A Brief Introduction to the Scandinavian Languages
Introduction
The Northern Lights smear, coppery and verdant, across the night skies. Fjords ooze around moss-matted rocks. In the summer, the sun stays high in the heavens, and in the winter it sinks below the horizon and stubbornly remains there. This is Scandinavia.
Though rich in linguistic and dialectal diversity, the Great North is home to the seven big “sisters,” as Ruth H. Sanders has pegged them in her groundbreaking book The Languages of Scandinavia: Danish, Norwegian (with its two different written forms, New Norwegian and Bokmål), Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, and Sámi (alternately spelled Saami). Scandinavia traditionally refers to the nations of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, while the term Nordic encompasses this and Finland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands.
A large amount of descriptive research of the Scandinavian and Nordic languages has been for the consumption of linguists and historians. When reconstructing or representing ancient and deceased languages, linguists rely on the so-called daughter languages, or languages that descend from the theoretical proto-language, to comparatively piece back the grammar – this method is indeed referred to as the comparative method. In use as well are archaeological gatherings – in the case of Old Norse this may be present in runes. Synthesizing this information is how linguists work to piece together what ancestral languages may have sounded like and what their grammatical inventory may have consisted of. Thus the purpose of this article is to present an accessible introduction to these languages, their grammar, and the issues that their speakers face. Further, this is the first in a series of linguistic studies and language families.
All in the Family
The most-spoken Nordic languages consist of two unrelated families. To the west, linguists and speakers encounter the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. Descended from the language known as Old Norse, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese are somewhat mutually intelligible (Faarlund).
To the east, we see a different situation altogether. Finnish and Sámi are members of the Uralic family, named for the concentration of these languages to the Ural mountains, and trace their lineage back to the proposed language Proto-Uralic. There are thirty-eight spoken Uralic languages, with Finnish being among the most studied and spoken, alongside Estonian and Hungarian (Wood).
Histories
There are unsolved mysteries that float about all studies of the Nordic languages and their histories. Beginning in the second century AD, the rise of the runic alphabet leads many scholars down rabbit holes that they are tunneling through even today. These runes represented Germanic languages – not “yet identifiably Scandinavian” (Sanders, 67) – and have been proposed to have arisen from the Goths, a Germanic people, with possible influence from Latin (Runic Alphabet).
The Uralic languages are older than the Northern Germanic. Proto-Uralic is dated to around 5000 BC, with Proto-Finno-Ugric (the more immediate ancestor of Finnish and Sámi) appearing in 4500 BC (Sanders, 15). The Indo-European languages, which possibly originate in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) and Turkey, spread west across Europe, establishing themselves as among the most widely-spoken languages on the planet today (Wallis). Haugen (1976) in his biography of the Scandinavian languages posits that this family made it to the region by 3000 BC.
The rise of Christianity, particularly Catholicism, punctured the relative isolation that the Old Scandinavian languages, which date to around 600 AD, endured or enjoyed, and brought with it massive changes in orthography (the runic alphabet was retired for the Latin) and culture. Now, the Nordic countries were brought into the greater sphere of European literary and intellectual life. Haugen writes of a “great wave” (Faarlund) of Latin words (filtered through Western Germanic sources) from the Church mixing with the indigenous Old Norse dialects (Haugen, 215).
Linguistics
As a member of the Germanic branch of the broader, Brobdingnagian Indo-European tree, the Old Norse-derived languages of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese display obvious similarities, characteristics that have ridden the waves of time and remain in the tongues of the denizens of these countries. In their texts, Ralph de Gorog, who reviewed The Scandinavian Languages by Einar Haugen, and the Encyclopedia Britannica outline the characteristics of the North Germanic languages. For the purposes of clarity, we will discuss what these characteristics mean in more accessible language.
