The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North

By Ruth H. Sanders

“A much-needed, comprehensive, and accessible overview of the interrelationship among” Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, and Sami (Ilmari Ivaska, Scandinavian Studies).

From fjords to mountains, schools of herring to herds of reindeer, Scandinavia is rich in astonishing natural beauty. Less well known, however, is that it is also rich in languages. Home to seven languages, Scandinavia has traditionally been understood as linguistically bifurcated between its five Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese) and its two Finno-Ugric ones (Finnish and Sámi). In The Languages of Scandinavia, Ruth H. Sanders takes a pioneering approach: she considers these Seven Sisters of the North together.

While the two linguistic families that comprise Scandinavia’s languages ultimately have differing origins, the Seven Sisters have coexisted side by side for millennia. As Sanders reveals, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics—intimate language contact—has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influences that is illuminated when the story of these seven languages is told as one. Exploring everything from the famed whalebone Lewis Chessmen of Norse origin to the interactions between the Black Death and the Norwegian language, The Languages of Scandinavia offers profound insight into languages with a cultural impact deep-rooted and far-reaching, from the Icelandic sagas to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s internationally popular Millennium trilogy. Sanders’s book is both an accessible work of linguistic scholarship and a fascinating intellectual history of language.

“Focuses on contacts, colonialism, conflicts and causes of friction, and the resulting language developments from a macro perspective . . . a refreshing and pleasant read.” —Verena Höfig, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226493923

Book preview

THE LANGUAGES OF SCANDINAVIA

Fig. 1. (frontispiece) Map of the North and environs, including Mainland Scandinavia and the North Atlantic Islands. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

The Languages of Scandinavia

SEVEN SISTERS OF THE NORTH

Ruth H. Sanders

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49389-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49392-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493923.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sanders, Ruth H., author.

Title: The languages of Scandinavia : seven sisters of the North / Ruth H. Sanders.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017006141| ISBN 9780226493893 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226493923 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Scandinavian languages—History.

Classification: LCC PD1545 .S26 2017 | DDC 439/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006141

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Introduction  •  Dead Man Talking

1  •  Prologue to History

2  •  Gemini, the Twins: Faroese and Icelandic

3  •  East Is East: Heralding the Birth of Danish and Swedish

4  •  The Ties That Bind: Finnish Is Visited by Swedish

5  •  The Black Death Comes for Norwegian: Danish Makes a House Call

6  •  Faroese Emerges

7  •  Sámi, Language of the Far North: Encounters with Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish

Epilogue  •  The Seven Sisters Now and in the Future

Acknowledgments

References

Index

Illustrations

Fig. 1  •  Map of the North and environs: frontispiece

Fig. 2  •  Germanic language family tree

Fig. 3  •  Finno-Ugric language family tree

Fig. 4  •  Norse/Viking settlement

Fig. 5  •  Odin’s eight-legged steed

Fig. 6  •  The Norns

Fig. 7  •  Lewis chess figures

Fig. 8  •  The runic alphabet of twenty-four symbols

Fig. 9  •  The British Isles

Fig. 10  •  Cities of the Hanseatic League

Tables

1  •  The Lord’s Prayer in Germanic Scandinavian languages

2  •  The Lord’s Prayer in Finno-Ugric Scandinavian languages

3  •  Timetable, 20,000 BC–AD 400

4  •  The Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn

5  •  Timetable, AD 500–1199

6  •  Genesis 8:15–17 in Bokmål and Nynorsk

7  •  The Lord’s Prayer in Icelandic, Faroese, and English

Introduction

Dead Man Talking

Þat kann ek it tólpta

ef ek sé á tré uppi

váfa virgilná

svá ek ríst

ok í runum fák

ok sá gengr gumí

ok mælir við mik

(For the twelfth I know,

if on a tree I see

a corpse swinging from a halter,

I can so grave

and in runes depict,

that the man shall walk,

and with me converse.)

Hávamál, 156, from The Poetic Edda

In very early times, the largely illiterate people of the North believed the ability to read the runes was a kind of magic. The people of Odin, All-Father of the pagan Norse, even considered Hávamál (Words of the High One) a gift from on high, its runic song-spells reginkunnr ‘of divine origin’ (Krause and Slocum 2013). It must have seemed wondrous that those initiated in reading the runes could call up the words of gods and of people long dead. Equally wondrous, those who inscribed the runes on stone could leave messages to the people of the future. Indeed, the runic treasure trove of information about the people of the North long ago can perhaps, as Hávamál described, make the dead—if not walk—at least converse with us as we read them.

