Old Swedish (

Modern Swedish Modern Swedish ( sv, nysvenska) is the Linguistics, linguistic term used for the Swedish language from the Bible translation of 1526 to the development of a common national language around 1880. The period can further be divided into ''Early Mode ...

: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 until about 1526. Old Swedish developed from

Old East Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...

, the eastern dialect of

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlemen ...

. The earliest forms of the Swedish and

Danish language Danish (; , ) is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schle ...

s, spoken between the years 800 and 1100, were dialects of Old East Norse and are referred to as ''

Runic Swedish Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...

'' and ''Runic Danish'' because at the time all texts were written in the

runic alphabet Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

. The differences were only minute, however, and the dialects truly began to diverge around the 12th century, becoming Old Swedish and Old Danish in the 13th century. It is not known when exactly

Old Gutnish Old Gutnish or Old Gotlandic was a North Germanic language spoken on the Baltic Sea, Baltic island of Gotland. It shows sufficient differences from the Old West Norse and Old East Norse dialects that it is considered to be a separate branch. ...

and

Elfdalian Elfdalian or Övdalian ( or , pronounced in Elfdalian, or in Swedish) is a North Germanic language spoken by up to 3,000 people who live or have grown up in the locality of Älvdalen ('), which is located in the southeastern part of Älvdale ...

began to diverge from Swedish, but Old Gutnish diverged long before Old Danish did. Early Old Swedish was markedly different from modern Swedish in that it had a more complex case structure and had not yet experienced a reduction of the gender system and thus had three genders. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and

accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...

Development

Early Old Swedish

The writing of the Westrogothic law marked the beginning of Early Old Swedish ( or ; 1225–1375), which had developed from Old East Norse. It was the first Swedish language document written in the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

, and its oldest fragments have been dated to around the year 1225. Old Swedish was relatively stable during this period. The phonological and grammatical systems inherited from Old Norse were relatively well preserved and did not experience any major changes. Most of the texts from the Early Old Swedish period were written in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, as it was the language of knowledge and the

Church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship * C ...

. However, Old Swedish was used as a literary language as well, and laws especially were written in it; of the 28 surviving manuscripts from this period, 24 contain law texts. Much of the knowledge of Old Swedish comes from these law texts. In addition to laws, some religious and poetic texts were also written in Old Swedish.

Loanwords

The Catholic Church and its various

monastic orders Monasticism (from Ancient Greek , , from , , 'alone'), also referred to as monachism, or monkhood, is a religious way of life in which one renounces worldly pursuits to devote oneself fully to spiritual work. Monastic life plays an important rol ...

introduced many new

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and Latin

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...

s into Old Swedish. Latin especially had an influence on the written language.Grünbaun, Katharina
''Svenska språket''
. Svenska institutet. The

Middle Low German Middle Low German or Middle Saxon (autonym: ''Sassisch'', i.e. " Saxon", Standard High German: ', Modern Dutch: ') is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented i ...

language also influenced Old Swedish due to the economic and political power of the Hanseatic League during the 13th and 14th centuries. Many German speakers immigrated to Swedish cities and worked in trade and administration. Accordingly, loanwords relating to warfare, trade, crafts and bureaucracy entered the Swedish language directly from Low German, along with some grammatical suffixes and conjunctions. The prefixes , and that can be found in the beginning of modern Swedish words came from the Low German , and . Some words were replaced with new ones: the native word for window, , was replaced with , (kitchen) was replaced with and (to pay) with . Some of these words still exist in Modern Swedish but are often considered archaic or dialectal; one example is the word (window). Many words related to seafaring were borrowed from Dutch. The influence of Low German was so strong that the inflectional system of Old Swedish was largely broken down.

Late Old Swedish

In contrast to the stable Early Old Swedish, Late Old Swedish (; 1375–1526) experienced many changes, including a simplification of the grammatical system and a

vowel shift A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language. The best-known example in the English language is the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the 15th century. The Greek language also underwent a vow ...

, so that in the 16th century the language resembled modern Swedish more than before. The printing of the

New Testament The New Testament grc, Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. ; la, Novum Testamentum. (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Chri ...

in Swedish in 1526 marked the starting point for modern Swedish. In this period Old Swedish had taken in a large amount of new vocabulary primarily from Latin, Low German and Dutch. When the country became part of the Kalmar Union in 1397, many Danish scribes brought Danicisms into the written language.

Orthography

Old Swedish used some letters that are no longer found in modern Swedish: and were used for modern and respectively, and could stand for both (''th'' as in the) and (''th'' as in thing). In the latter part of the 14th century was replaced with and . The

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...

could stand for both the

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

s and (e.g. (soul), in modern Swedish). The graphemes , , and were used interchangeably with the phonemes and (e.g. (without), in modern Swedish), and could also sometimes stand for the consonant-vowel combinations and : ( or dove). Certain abbreviations were used in writing, such as for (modern , with). The letter combinations , and were often written so that one of the letters stood above the other as a smaller letter, , and , which led to the development of the modern letters , , and .

