SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES. Closely allied lan guages are and have been spoken by the Teutonic population in Scandinavia, and by the inhabitants of the countries that have been wholly or partially peopled from it, in Sweden, except where Finnish and Lappish prevail; in southern Russia (government of Kerson), a village colonized from Dap:5; Norway, except where peopled by Finns and Lapps ; Denmark, with the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland, and the northern half of Slesvig Nord. Scandinavian dialects were also spoken for varying periods in the following places : Norwegian in certain parts of Ireland (A.D. 800-1 2 5o) and northern Scotland, in the Isle of Man (800-145o), the Hebrides (800—I400), the Shetland Islands (800-1800), and the Orkneys (800-1800), Danish in the whole of Slesvig Nord, in the north-eastern part of England (the Danelagh, q.v., '175), and in Normandy (goo—iioo or a little longer) ; Swedish in Russia (862-1300 or a little longer) ; Icelandic in Greenland 1450).
The Teutonic population existed in Scandinavia before the Christian era, and it is only from the beginning of that era that we get any information concerning the language of the old Scan dinavians, which by that time had spread over Denmark and great parts of southern and middle Sweden and of Norway, and had reached Finland (at least Nyland) and Estonia. The lan guage appears to have been fairly homogeneous throughout the whole territory, and as the mother of the younger Scandinavian tongues has been named the primitive Scandinavian (urnordisk) language. The words borrowed during the first centuries of the Christian era by the Lapps from the inhabitants of central Swe den and Norway, and by the Finns from their neighbours in Fin land and Estonia, and partly from their Gothic neighbours in Russia and the Baltic provinces, and preserved in Finnish and Lappish down to our own days, denoted chiefly utensils belong ing to a fairly advanced stage of culture and amount to several hundreds, with a phonetic form of a very primitive stamp. These words and those mentioned by contemporary Roman and Greek authors are the oldest existing traces of any Teutonic language, but throw little light on the nature of the original northern tongue. The primitive northern runic inscriptions, the oldest upon the utensils found at Vi in Slesvig Nord and Thorsbjerg in Denmark, dating back to about A.D. 250-300, together with the ms. fragments of Ulfilas' Gothic translation of the Bible, about 200 years later in date, constitute the oldest genuine monuments of any Teutonic tongue.
Although very brief, and not yet thoroughly interpreted, these primitive Scandinavian inscriptions enable us to deter mine with some certainty the relation which the language in which they are written bears to other languages. Thus it belongs to the Teutonic family of the Indo-European stock of languages, of which it constitutes an independent and individual branch. Its nearest relation being the Gothic, these two branches were for merly sometimes taken together under the general denomination Eastern Teutonic, as opposed to the other Teutonic idioms (Ger man, English, Dutch, etc.), then called Western Teutonic.
Before the beginning of the so-called Viking period (since about A.D. 800) the primitive Scandinavian language had under gone a considerable transformation, and at this epoch the primi tive Scandinavian language must be considered as no longer existing. The centuries A.D. 700-1000 form a period of transition as regards the language as well as the alphabet which it employed. The language of inscriptions dating from about A.D. 800 not only differs widely from the original Scandinavian, but also exhibits dialectical peculiarities suggesting the existence of a Danish Swedish language as opposed to Norwegian. These differences are unimportant and the Scandinavians still considered their language as one and the same throughout Scandinavia, and named it Densk tunga, Danish tongue. But when Iceland was colonized (c. goo), chiefly from western Norway, a separate (western) Nor wegian dialect gradually sprang up, at first differing slightly from the mother-tongue. At the definitive introduction of Christianity (about A.D. I000), the language had been differentiated in runic inscriptions and in the literature which was then arising, into four different dialects, and Swedish and Danish (eastern Scandinavian) and Icelandic and Norwegian (western Scandinavian, or north ern tongue) are very nearly related to each other. The most important differences between the two branches, as seen in the oldest preserved documents, are (I) in E. Scand. for fewer cases of "Umlaut," (2) E. Scand. "Brechung" of y into iu (or io) be fore ng(w), nk(w), (3) in E. Scand. nk, nt are in many cases not assimilated into pp, kk, tt; (4) in E. Scand. the dative of the definite plural ends in -umin instead of W. Scand. -onorn; (5) in E. Scand. the simplification of the verbal inflectional end ings is much farther advanced, and the passive ends in -s(s) for -sk. In several of these points, and indeed generally speaking, the western Scandinavian languages have preserved the more primi tive forms, which also are found in the oldest eastern Scandinav ian runic inscriptions, dating from a period before the beginning of the literature, as well as in many modern eastern Scandinavian dialects. Leaving out of account the Icelandic dialects and those of the Faeroes, each of which constitutes a separate group, the remainder may be thus classified : I. West Norwegian Dialects—spoken on the western coast of Norway between Langesund and Molde.
3. The dialects on the island of Gotland.