Old Swedish

Old Swedish is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish, spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish, spoken from about 1375 until about 1526.
Old Swedish developed from Old East Norse, the eastern dialect of Old Norse. The earliest forms of the Swedish and Danish languages, spoken between the years 800 and 1100, were dialects of Old East Norse and are referred to as Runic Swedish and Runic Danish because at the time all texts were written in the runic alphabet. The differences were only minute, however, and the dialects truly began to diverge around the 12th century, becoming Old Swedish and Old Danish in the 13th century. It is not known when exactly Elfdalian began to diverge from Swedish.
Early Old Swedish was markedly different from modern Swedish in that it had a more complex case structure and had not yet experienced a reduction of the gender system and thus had three genders. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

Development

Early Old Swedish

The writing of the Westrogothic law marked the beginning of Early Old Swedish, which had developed from Old East Norse. It was the first Swedish language document written in the Latin alphabet, and its oldest fragments have been dated to around the year 1225.
Old Swedish was relatively stable during this period. The phonological and grammatical systems inherited from Old Norse were relatively well preserved and did not experience any major changes.
Most of the texts from the Early Old Swedish period were written in Latin, as it was the language of knowledge and the Church. However, Old Swedish was used as a literary language as well, and laws especially were written in it; of the 28 surviving manuscripts from this period, 24 contain law texts. Much of the knowledge of Old Swedish comes from these law texts. In addition to laws, some religious and poetic texts were also written in Old Swedish.

Loanwords

The Catholic Church and its various monastic orders introduced many new Greek and Latin loanwords into Old Swedish. Latin especially had an influence on the written language.
The Middle Low German language also influenced Old Swedish due to the economic and political power of the Hanseatic League during the 13th and 14th centuries. Accordingly, loanwords relating to warfare, trade, crafts and bureaucracy entered the Swedish language directly from Low German, along with some grammatical suffixes and conjunctions. The prefixes be-, ge- and för- that can be found in the beginning of modern Swedish words came from the Low German be-, ge- and vor-. Some words were replaced with new ones: the native word for window, vindøgha, was replaced with fönster, eldhus was replaced with kök and gælda with betala. Some of these words still exist in Modern Swedish but are often considered archaic or dialectal; one example is the word vindöga. Many words related to seafaring were borrowed from Dutch.
It is speculated that the influence of Low German was so strong that it helped break down the inflectional system of Old Swedish.

Late Old Swedish

In contrast to the stable Early Old Swedish, Late Old Swedish experienced many changes, including a simplification of the grammatical system and a vowel shift, so that in the 16th century the language resembled modern Swedish more than before. The printing of the New Testament in Swedish in 1526 marked the starting point for modern Swedish.
In this period Old Swedish had taken in a large amount of new vocabulary primarily from Latin, Low German and Dutch. When the country became part of the Kalmar Union in 1397, many Danish scribes brought Danicisms into the written language.

Orthography

Old Swedish used some letters that are no longer found in modern Swedish: and were used for modern and respectively, and could stand for both and . In the latter part of the 14th century was replaced with and.
The grapheme could stand for both the phonemes and . The graphemes,, and were used interchangeably with the phonemes and , and could also sometimes stand for the consonant–vowel combinations and : dwa.
Certain abbreviations were used in writing, such as mꝫ for meþ. The letter combinations, and were often written so that one of the letters stood above the other as a smaller letter,, and, which led to the development of the modern letters,, and.