Firstly, with regards to orthography (a language or language family’s spelling systems), we see that all seven languages now use the Latin alphabet. However, Icelandic and Faroese maintain the runic letters thorn (capital Þ and lowercase þ) and eth (capital Đ and lowercase ð). Thorn is a voiceless dental fricative while eth is a voiced dental fricative, meaning that the sound is made by pushing air through a narrowed part of the mouth. By saying that a consonant is voiced versus voiceless, we are saying that the vocal folds are vibrating in the former. Discerning voiced and voiceless consonants are traditionally done by pressing the fingers to the front of the throat and speaking a specific letter or word; what we find is that we feel a wiggle in the throat in the voiced consonants. This translates into the thorn being pronounced like English th and is “bath” while the eth is pronounced like the th in “bathe.”
Next we will look at phonology (the sounds of a language), starting with stress. The stress falls on the first syllable of a native word but the stress of a word borrowed from another language falls on the later segment, except for Icelandic, where the stress comes upon the initial syllable regardless (de Gorog).
We will examine the example of Icelandic more in depth here. Spoken by roughly 330,000 people, Icelandic is notable for its unusual closeness to Old Norse, meaning that it has been relatively free from major changes from its ancestral tongue. Exactly what Old Norse sounded like cannot be known with certainty, of course, but Icelanders can read the ancient eddas with relative ease (Neijmann). Stefán Einarsson in his 1945 publication Icelandic outlined the grammar of this beautiful language for the first time for English speakers. Thus the mechanics underpinning Icelandic became clear for many, including the fact that the language has three genders, two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases, the definition of which will be outlined below (Einarsson, 32).
It also has “strong” and “weak” declension. “Strong” declension refers to adjectives that end in a consonant, while “weak” encompasses those words that end in a vowel, all of which becomes relevant when declining the word itself (32). Pulling an example from the Icelandic language education site Ylhýra, we see that a so-called strong declension of an adjective is different from a weak-declined adjective like goður, meaning good. The declension of goður is strong because it ends in a consonant. Thus, the Ylhýra example of good coffee becomes gott kaffi. Note the word-final consonant. However, when we add an article, which in Icelandic appears as suffixes, the adjective takes a vowel ending, which causes the declension of the word to differ from its “strong” form: góða kaffið, or the good coffee. See the vowel at play here (Strong and Weak Declension).
We can direct our attention to the Uralic languages spoken in the Nordic countries, Finnish and Sámi. Both of these are agglutinative languages, meaning that they join morphemes together in impossibly long strands such that words can become quite long, sometimes expressing a sentence in a single word (Agglutination). Vowel harmony, which typifies Uralic languages and is defined as a type of phonological assimilation in which vowels come to share certain characteristics spread throughout the entire word, such as rounding of the lips or tone. Both Finnish and Sámi present vowel harmony. Suomi and colleagues (1997) conduct a more thorough study of this phenomenon. In the case of Finnish, we see that the vowels of a single word may either be all front vowels – spoken at the front space of the mouth – or all back vowels. There is no mixing the front or back vowels within a word.
Finnish possesses fourteen to fifteen cases, depending on competing definitions of the accusative (Korpela). Because English has limited cases to pronouns, the concept of the case itself may be confusing to individuals who do not speak a language with this structure. Simply put, the case refers to how a noun or pronoun inflects based on the syntactic function in which it finds itself. Within English, we distinguish between the nominative (I go to the store) and the genitive or possessive (This is my book), as an example. Thus Finnish’s extensive library of cases is both a common sight in Uralic languages and something that intimidates second language speakers. Sámi consists of six cases (Wood).
Language Contact
Returning to The Languages of Scandinavia, we see that Sanders has completed the most comprehensive and up-to-date record of the interactions between the seven languages. She quotes Iain Clarkson and P. Sture Ureland, who wrote, “None of the Scandinavian languages have existed in a state of isolation, not even the most remote mountain dialects in the Norwegian fjord landscape, in the vast Swedish forest area, in the stormy Faroe Islands, or on the volcanic West Islands west of Iceland” (Ureland, 3).
