a variety of places, and by speakers of other languages besides Scandinavian. It is thus
something of a surprise to find that the so-called First Grammatical Treatise, compiled in
Iceland probably in the first half of the twelfth century (Haugen 1972 ), treats Icelandic
as though it were a variation-free tongue. Possibly 200 – 250 years was enough to even
out all major differences of speech, but conceivably the author was describing a literary
norm used by poets and scholars.
Viking Age Finland is all but bereft of Scandinavian documents (a runic fragment has
recently been found, but it tells us nothing about the type of Scandinavian spoken there;
Åhlén et al. 1998 ). The modern Swedish dialects of Finland do not exhibit all the East
Scandinavian features associated with Swedish in Sweden. For example, they preserve
the historical diphthongs /ei/, /au/, /øy/, but that can hardly reflect West Scandinavian
input since they share this characteristic with Gotlandic and a number of dialects in the
north of Sweden.
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–– Michael P. Barnes––