Phonology

The root syllable length in Old Swedish could be short (), long (, ) or overlong (). During the Late Old Swedish period the short root syllables () were lengthened and the overlong root syllables () were shortened, so modern Swedish only has the combinations and . Unlike in modern Swedish, a short vowel in Old Swedish did not entail a long consonant. There were eight

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s in Early Old Swedish: . A

() occurred during the Late Old Swedish period, which had the following effects: * became ( > ''hus'' , house) * became ( > ''bok'' , book) * became ( > blå , blue) The

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...

sounds were largely the same as in modern Swedish, with the notable exceptions of and , which do not exist in modern Swedish (although the former is preserved in

and to some extent also the latter). The Modern Swedish tje-sound ( � and sje-sound ( � were probably and , respectively, similar to their values in modern Finland Swedish. A similar change can be seen from Old Spanish and to Modern Spanish and . The

Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bran ...

phoneme was preserved in initial sounds in Old Swedish (w-) and did survive in rural

Swedish dialects Swedish dialects are the various forms of the Swedish language, particularly those that differ considerably from Standard Swedish. Traditional dialects The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called ' ...

in the provinces of Skåne,

Halland Halland () is one of the traditional provinces of Sweden (''landskap''), on the western coast of Götaland, southern Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Småland, Scania and the sea of Kattegat. Until 1645 and the Second Treaty of Brömseb ...

Västergötland Västergötland (), also known as West Gothland or the Latinized version Westrogothia in older literature, is one of the 25 traditional non-administrative provinces of Sweden (''landskap'' in Swedish), situated in the southwest of Sweden. Väs ...

and south of Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is still preserved in the

Dalecarlian dialects Dalecarlian (''dalmål'' in Swedish) is a group of East and West Scandinavian languages, and their respective dialects spoken in Dalarna County, Sweden. Some Dalecarlian varieties can be regarded as part of the Swedish dialect group in Gäs ...

in the province of

Dalarna Dalarna () is a '' landskap'' (historical province) in central Sweden. English exonyms for it are Dalecarlia () and the Dales. Dalarna adjoins Härjedalen, Hälsingland, Gästrikland, Västmanland and Värmland. It is also bordered by Norwa ...

, Sweden. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants (kw-, tw- etc.) in Old Swedish and did so into modern times in said dialects, as well as in the Westro- and North Bothnian tongues in northern Sweden.

Grammar

Nominal morphology

In Early Old Swedish

The most defining difference between Old Swedish and modern Swedish was the more complex grammatical system of the former. In Old Swedish nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases ( nominative, genitive, dative and

), whereas modern standard Swedish has reduced the case system to a common form and a genitive (some dialects retain distinct dative forms). There were also three

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

s (masculine, feminine and neuter), still retained in many dialects today, but now reduced to two in the standard language, where the masculine and feminine have merged. These features of Old Swedish are still found in modern Icelandic and Faroese; the noun declensions are almost identical. Noun

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...

s fell under two categories: weak and strong.Noreen, Adolf
''Altschwedische Grammatik, mit Einschluss des Altgutnischen''
1904. Retrieved 2009-28-10. The weak masculine, feminine and neuter nouns had their own declensions and at least three groups of strong masculine nouns, three groups of strong feminine nouns and one group of strong neuter nouns can be identified. Below is an overview of the noun declension system: The noun declension system *Vowel stems (strong declension) **a-stems ***a-stems ***ja-stems ***ia-stems **ō-stems ***ō-stems ***jō-stems ***iō-stems **i-stems **u-stems *Consonant n-stems (weak declension) **n-stems ***an-stems ***ōn, ūn-stems ***īn-stems *Consonant stems ** monosyllabic stems ** r-stems ** nd-stems Some noun paradigms of the words (fish), (son), (bed), (ship), (bit) and (week):

In Late Old Swedish

By the year 1500 the number of cases in Old Swedish had been reduced from four ( nominative, genitive, dative and

) to two (nominative and genitive). The dative case, however, lived on in a few

dialects The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

well into the 20th century. Other major changes include the loss of a separate inflectional system for masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns and adjectives in the course of the 15th century, leaving only two genders in the standard Swedish language, although three genders are still common in many of the dialects. The old dative forms of the personal pronouns became the

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

forms (''honom'', ''henne'', ''dem''; him, her, them) and ''-s'' became more common as the ending for the genitive singular.

Adjectives

Adjectives and certain numerals were inflected according to the gender and case the noun they modified was in. Below is a table of the inflection of weak adjectives.

Verbs

Verbs in Old Swedish were conjugated according to person and number. There were four weak verb conjugations and six groups of strong verbs. The difference between weak and strong verbs is in the way the

past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some ha ...

( preterite) is formed: strong verbs form it with a vowel shift in the root of the verb, while weak verbs form it with a dental suffix (þ, d or t).Germanic languages: conjugate Old Swedish verbs
''Verbix.com''. Retrieved 2009-28-10.

