VIKING AGE SCANDINAVIANNorth Germanic, just as North-West Germanic and ‘Common Germanic’ before it, is
unlikely to have been a uniform language. The centralised authority that would seem to
be a prerequisite for the development of a koiné or norm was absent. Such unity as may
have existed must in any case have been disrupted by the radical linguistic changes
of the syncope period (c. 550 – 700 ), which mark the emergence of an indubitably
Scandinavian form of speech. It is inconceivable that the shortening of words, the
restructuring of vowel and consonant systems and the creation of new grammatical
categories associated with the syncope period can have been accomplished without
massive dialectal variation. What is remarkable is the degree of linguistic uniformity
that appears to have prevailed in Scandinavia after c. ad 700. So uniform has the
language of the Vikings and stay-at-home Scandinavians appeared to some that it has
been christened ‘Common Scandinavian’ (Haugen 1976 : 150 ). This is clearly in part an
illusion, arising from the extreme scarcity of linguistic sources. There is no doubt, how-
ever, that some unifying forces were at work, whatever they may have been. It is
otherwise hard to explain why, for example, loss of initial /j-/ should have come to
characterise all forms of Scandinavian, but no other kinds of Germanic (contrast main-
land Scandinavian år, Faroese/Icelandic ár with English year, German Jahr; Scandinavian
ung(ur) with English young, German jung); or why the reform of the runic alphabet that
led to the jettisoning of eight of the original twenty-four characters and the simplifi-
cation of many of the others should have been accepted Scandinavia-wide, apparently in
the space of a few decades at the end of the seventh/beginning of the eighth century.
With the help of the meagre sources at our disposal – chiefly runic inscriptions –
we can reconstruct in broad outline what Scandinavian was like in the Viking Age.
Following the changes of the syncope period it had developed into a language not unlike
classical Old Norse. It had twenty-seven vowel phonemes or thereabouts: nine qualita-
tively different sounds (/i, e, æ, a, , o, u, y, ø/) with length and nasality as additional
distinctive features. Most consonants might also be long or short. There were four types
of stressed syllable: short vowel + short consonant; short vowel + long consonant or
consonant cluster; long vowel + short consonant or no consonant; long vowel + long
consonant or consonant cluster. Length went hand-in-hand with stress; in unstressed
syllables all sounds were short, and the vowel system was by and large reduced to a
three-way contrast (/i, a, u/). As in all the early Germanic languages, three genders and
four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) were distinguished in nouns, pro-
nouns and adjectives; there was also a distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ adjective
inflexion, strong marking indefinite and weak definite function. Viking Age Scandina-
vian verbs (as indicated above), had two tense forms, present and past, and the past tense
might have ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ inflexion. The verb also had three moods (indicative,
subjunctive, imperative), and all tensed forms had personal inflexion (different forms in
most cases for 1 st, 2 nd and 3 rd person singular and plural). There was a suffixed definite
article, and an -sk form of the verb (cf. above). The vocabulary was inherited from earlier
Germanic, with few loan words. No adequate description of Viking Age Scandinavian
exists, but in its essential structure it can be taken not to have differed greatly from the
more archaic forms of Old Norse.
Attempts to flesh out this skeletal structure with detail bring our ignorance about
Scandinavian at the dawn of the Viking Age into sharper focus. With some forces
–– chapter 20: The Scandinavian languages in the Viking Age––