Old Norse was a North Germanic language spoken in Scandinavia and in Norse settlements during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages (approximately the 8th–14th centuries). It is the conventional term for the medieval West and East Scandinavian dialects (often labelled Old West Norse and Old East Norse) that developed from Proto-Norse and later evolved into the modern North Germanic languages, including Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.
Old Norse is attested in runic inscriptions (written in the Younger Futhark) and in numerous medieval manuscripts written with the Latin alphabet; its literary corpus includes the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, skaldic verse, law codes, and religious texts. Contact between Old Norse speakers and other languages — particularly Old English and the Celtic languages — left a substantial legacy of loanwords and toponyms; many common English words such as egg, knife, sky, and window derive from Old Norse.
Scholarly usage of the term Old Norse typically covers texts from the 11th to the 14th centuries, though periodization varies within academia based on the theoretical focus and tradition of the particular source.
Geographical distribution
Old Icelandic was close to Old Norwegian, and together they formed Old West Norse, which was also spoken in Norse settlements in Greenland, the Faroes, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, northwest England (particularly Cumbria), and Normandy. Old East Norse was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, Kievan Rus', eastern England, and Danish 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 in the West to the Volga River in the East. In Kievan Rus', it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 14th century there. The age of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland is strongly contested, but Swedish settlement had spread the language into the region by the time of the Second Swedish Crusade 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, and the extinct Norn language of Orkney and Shetland, although Norwegian was heavily influenced by the East dialect, and is today more similar to East Scandinavian (Danish and Swedish) than to Icelandic and Faroese. The descendants of the Old East Norse dialect are the East Scandinavian languages of Danish, Swedish and Övdalian, although Övdalian was heavily influenced by the West Dialect, and is sometimes considered to form its own group.
Among these, the grammar of Icelandic, Faroese and Övdalian have changed the least from Old Norse in the last thousand years, though the pronunciations of Icelandic and Faroese both have changed considerably from Old Norse. With Danish rule of the Faroe Islands, Faroese has also been influenced by Danish.
Both Middle English (especially northern English dialects within the area of the Danelaw) and Early Scots (including Lowland Scots) were strongly influenced by Norse and contained many Old Norse loanwords. Consequently, Modern English (including Scottish English), 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 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. 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.See, e.g.,
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 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, 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, many associated with fishing and sailing. A similar influence is found in Scottish Gaelic, with over one hundred loanwords estimated to be in the language, many of which are related to fishing and sailing.
Phonology
Vowels Old Norse 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.
Old Norse had nasalized versions of all ten vowel qualities. 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. This nasalization also occurred in the other Germanic languages, but were not retained long. They were noted in the First Grammatical Treatise, 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. The dots in the following vowel table separate the oral from nasal phonemes.
+ Generic vowel system –12th centuries Front vowels Back vowels Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Rounded Close • • • • • • Mid • • • • • • Open/Open-mid • • • • • • •
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 but not within the early 13th-century Prose Edda. 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 and other dialects of Ovansiljan). See Old Icelandic for the mergers of (spelled ) with (spelled ) and (spelled ) with (spelled ).
+ Generic vowel system –14th centuries Front vowels Back vowels Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Rounded High Mid Low/Low-mid
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.
+ History of Old Norse and Old Icelandic vowels Proto-Germanic Northwest Germanic Primitive Old West Norse Old Icelandic(1st Grammarian) Later Old Icelandic Example (Old Norse) *a * *a ; < *a (+i-mut) ; ; < *a ; ; < < ; < < *a ; ; < *ē * *aː ; < *aː (+i-mut) ; < < *aː (+u-mut) ; ; < < *e *e ; < ; < *e ; ; < *e (broken) ; ; < *e (broken ) ; > ; ; < *ē₂ * *eː ; < *i *i ; < *i (+w-mut) ; < *ī *iː ; < *ō /*ā * *oː ; < ; < *oː (+i-mut) ; ; < *u *u ; < *u (+i-mut) ; < *u (+a-mut) ; / < ; < *ū *uː ; < *uː (+i-mut) ; < *ai * *ai > ; , Gut. < *ai (+w-mut) ; ; < *au * *au > ; < *au (+i-mut) ; ; < *eu *eu ; ; < *eu (+dental) ; ; ; / < *V̨ *Ṽ < ; OWN < < *V̨̄ *Ṽː < ; (pl.) < ; (acc. neut. wk.) <
Consonants Old Norse has six plosive phonemes, being rare word-initially and and pronounced as voiced fricative allophones between vowels except in compound words (e.g. ), already in the Proto-Germanic language (e.g. * > between vowels). The phoneme was pronounced as after an or another and as before and . Some accounts have it as 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 /ʀ/ was an apical consonant, with its precise position unknown. It is reconstructed by some as a palatal sibilant. It descended from Proto-Germanic *z and eventually developed into , as had already occurred in Old West Norse.
Labial Coronal Dorsal Glottal Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Nasal Plosive Fricative ) Trill Glide Lateral
The pronunciation of is unclear, but it may have been (the assumed 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 to a plosive , which suggests that instead of being a voiceless sonorant, it retained a stronger frication. In some Icelandic dialects it is still preserved as or .
Accent Old Norse had a stress accent with primary stress generally on the first syllable of the word, a feature reflected particularly in the conservative modern descendants Icelandic and Faroese. It is also usually thought that a contrastive prosodic feature—generally reconstructed as a pitch or tonal distinction—was already forming either in late Proto-Norse or, at the latest, in early Old Norse, and that it is reflected in the modern Swedish and Norwegian tonal accents (traditionally called Accent 1 and Accent 2). In Danish the modern output of this contrast is, in many varieties, a creaky-voice register called stød.
The emergence of the tonal contrast as a lexical feature is commonly linked to the rise of new disyllabic words due to incorporation of the definite article and vowel epenthesis during the Viking Age and early Middle Ages. However, the precise dating and mechanism of the rise of the contrast remains debated among scholars. Some studies interpret the process as a phonologization of earlier (Proto-Nordic) rhythmic contrasts involving syllable weight, with vowel length changes and the reduction of unstressed syllables resulting in an inherited double-peaked melody during the Viking Age. Others argue for a "peak delay" model of tonal development.