Most of the innovations that appeared in Old Norse spread evenly through the Old Norse area. As a result, the dialects were similar and considered to be the same language, a language that they sometimes called the Danish tongue (), sometimes Norse language (), as evidenced in the following two quotes from by
Snorri Sturluson: However, some changes were geographically limited and so created a dialectal difference between Old West Norse and Old East Norse. As Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse, in the 8th century, the effects of the
umlauts seem to have been very much the same over the whole Old Norse area. But in later dialects of the language a split occurred mainly between west and east as the use of umlauts began to vary. The typical umlauts (for example , OIC > .
Old Icelandic In Iceland, initial before was lost: compare Icelandic with Danish , OEN . The change is shared with Old Gutnish. A specifically Icelandic sound, the long,
u-umlauted A, spelled and pronounced , developed around the early 11th century. Thus, pre-13th-century (with ) 'green' became spelled as in modern Icelandic (with ). The 12th-century
Gray Goose Laws manuscripts distinguish the vowels, and so does the
Codex Regius copy. Towards the end of the 13th century, () merged to ().
Old Norwegian Around the 11th century, Old Norwegian , , and became , and . It is debatable whether the sequences represented a consonant cluster () or devoicing (). Orthographic evidence suggests that in a confined dialect of Old Norwegian, may have been unrounded before and that
u-umlaut was reversed unless the
u had been eliminated: , > , .
Greenlandic Norse This dialect of Old West Norse was spoken by Icelandic colonies in Greenland. When the colonies died out around the 15th century, the dialect went with it. The phoneme and some instances of merged to and so Old Icelandic became .
Text example The following text is from , an
Alexander Romance. The manuscript,
AM 519 a 4to, is dated . The facsimile demonstrates the
sigla used by scribes to write Old Norse. Many of them were borrowed from Latin. Without familiarity with these abbreviations, the facsimile will be unreadable to many. In addition, reading the manuscript itself requires familiarity with the letterforms of the native script. The abbreviations are expanded in a version with normalized spelling like that of the
standard normalization system. Compared to the spelling of the same text in Modern Icelandic, pronunciation has changed greatly, but spelling has changed little since
Icelandic orthography was intentionally modelled after Old Norse in the 19th century. •
a printed in
uncial. Uncials not encoded separately in Unicode as of this section's writing.
Old East Norse in
Östergötland, Sweden, is the longest surviving source of early Old East Norse. It is inscribed on both sides.
Old East Norse or
Old East Nordic between 800 and 1100 is called
Runic Swedish in Sweden and
Runic Danish in Denmark, but for geographical rather than linguistic reasons. Any differences between the two were minute at best during the more ancient stages of this dialect group. Changes had a tendency to occur earlier in the Danish region. Even today many Old Danish changes have still not taken place in modern Swedish. Swedish is therefore the more
conservative of the two in both the ancient and the modern languages, sometimes by a profound margin. The language is called "runic" because the body of text appears in
runes. Runic Old East Norse is characteristically conservative in form, especially Swedish (which is still true for modern Swedish compared to Danish). In essence it matches or surpasses the conservatism of post-runic Old West Norse, which in turn is generally more conservative than post-runic Old East Norse. While typically "Eastern" in structure, many later post-runic changes and trademarks of OEN had yet to happen. The phoneme
ʀ, which evolved during the Proto-Norse period from
z, was still clearly separated from
r in most positions, even when being geminated, while in OWN it had already merged with
r. The
Proto-Germanic phoneme */w/ was preserved in initial sounds in Old East Norse (w-), unlike in West Norse where it developed into . It survived in rural
Swedish dialects in the provinces of Westro- and North Bothnia,
Skåne,
Blekinge,
Småland,
Halland,
Västergötland and south of
Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th century. It is still preserved in the
Dalecarlian dialects in the province of
Dalarna, Sweden, and in
Jutlandic dialects in Denmark. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants (kw-, tw-, sw- etc.) in Old East Norse and did so into modern times in said Swedish dialects and in a number of others. Generally, the initial w-sound developed into in dialects earlier than after consonants where it survived much longer. In summation, the -sound survived in the East Nordic tongues almost a millennium longer than in the West Norse counterparts, and does still subsist at the present. Monophthongization of > and > started in mid-10th-century Denmark. Compare runic OEN: , , , , ; with Post-runic OEN: , , , , ; OWN: , , , , ; from PN , , , + , . Feminine
o-stems often preserve the plural ending , while in OWN they more often merge with the feminine
i-stems: (runic OEN) , , , versus OWN , and (Danish has mainly lost the distinction between the two stems, with both endings now being rendered as or alternatively for the
o-stems ; modern Swedish , , ). Vice versa, masculine
i-stems with the root ending in either or tended to shift the plural ending to that of the
ja-stems while OEN kept the original: , and versus OWN , and (modern Danish , , ; modern Swedish , , ). The plural ending of
ja-stems were mostly preserved while those of OWN often acquired that of the
i-stems: , , versus OWN ,
bekkir, (modern Swedish , , ).
Old Danish Until the early 12th century, Old East Norse was very much a uniform dialect. It was in Denmark that the first innovations appeared that would differentiate Old Danish from Old Swedish () as these innovations spread north unevenly (unlike the earlier changes that spread more evenly over the East Norse area), creating a series of
isoglosses going from
Zealand to
Svealand. In Old Danish, merged with during the 9th century. From the 11th to 14th centuries, the unstressed vowels -
a, -
o and -
e (
standard normalization -
a, -
u and -
i) started to merge into a single central vowel, represented with the letter , which also came from widespread
epenthesis, occurring particularly before
-ʀ endings. At the same time, the voiceless
stop consonants
p,
t and
k became voiced plosives and even
fricative consonants. Resulting from these innovations, Danish has (cake), (tongues) and (guests) whereas (Standard) Swedish has retained older forms, , and (OEN , , ). Moreover, the Danish
pitch accent shared with Norwegian and Swedish changed into
stød around this time.
Old Swedish At the end of the 10th and early 11th century initial
h- before
l,
n and
r was still preserved in the middle and northern parts of Sweden, and is sporadically still preserved in some northern dialects as
g-, e.g. , from . The
Dalecarlian dialects developed independently from Old Swedish and as such can be considered separate languages from Swedish.
Text example This is an extract from , the Westrogothic law. It is the oldest text written as a manuscript found in Sweden and from the 13th century. It is contemporaneous with most of the Icelandic literature. The text marks the beginning of
Old Swedish as a distinct dialect.
Old Gutnish Due to
Gotland's early isolation from the mainland, many features of Old Norse did not spread from or to the island, and Old Gutnish developed as an entirely separate branch from Old East and West Norse. For example, the diphthong in , and was not subject to
anticipatory assimilation to as in e.g. Old Icelandic , and . Gutnish also shows dropping of in initial , which it shares with the Old West Norse dialects (except Old East Norwegian), but which is otherwise abnormal. Breaking was also particularly active in Old Gutnish, leading to e.g. versus mainland .
Text example The is the longest text surviving from
Old Gutnish. Appended to it is a short texting dealing with the history of the Gotlanders. This part relates to the agreement that the Gotlanders had with the Swedish king sometime before the 9th century: == Relationship to other languages ==