North Germanic languages

• 1. Introduction

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  North Germanic languages bind together roughly 20 million people across the Nordic countries, stretching from the fjords of western Norway to the volcanic plains of Iceland. Yet this family is far older than any nation that speaks it. Its roots reach back to the late Pre-Roman Iron Age, when a distinct cluster of dialects broke away from the broader Germanic world and began its own long journey. How did a single ancestral tongue branch into Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and the lesser-known varieties like Elfdalian and Gutnish? Why can a person in Oslo hold a conversation with a Swede in Stockholm but struggle to follow a Dane speaking at speed? And what does a 2005 survey of borrowed English words tell us about where these languages are heading? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots in Old Norse

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  Around the year AD 200, speakers of what would become the North Germanic branch became distinguishable from their Germanic neighbors to the south and east. The earliest evidence comes from runic inscriptions, which scholars treat as the primary window into the earliest stages of the language. During the Migration Period, running from AD 300 to 600, the various Germanic dialects still shared enough in common that cross-community communication was possible, making firm classification difficult even today.

  North Germanic and West Germanic share a set of phonological and morphological changes that set them apart from the extinct East Germanic languages, the family that includes Gothic. One example is a sound shift known as rhotacism, where the sound /z/ transformed into /r/. East Germanic had already split away before this change could reach it, which is why Gothic preserves the older form. An intermediate runic symbol called ʀ is still visible in late runic East Norse inscriptions, caught between the old and new sounds, at a point when West Germanic had long since completed the same shift.

• 3. The Old Norse Split

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  Norwegian settlers carried Old West Norse to Iceland and the Faroe Islands around 800. That transplanted variety survived in remarkable condition: of all the modern Scandinavian languages, written Icelandic remains closest to the Old Norse from which they all descend. A separate branch called Norn grew up on Orkney and Shetland after Vikings settled there around the same time, but Norn had disappeared entirely by around 1700.

  During the medieval period, the Scandinavian languages remained close enough that speakers from different regions could broadly understand one another, and the whole group was sometimes called a single tongue. Some writers in Sweden and Iceland referred to it simply as the "Danish tongue" as late as the 13th century. As late as the 16th century, both Danes and Swedes still described North Germanic as one language; this view appears in the introduction to the first Danish translation of the Bible and in Olaus Magnus' work A Description of the Northern Peoples.

  Yet the eastern and western dialects of Old Norse were already drifting apart during the Middle Ages. Old Icelandic was essentially identical to Old Norwegian at least until around 1000, and together they formed the Old West Norse dialect, spoken also in settlements in the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Norwegian communities in Normandy. The Old East Norse dialect, by contrast, was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Russia, England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. Old Gutnish occupied its own space on the island of Gotland and in eastern settlements. By 1600 a new way of dividing the family had emerged, separating an insular group (Icelandic and Faroese) from a continental one (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish), a division that persists in modern linguistics.

• 4. Danish Influence and Norwegian

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  The political union of Denmark and Norway, which lasted from 1536 to 1814, left a deep mark on the Norwegian language. Denmark governed from Copenhagen, and Danish became the prestige written standard across the union. The result was that moderate and conservative Norwegian Bokmål ended up sharing most of the Danish vocabulary and grammar, remaining nearly identical to written Danish until the spelling reform of 1907.

  The divergence between Swedish and Danish illustrates how politics shapes vocabulary. Sweden left the Kalmar Union in 1523 following conflicts with Denmark, after which the two countries took different sides in several wars and made different international contacts. Sweden went through a francophone period, borrowing heavily from French. For a word like "window," Swedish replaced the native vindöga with fönster, borrowed from Middle Low German, while Danish kept the native vindue. Norwegians, meanwhile, continued to say vindauga or similar, drawing on the unbroken line of Norwegian dialects descended from Old Norse.

  After Norway separated from Denmark in 1814, the linguist and writer Ivar Aasen developed Nynorsk by drawing systematically on western Norwegian dialects. The Norwegian linguist Arne Torp has argued that this project would have been far harder to carry out if Norway had been in a union with Sweden rather than Denmark, because the differences between Norwegian and Swedish dialects were simply smaller. Nynorsk today shares many features with Swedish that Bokmål does not, including forms like byrja (matching Swedish börja, versus Danish begynde) and vatn (matching Swedish vatten, versus Danish vand). The result is that Nynorsk does not fit neatly into either the East or West Scandinavian classification.

• 5. Who Understands Whom

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  A study conducted between 2002 and 2005, funded by the Nordic Cultural Fund, mapped how well young speakers of the Continental Scandinavian languages understood each other. The results were striking and asymmetrical. Youth in Oslo scored an average of 6.85 out of 10 across comprehension of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Youth in Copenhagen averaged just 3.87. Stockholm youth scored 4.51 on average, but specifically for Danish their average was only 3.46, the lowest single-language score in the survey.

  Participants from Malmö, in the southernmost Swedish province of Scania (Skåne), did noticeably better on Danish than their counterparts further north in Sweden. The study attributed this partly to access to Danish television and radio, direct train connections to Copenhagen over the Øresund Bridge, and a higher number of cross-border commuters in the Øresund Region. Even so, youth in Copenhagen showed a poor command of Swedish, suggesting the Øresund connection worked mostly in one direction.

  Faroese speakers outperformed everyone on comprehension of other languages within the group. Tested on Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, they averaged 7.01, with a Danish score of 8.28, the highest single-language score for any non-native group in the study. Faroese students study Danish at school, which accounts for much of that advantage. Icelandic speakers, by contrast, scored an average of only 4.19 across the three continental languages, with Swedish at 3.34. Icelandic is not mutually intelligible with any other language in the group, including Faroese, which is considered the closest relative.

  A 2005 survey of vocabulary across the Scandinavian languages found that English loanwords had doubled over the previous 30 years and then stood at 1.2% of words in everyday use. Icelandic imported fewer English words than any of its relatives, despite being the country that uses English most as a foreign language.

• 6. Languages, Dialects, and Borders

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  The Continental Scandinavian languages are sometimes cited as the clearest real-world example of the aphorism that a language is simply a dialect with an army and a navy. Within Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the differences between regional dialects can be larger than the differences across national borders, yet the political independence of those countries leads linguists and the general public alike to count them as separate languages.

  Norwegian sits at an unusual point in this picture. The country has two official written norms, Bokmål and Nynorsk. Beyond those, Riksmål, a more conservative variant closer to Danish, is used by a significant number of Norwegians, including the readership of Aftenposten, described in the source as the largest newspaper in Norway. A very small minority uses Høgnorsk, a form similar to Nynorsk but even more conservative. The prestige dialect in Norway, sometimes called Eastern Urban Norwegian and centered on the Oslo region, has moved geographically several times over the past 200 years, giving Norway a more fluid relationship with spoken norms than Denmark or Sweden.

  Elfdalian, spoken in the Älvdalen locality of Dalarna, sits at an even sharper boundary. Once classified as a Sveamål dialect of Swedish, Elfdalian now has an official orthography and is considered a separate language by many linguists on the grounds that it lacks mutual intelligibility with Swedish. It shares more features with West Scandinavian dialects than a straightforward east-west classification would predict. The Nordic Council, for its part, has at times referred to the Germanic languages of Scandinavia collectively as the "Scandinavian language" in the singular, and its official newsletter is written in that single composite form; a full merger of written norms, however, is considered highly unlikely.