Strong verbs

The verbs in the table below are (bite), (offer), (become), (steal), (measure) and (go).

Weak verbs

Weak verbs are grouped into four classes: *First conjugation: verbs ending in , in the present tense. Most verbs belong to this class. *Second conjugation: verbs ending in , in the present tense. *Third conjugation: verbs ending in , in the present tense. *Fourth conjugation: these verbs have a more or less irregular conjugation. About twenty verbs belong to this class. Inside the conjugation classes the weak verbs are also categorised into further three classes: *I: those ending in in the preterite *II: those ending in in the preterite *III: those ending in in the preterite

Syntax

Word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

was less restricted in Old Swedish than modern Swedish due to complex verbal morphology. Both referential and nonreferential subjects could be left out as verbal structures already conveyed the necessary information, in much the same way as in languages such as Spanish and

. In nominal phrases the genitive attribute could stand both before and after the word it modified, i.e. one could say ''his house'' or ''house his''. The same was true for pronouns and adjectives (''that house'' or ''house that''; ''green pasture'' or ''pasture green''). During the Late Old Swedish period the usage of the genitive attribute became increasingly more restricted, and it nearly always came to be placed before the word it modified, so in modern Swedish one would usually only say (his house), or in some dialects or manners of emphasis, , but almost never . However, this too has lived on in some dialects, like in

Västgötska Västgötska is a Swedish dialect spoken in the western Swedish province of Västergötland. Specifically, Västgötska commonly refers to several variants of the more broadly defined Götamål spoken across Västergötland except for Gothenburg ...

, where the use of (mother yours) has been common.

Personal pronouns

Below is a table of the Old Swedish

personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

Numerals

The Old Swedish

cardinal number In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. T ...

s are as follows. Numbers from one to four decline in the nominative, genitive, dative and accusative cases and in all three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter); here the nominative forms are given. Numbers above four are indeclinable. The higher numbers are as follows. The numbers 21–29, 31–39, and so on are formed in the following way: (, , etc.) , , etc.

Examples

Västgötalagen

This is an extract from the Westrogothic law (), which is the oldest continuous text written in the Swedish language, and was compiled during the early 13th century. The text marks the beginning of Old Swedish. : Modern Swedish: : English: :''If someone slays a Swede or a Smålander, a man from the kingdom, but not a West

Geat The Geats ( ; ang, gēatas ; non, gautar ; sv, götar ), sometimes called ''Goths'', were a large North Germanic tribe who inhabited ("land of the Geats") in modern southern Sweden from antiquity until the late Middle Ages. They are one of th ...

, he will pay eight örtugar and thirteen marks, but no

wergild Weregild (also spelled wergild, wergeld (in archaic/historical usage of English), weregeld, etc.), also known as man price (blood money), was a precept in some archaic legal codes whereby a monetary value was established for a person's life, to b ...

. ..If someone slays a Dane or a

Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...

, he will pay nine marks. If someone slays a foreigner, he shall not be banished and have to flee to his clan. If someone slays a foreign priest, he will pay as much as for a fellow countryman. A priest counts as a free man. If a Southerner is slain or an

Englishman The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common history and culture. The English identity is of Anglo-Saxon origin, when they were known in ...

, he shall pay four marks to the plaintiff and two marks to the king.''

The Life of Saint Eric

This text about Eric IX Gordon and Taylor Old Norse readings
''Germanic Lexicon Project''. Section "XX The Life of Saint Eric". Retrieved 2009-28-10. : Translation: :''Here we want to say with God's grace a few words about that holy God's martyr Saint Eric, who was earlier the

King of Sweden The monarchy of Sweden is the monarchical head of state of Sweden,See the Instrument of Government, Chapter 1, Article 5. which is a constitutional and hereditary monarchy with a parliamentary system.Parliamentary system: see the Instrument ...

. In both heritage and nobility he was fastly of royal extraction as other Swedish leaders. Since the realm was without a leader and he was beloved by all of the land's nobility and all of the common people, the commoners chose him as King with all of their good will, and sat him reverentially on the King's throne at

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inhabitants in 2019. Located north of the c ...

.''

Notes

Bibliography

* Bergman, Gösta.''Kortfattad svensk språkhistoria''. Prisma 1980. * Kirro, Arto; Himanen, Ritva. ''Textkurs i fornsvenska''. Universitetet 1988. * Noreen, Adolf. ''Altschwedische Grammatik''. 1904. * Wessén, Elias. ''Fornsvenska texter: med förklaringar och ordlista''. Läromedelsförlagen, Svenska bokförlagen 1969.

References

External links

''Altschwedische Grammatik''
by Adolf Noreen at the Germanic Lexicon Project
Old Swedish verb conjugator
{{Germanic languages Swedish, Old Swedish, Old

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

Swedish language Languages attested from the 13th century Swedish, Old