Language contact has had a profound impact on Sámi. Though the population of individuals who identify as Sámi stands at about 100,000, there are only between 25,000 and 35,000 speakers of the language. Historically, it has been suppressed up until the Second World War, leading to its current status as a minority language in Norway and Finland. It is therefore common that Sámi speakers learn their language at home as opposed to in schools or economic situations. In some Scandinavian countries, there are laws in place to safeguard Sámi heritage, but some activists call for more support in moving the language from older generations to young (Ricco).
Literature
“In early times, say the Icelandic chronicles, men from the Western Islands came to live in this country, and when they departed left behind them crosses, bells, and other objects used in the practice of sorcery.”
So begins the novel Independent People by the late Halldór Laxness, the first and only present Icelander to receive a Nobel Prize, with Laxness winning in Literature for “his vivid, epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.” Laxness lived from 1902 to 1998, and dedicated much of that time to defending Iceland’s independence from larger presences, from Denmark (Iceland achieved this after the Second World War) to NATO, as Iceland is the only member of that order without a standing military. Despite what one might think of Laxness’ isolative tendencies, once Independent People was published in English, it sold more than four hundred thousand copies in its first year in the United States (Scibona), a figure larger than the entire population of his homeland.
Though Icelanders count among their ranks a single Nobel Laureate as of the time of this writing, other Scandinavian nations have seen several recipients. There have been eight Nobel Literature Laureates from Sweden and three from Denmark (All Nobel Prizes in Literature).
Conclusion
The Great North, from the Baltic Sea to the frigid upper Atlantic, has long been a seething melting pot of languages, seven of which have emerged most dominant today. The so-called sisters have butted up against each other historically, pulling and pushing at one another like a wave, at turns dominating one another and spilling forth vocabulary into each other’s jagged lexicons.
Scandinavia is a wild and gorgeous terrain, and its many languages reflect its long history. The works of the Vikings and the contemporary masters of Nordic noir are channeled through the seven sisters, all of whom have left their sizable footprints on the world stage.
References
All Nobel Prizes in Literature. The Nobel Prize. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/
de Gorog, R. (1980). [Review of the book The Scandinavian languages, by Einar Haugen]. American Speech, 55 (1), 60 – 64.
T. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2009, February 10). Agglutination. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/agglutination-grammar
T. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2022, September 2). Runic alphabet. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/runic-alphabet
Einarsson, S. (1945). Icelandic. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Faarlund, J. T., and Haugen, E. (2011, January 20). Scandinavian languages. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Scandinavian-languages
Haugen, E. (1976). The Scandinavian languages: An introduction to their history. Faber & Faber.
Korpela, J. (1997). Cases in Finnish. Jukka Korpela. https://jkorpela.fi/finnish-cases.html
Laxness, H. (1997). Independent people (B. Leithouser, Trans.). Vintage.
Neijmann, D.L. (2014). Colloquial Icelandic. Routledge.
Ricco, E. The Sámi language crisis. The University of Texas. https://www.laits.utexas.edu/sami/dieda/ling/languagecrisis.htm
Sanders, R. (2017). The languages of Scandinavia: Seven sisters of the North. The University of Chicago Press.
Scibona, S. (2022, July 11). The rediscovery of Halldór Laxness. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/11/the-rediscovery-of-halldor-laxness
Strong and weak declension. Ylhýra. https://ylhyra.is/strong-and-weak-declension
Suomi, K., McQueen, J.M., & Cutler, A. (1997). Vowel harmony and speech segmentation in Finnish. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 422 – 444.
Ureland, P.S., & Clarkson, I. (Eds.). (2009). Scandinavian language contacts. Cambridge University Press.
Wallis, E. (2013, July 7). Indo-European languages came from a common root about 15,000 years ago. Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/indo-european-languages-came-from-a-common-root-about-15000-years-ago/a-16796900
Wood, S. (2020, June 2). All in the language family: The Uralic languages. Babbel Magazine. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-uralic-language-family