Phonology

The root syllable length in Old Swedish could be short, long or overlong. During the Late Old Swedish period the short root syllables were lengthened and the overlong root syllables were shortened, so modern Swedish only has the combinations and. Unlike in modern Swedish, a short vowel in Old Swedish did not entail a long consonant.
There were eight vowels in Early Old Swedish:. A vowel shift occurred during the Late Old Swedish period, which had the following effects:

became
became
became

The consonant sounds were largely the same as in modern Swedish, with the notable exceptions of and, which do not exist in modern Swedish.
The Modern Swedish tje-sound and sje-sound were probably and, respectively, similar to their values in modern Finland Swedish. A similar change can be seen from Old Spanish and to Modern Spanish and.
The Proto-Germanic phoneme was preserved in initial sounds in Old Swedish and did survive in rural Swedish dialects in the provinces of Skåne, Halland, Västergötland and south of Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is still preserved in the Dalecarlian dialects in the province of Dalarna, Sweden. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants in Old Swedish and did so into modern times in said dialects, as well as in the Westro- and North Bothnian tongues in northern Sweden.

Grammar

Nominal morphology

In Early Old Swedish

The most defining difference between Old Swedish and modern Swedish was the more complex grammatical system of the former. In Old Swedish nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases, whereas modern standard Swedish has reduced the case system to a common form and a genitive. There were also three grammatical genders, still retained in many dialects today, but now reduced to two in the standard language, where the masculine and feminine have merged. These features of Old Swedish are still found in modern Icelandic and Faroese; the noun declensions are almost identical.
Noun declensions fell under two categories: weak and strong. The weak masculine, feminine and neuter nouns had their own declensions and at least three groups of strong masculine nouns, three groups of strong feminine nouns and one group of strong neuter nouns can be identified. Below is an overview of the noun declension system:
The noun declension system

Vowel stems
*a-stems
**a-stems
**ja-stems
**ia-stems
*ō-stems
**ō-stems
**jō-stems
**iō-stems
*i-stems
*u-stems
Consonant n-stems
*n-stems
**an-stems
**ōn, ūn-stems
**īn-stems
Consonant stems
* monosyllabic stems
* r-stems
* nd-stems

Some noun paradigms of the words fisker, sun, siang, skip, biti and vika :

	Masculine a-stems	Masculine u-stems	Feminine ō-stems	Neuter a-stems	Masculine an-stems	Feminine ōn-stems
Sg.Nom.	fisker	sun	siang	skip	biti	wika
Sg.Acc.	fisk	sun	siang	skip	bita	wiku
Sg.Gen.	fisks	sunar	siangar	skips	bita	wiku
Sg.Dat.	fiski	syni	siangu	skipi	bita	wiku
Pl.Nom.	fiskar	synir	siangar	skip	bitar	wikur
Pl.Acc.	fiska	syni	siangar	skip	bita	wikur
Pl.Gen.	fiska	suna	sianga	skipa	bita	wikna
Pl.Dat.	fiskum	sunum	siangum	skipum	bitum	wikum

In Late Old Swedish

By the year 1500 the number of cases in Old Swedish had been reduced from four to two.
Other major changes include the loss of a separate inflectional system for masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns and adjectives in the course of the 15th century, leaving only two genders in the standard Swedish language, although three genders are still common in many of the dialects. The old dative forms of the personal pronouns became the object forms and -s became more common as the ending for the genitive singular.

Adjectives

Adjectives and certain numerals were inflected according to the gender and case the noun they modified was in. Below is a table of the inflection of weak adjectives.

Verbs

Verbs in Old Swedish were conjugated according to person and number. There were four weak verb conjugations and six groups of strong verbs. The difference between weak and strong verbs is in the way the past tense is formed: strong verbs form it with a vowel shift in the root of the verb, while weak verbs form it with a dental suffix.

Strong verbs

The verbs in the table below are bīta, biūþa, wærþa, stiæla, mæta and fara.

Weak verbs

Weak verbs are grouped into four classes:

First conjugation: verbs ending in -a, -ā in the present tense. Most verbs belong to this class.
Second conjugation: verbs ending in -e, -æ in the present tense.
Third conjugation: verbs ending in -i, -ø in the present tense.
Fourth conjugation: these verbs have a more or less irregular conjugation. About twenty verbs belong to this class.

Inside the conjugation classes the weak verbs are also categorised into further three classes:

I: those ending in -þe in the preterite
II: those ending in -de in the preterite
III: those ending in -te in the preterite