skåne), Götaland, Svealand, North (Norrland), Gotland, and East (Finland); in Norway, East (Lowland, Midland), Trønder (around Trondheim), North, and West. In the Faroese language there are minor dialectal differences between the southern and northern islands; minor dialectal differences occur in Icelandic as well, but there are no clearly defined regional dialects. In the larger cities social dialects range from the everyday speech of the working classes (often similar to nearby rural speech) to the more cultivated forms of middle- and upper-class speech, including the highly formal style of courts and legislatures. Speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish normally use their own languages in communicating with one another.
Linguistic characteristics
Common and distinctly Scandinavian characteristics
North Germanic differs from West Germanic (but not East Germanic) in having ggj and ggv for medial jj and ww, respectively (Old Norse tveggja ‘two,’ hoggva ‘hew’), -t for -e in the second person singular of the strong preterite (Old Norse namt ‘you took’; compare Old English næme), and a reflexive possessive sin.
North Germanic differs from East Germanic (but not West Germanic) in that original ē becomes ā (Old Norse máni ‘moon’) and original z becomes r (Old Norse meiri ‘more’); furthermore, there is a new demonstrative pronoun þessi ‘this’ (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian denne), back vowels are mutated to front vowels by the influence of a following i or j (“i-umlaut”—a and ā become æ and æ, o and ō become ø and ø [ø represents umlauted o], u and ū become y and ȳ [y represents umlauted u], au becomes ey or øy), and the number of unstressed vowels is reduced to three (a, i, u).
North Germanic differs from both West Germanic and East Germanic in the following ways: rounding of unrounded vowels by following u or w (“u-umlaut”—a and ā become ǫ and ǫ [ǫ represents a low back rounded vowel], e becomes ø, i becomes y, ei becomes ey or øy); loss of initial j and of w before rounded vowels (Old Norse ár ‘year,’ ungr ‘young,’ orð ‘word’); loss of final nasals (Old Norse frá ‘from,’ and generally in infinitives: Old Norse fara ‘fare, go’; compare Old English faran, German fahren); diphthongization (the creation of a gliding monosyllabic speech sound) of short e to ja or jǫ (Old Norse jafn ‘even,’ jǫrd ‘earth’). It has new pronouns for the third person singular (Old Norse hann ‘he,’ hon ‘she’); attaches the reflexive pronoun (sik) to the verb to make a new mediopassive in -sk, -st, or -s (finna sik ‘find oneself’ became Old Norse finnast ‘be found, exist,’ Danish findes); attaches the demonstrative inn ‘that’ to nouns as a definite article (Old Norse fótrinn ‘the foot,’ Norwegian and Swedish foten, Danish foden), except in West Jutland (possibly a later development); and uses -t as marker of the neuter in pronouns and adjectives (Old Norse stórt ‘big’ from stór-).
Furthermore, North Germanic employed es (which changed to er) and later sum as an indeclinable relative pronoun. It also lost some Germanic prefixes such as ga- (German ge-) and contains a considerable number of words such as hestr ‘horse,’ fær or fár ‘sheep,’ gríss ‘pig,’ gólf ‘floor,’ and ostr ‘cheese’ that do not occur in East or West Germanic.