North Germanic Languages - Classification

Classification

In historical linguistics, the North Germanic family tree is divided into two main branches, West Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic) and East Scandinavian languages (Danish and Swedish), along with various dialects and varieties. The two branches are derived from the western and eastern dialect group of Old Norse, respectively. There was also an Old Gutnish branch spoken on the island of Gotland. The East Scandinavian languages (and modern Norwegian, through Danish) were heavily influenced by Middle Low German during the period of Hanseatic expansion.

Currently, English loanwords are influencing the languages. A 2005 survey of words used by speakers of the Scandinavian languages showed that the number of English loanwords used in the languages has doubled during the last 30 years and is now 1.2%. Icelandic has imported fewer English words than the other Scandinavian languages, despite the fact that it is the country that uses English most.

Another way of classifying the languages — focusing on mutual intelligibility rather than the tree of life-model — posits Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish as Continental Scandinavian, and Faroese and Icelandic as Insular Scandinavian. Because of the long political union between Norway and Denmark, moderate and conservative forms of Norwegian Bokmål share most of the Danish vocabulary and grammar, and was virtually identical to written Danish until the spelling reform of 1907. (For this reason, Bokmål and its unofficial, more conservative variant Riksmål is sometimes considered East Scandinavian, and Nynorsk West Scandinavian via the West-East division shown above.) However, Danish has developed a greater distance between the spoken and written versions of the language, so the differences between spoken Norwegian and Danish are somewhat more significant than the difference between the written. In writing, Danish is relatively close to the other Continental Scandinavian languages, but the sound developments of spoken Danish include reduction and assimilation of consonants and vowels, as well as the prosodic feature called stød in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"), developments which have not occurred in the other languages (though the stød corresponds to the different tones in Norwegian and Swedish, which are tonal languages). However, Scandinavians are widely expected to understand the other spoken Scandinavian languages. Some people may have some difficulties, particularly older people who speak a dialect, but most people can understand the standard languages, as they appear in radio and television, of the other Scandinavian countries.

Sweden left the Kalmar union in 1523 due to conflicts with Denmark, leaving two Scandinavian units: the union of Denmark-Norway (ruled from Copenhagen, Denmark) and Sweden (including present-day Finland). The two countries were taking different sides during several wars until 1814 and made different international contacts. This led to different borrowings from foreign languages (Sweden had a francophile period), for example the older Swedish word vindöga (“window”) was replaced by fönster, whilst native vindue was kept in Danish. Norwegians, who spoke (and still speak) the Norwegian dialects derived from Old Norse, would say vindauga or similar. The written language of Denmark-Norway however, was based on the dialect of Copenhagen and thus had vindue. On the other hand, the word begynde (“begin”, now written begynne in Norwegian Bokmål) was borrowed into Danish and Norwegian, whilst native börja was kept in Swedish. Even though standard Swedish and Danish were moving apart, the dialects were not influenced that much. Thus Norwegian and Swedish would still be similar in pronunciation, and words like børja would be able to survive in some of the Norwegian dialects whilst vindöga survived in some of the Swedish dialects. The minority written standard of Norwegian (Nynorsk) incorporates a great portion of these words, like byrja, veke (Swedish vecka, Danish uge) and vatn (Swedish vatten, Danish vand) whereas Bokmål has kept the Danish forms (begynne, uke, vann). This way Nynorsk is causing trouble for the above model, as it shares a lot of features with Swedish. According to Norwegian linguist Arne Torp, the Nynorsk project (whose goal was to re-establish a written Norwegian language) would be much harder to carry out if Norway had been in union with Sweden instead of Denmark, simply because the differences would be smaller.