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A Very Brief History of the Scandinavian Languages
© 2002 by Brian M. Scott; all rights reserved.
Most of the languages of Europe belong to the
Indo-European family of languages and are therefore at least
distantly related to one another. The only major exceptions
are Basque, Turkish, the closely related languages Finnish
and Estonian, and their distant relative Hungarian. Within
the Indo-European family are subfamilies of more closely
related languages. One of these is the Germanic family of
languages, one branch of which includes English, German, and
Dutch. Another branch, the North Germanic family, consists
of all of the languages of Scandinavia except Finnish and
its distant relative Sami, the language of the people
formerly called Lapps. These North Germanic languages are
all descended from a common ancestor, Common
Scandinavian, that is first attested in runic
inscriptions from the middle of the sixth century C.E.
Over time Common Scandinavian split up into various
dialects. The main division was between the West
Scandinavian dialects of the lands facing the Atlantic
Ocean and the East Scandinavian dialects of those
facing the Baltic Sea. The West Scandinavian region
comprised Norway together with the now-Swedish provinces of
Jämtland, Herjedalen, and Bohuslän, Iceland,
Greenland, and the western isles of Shetland, the Faroes,
the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man. The East
Scandinavian area included Denmark, the rest of Sweden,
parts of Finland, and some of the Baltic coast opposite
Finland.
This division of Common Scandinavian into Old West
Scandinavian and Old East Scandinavian was
established by the beginning of the Viking period around 800
C.E., though the differences between the two dialects were
still quite small. After about 1000 C.E., however, the
differences increased markedly, and by the time of the
earliest preserved manuscripts about 1150 C.E. in
Iceland and Norway and about 1250 C.E. in Denmark and Sweden
they are quite noticeable. Different dialects within
each of these two main branches also become increasingly
apparent. By the 12th century we can distinguish Old
Icelandic and Old Norwegian dialects within West
Scandinavian, though the differences remained very minor
until the 13th century. Within East Scandinavian we
distinguish Old Swedish from Old Danish after
1250 or so, with major differences appearing after 1300. It
is important to understand, however, that these dialect
divisions did not have sharp boundaries, either
geographically or linguistically. Neighboring dialects were
generally quite similar, regardless of lines drawn on maps.
For instance, there were significant differences between the
western and eastern dialects of Old Norwegian, the latter
having some characteristics in common with Old Swedish.
The term Old Norse is sometimes used generically
for the Old West Scandinavian dialects, but in careful usage
it refers to a scholarly abstraction, a standardized and
regularized version of 13th century written Old Icelandic.
This normalized language draws on modern Icelandic spelling
to make distinctions that were rarely or never made in Old
Icelandic and Old Norwegian. For instance, the Old Norse
name Herjólfr actually appears in Old
Icelandic and Old Norwegian as Heriolfr,
Heriulfr, Heriólfr, Heriolbr,
and Heriulfuer, the first of these apparently being
the most common.
In the later Middle Ages say from the Black Death
to the Reformation, roughly 1350-1550 the Continental
Scandinavian languages underwent significant changes. In all
of them the original complex inflectional system was greatly
simplified. Old Norwegian ceased to exist as a written
standard in the late 14th century, when Norway came under
Danish control, though the rural spoken dialects continued
to develop normally. Old Danish and Old Swedish were greatly
influenced by Middle Low German, the language of the
Hanseatic League. Old Icelandic was exceptional: its
pronunciation changed significantly during this period, but
isolation and a strong and strongly conservative native
written tradition preserved the written language almost
unchanged.
From about the middle of the 16th century on we can speak
simply of Icelandic, Danish, and
Swedish; all three written languages were by then
much like their modern counterparts, just as Shakespeare's
English is recognizably modern compared with, say, Chaucer's
Middle English. In Norway the situation was different,
thanks to Danish rule. The written language was essentially
contemporary Danish, and the spoken language of the elite
was heavily influenced by the written standard. When Danish
rule of Norway ended in the early 20th century, this
Dano-Norwegian mixture was codified as a standard language.
Its contemporary descendent, called bokmål
'book language', is one of the two modern standard Norwegian
languages and is the standard of a majority of Norwegian
school districts. The other standard, called nynorsk
'new Norwegian', was created in the mid-19th century by Ivar
Aasen. Roughly speaking, it is a reconstruction of what Old
Norwegian might have become had it developed with much less
outside influence, based especially on the conservative
western dialects of spoken Norwegian. The official
bokmål and nynorsk standards converged noticeably
during the 20th century, but significant differences
remain.
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