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 overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the Viking Age, the Christianization of Scandinavia, and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 8th to the 15th centuries.
The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American languages. It is also placed on the lower right corner of consonants in some Latin transcriptions of various indigenous languages of the Caucasus mountains.
Thorn or þorn is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.
Æ is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. It was also used in Ossetian before switched back to its Cyrillic counterpart. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel. Diacritic variants include Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂ and Æ̃/æ̃.
The letter Å represents various sounds in several languages. It is a separate letter in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, North Frisian, Low Saxon, Transylvanian Saxon, Walloon, Chamorro, Lule Sami, Pite Sami, Skolt Sami, Southern Sami, Ume Sami, Pamirian languages, and Greenlandic alphabets. Additionally, it is part of the alphabets used for some Alemannic and Austro-Bavarian dialects of German.
The Danish and Norwegian alphabet is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish):
The Rök runestone is one of the most famous runestones, featuring the longest known runic inscription in stone. It can now be seen beside the church in Rök, Ödeshög Municipality, Östergötland, Sweden. It is considered the first piece of written Swedish literature and thus it marks the beginning of the history of Swedish literature.
The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. Also, the writing custom avoided carving the same rune consecutively for the same sound, so the spoken distinction between long and short vowels was lost in writing. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and minimal pairs that were written the same.
Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic in the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE. It evolved into the dialects of Old Norse at the beginning of the Viking Age around 800 CE, which later themselves evolved into the modern North Germanic languages.
The First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus. The anonymous author is today often referred to as the "First Grammarian".
In the 9th century, Old Norse began to diverge into Old West Norse and Old East Norse. In the 12th century, the dialects of Denmark and Sweden began to diverge, becoming Old Danish and Old Swedish in the 13th century. All were heavily influenced by Middle Low German during the medieval period. Though stages of language development are never as sharply delimited as implied here, and should not be taken too literally, the system of subdivisions used in this article is the most commonly used by Swedish linguists and is used for the sake of practicality.
The Karlevi Runestone, designated as Öl 1 by Rundata, is commonly dated to the late 10th century and located near the Kalmarsund straight in Karlevi on the island of Öland, Sweden. It is one of the most notable and prominent runestones and constitutes the oldest record of a stanza of skaldic verse.
Icelandic orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet which has 32 letters. Compared with the 26 letters of English, the Icelandic alphabet lacks C, Q, W and Z, but additionally has Ð, Þ, Æ and Ö. Six letters have forms with acute accents to produce Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú and Ý.
The Sjörup Runestone is a runestone in Scania, Sweden, from approximately 1000 AD that is classified as being in runestone style RAK. The Karlevi Runestone, the Egtved Runestone and the Hällestad Runestones may be connected to it.
Greenlandic Norse is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken in the Norse settlements of Greenland until their demise in the late 15th century. The language is primarily attested by runic inscriptions found in Greenland. The limited inscriptional evidence shows some innovations, including the use of initial t for þ, but also the conservation of certain features that changed in other Norse languages. Some runic features are regarded as characteristically Greenlandic, and when they are sporadically found outside of Greenland, they may suggest travelling Greenlanders.
Runic transliteration and transcription are part of analysing a runic inscription which involves transliteration of the runes into Latin letters, transcription into a normalized spelling in the language of the inscription, and translation of the inscription into a modern language. There is a long-standing practice of formatting transliterations in boldface and transcriptions in Italic type, as the two forms of rendering a runic text have to be kept distinct.
The medieval runes, or the futhork, was a Scandinavian runic alphabet that evolved from the Younger Futhark after the introduction of stung runes at the end of the Viking Age. These stung runes were regular runes with the addition of either a dot diacritic or bar diacritic to indicate that the rune stood for one of its secondary sounds. The medieval futhork was fully formed in the early 13th century. Due to the expansion of its character inventory, it was essentially possible to have each character in an inscription correspond to only one phoneme, something which was virtually impossible in Younger Futhark with its small inventory of 16 runes.
DR 110, or the Virring stone, is a runestone made of granite that measures 155 cm (61 in) in height, 120 cm (47 in) in width and 27 cm (11 in) in thickness. It is written in Old East Norse in the Younger Futhark, and the runestone style is in a form called RAK.
Södermanland runic inscription 140 is a Viking Age runestone inscribed in Old Norse with the Younger Futhark runic alphabet. It and Sö 139 stand close together on the south side of the road next to the brook at Korpbro, between Lid and Aspa in Ludgo parish, Nyköping Municipality, in Södermanland, but Sö 140 was found broken and has been re-erected. A cross in the centre of the stone formed by five bind runes has been variously interpreted as an invocation of Thor or as part of the inscription.
The Nylarsker stone 2, Ny Larsker stone I or DR 380 is a Viking Age runestone engraved in Old Norse with the Younger Futhark runic alphabet on Bornholm. The runestone was discovered in 1643 and first mentioned in Ole Worm's Monumenta Danica. It was to be found outside the entrance of Nylars Church until 1855. It is securely dated to the period 1075–1125, and belongs to a group of Bornholm runestones that were made during the transition from the Viking Age to the Nordic Middle Ages. It made in sandstone and it is 186 cm tall, 146,5 cm wide and 17 cm thick, and the style of the runestone is the runestone style RAK.
