Middle Norwegian (
Norwegian Bokmål: ;
Norwegian Nynorsk: , ) is a form of the
Norwegian language
Norwegian ( ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelli ...
that was spoken from 1350 up to 1550 and was the last phase of Norwegian in its original state, before
Danish replaced Norwegian as the official written language in
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
.
Language history
The
Black Death
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the list of epidemics, most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as people perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population. ...
came to Norway in 1349, killing over 60% of the population.
This significantly affected the development of Norwegian down the line.
The language in Norway after 1350 until about 1550 is generally referred to as Middle Norwegian. During this period the language went through several changes: morphological paradigms were simplified, including the loss of
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...
s and the levelling of personal inflection on verbs. An
epenthetic "e" gradually appeared before the nominative ending from Old Norse to ease pronunciation. This made terms such as change to .
The -r disappeared from the language altogether, and so did the epenthetic in most dialects, but some still retain this vowel.
A
vowel reduction
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic ''quality'' of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Muscogee language), and which ar ...
also took place, in some dialects, including in parts of Norway, reducing many final unstressed vowels in a word to a common "e".
The
phonemic
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
inventory also underwent changes. The
dental fricatives, represented by the letters
þ and
ð, disappeared from Norwegian, either by merging with their equivalent
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...
s, represented by
t and
d, respectively, or by being lost altogether.
Danicisation of the written language
During the 15th century, Middle Norwegian gradually ceased to be used as a written language. At the end of the 16th century,
Christian IV of Denmark-Norway (1577–1648) decided to revise and translate
Magnus VI of Norway's 13th century ''
Landslov'' "Country Law" into
Danish, since it was originally written in
Old West Norse
Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was 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 ...
. In 1604, the revised version of the law was introduced. The translation of this law marks the final transition to Danish as the administrative language in Norway.
References
External links
Dinara, Alieva. (2013) The adnominal genitive constructs in middle norwegian (in norwegian).
Norwegian language
Languages attested from the 14th century
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