From the second century AD, the runes were the writing system both for North Germanic, the predecessor to Proto-Norse and then Old Norse (which emerged by about the eighth century AD), and for the other Germanic languages. As that world was Christianized, the runes were gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet. In their day, runes were used not only to prophesy the future and cast spells, but also for everyday purposes: to record, in stone and later on vellum, memories of loved ones, great deeds, historical events, and the laws and customs of the people of the European North. The Old Norse Hávamál, source of the song-spell cited above, is a long gnomic poem; that is, it consists of short proverbs or words of wisdom attributed to Odin. Some parts of it are traceable to the ninth or tenth century, when runes were still in use in the North. The Poetic Edda, of which it is a part, was, however, not written down until the thirteenth century, long after the North had been Christianized; and it was recorded not in runes, but in the Roman alphabet.

In modern Scandinavia, if All-Father Odin is remembered by the descendants of his people, it is as a mysterious, though still eerily attractive, chimera from the mists of the past. The language of Odin has become the ancestor of five modern languages—Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, and Icelandic. Through millennia these languages have mutated, merged, split, and then merged again to separate still another time. Stones and documents in runes, carved and written until the fourteenth century AD, long after the Roman alphabet became dominant, have survived to our time in an incomplete but surprisingly information-rich collection of inscriptions. Their messages range from the brief and quotidian (for example, ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawidō ‘I Hlewagastiz Holtijaz made the horn’, on the fifth-century Horn of Gallehus) to the lengthy and complex two-hundred-page Danish Codex Runicus of 1300, written in the by-then-archaic runes even though the Latin alphabet was already standard in Scandinavia by that time.

This book narrates, primarily for the nonspecialist reader, highlights of the shared history from earliest times, insofar as it can be reconstructed, to modern times, of these five Norse daughter languages, plus two more: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, and Sámi. These—the Seven Sisters of the North—are not, in traditional linguistic terms, all sister languages, since not all are descended from the same ancestor language; but they have been close neighbors in Fenno-Scandia for millennia, and their long-term intimate relationship is emphasized in this account. The chapters focus not so much on the languages alone as on their transforming relationships with each other. The stories of these languages are woven into the stories of all seven of the sisters. The histories of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese—members of the Germanic language family, itself a member of the larger Indo-European family—are entwined with those of Finnish and Sámi, members of the Finno-Ugric family.

In linguistic science, languages are conceived of as feminine: we speak of mother tongues, and genetics of language families that have mother languages and daughter languages. Thus, I have called these seven languages, from two language families, sisters. More accurately, they are stepsisters, members of a blended family—they grew up in the same household, have histories of squabbles and even of blood feuds, and in the end have influenced each other, not as strongly as their genetic forebears, but overall far more than any other languages have influenced them.

Traditionally, studies of the linguistic history have separated the Indo-European, Germanic Scandinavian languages from the Finno-Ugric Scandinavian languages because of their differing genetic origins. However, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics in the North over millennia has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influence that invites us to consider these seven languages together.

Uriel Weinreich, author of Languages in Contact (first edition 1953, reprinted many times; see Weinreich 2011) was probably the first scholar to investigate languages from the point of view of contact between them. This line of inquiry was applied in particular to the Scandinavian languages in the 1984 volume Scandinavian Language Contacts, whose editors, P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, write that 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 (2009, 3). Further, as Dutch linguist Peter Schrijver writes, a consequence of reintroducing language contact into language change is that it stresses the role of speakers . . . a reminder that the structure of a language is to a large extent determined by the vagaries of human history, rather than by the innate tendencies of the language beast that inhabits our brains (2014, 200). Historian Byron J. Nordstrom reminds us that during the early modern period, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, Norway (which nominally retained its status as a kingdom), and Finland were integral parts of the central kingdoms of Denmark or Sweden (2000, 138).

In fact, contact and concomitant language mingling and codevelopment have been part of the story of the Germanic languages and the Finno-Ugric languages of Scandinavia since the languages’ beginnings. This contact has amounted throughout history not only to language change, but to language life, language decline, and language renewal.

NOMENCLATURE

Scatinavia and Scandia are first recorded as names for the North in Pliny the Elder’s AD 77 work Naturalis historia (Natural history). Pliny, like the Roman geographers who followed him, used these names to refer to northern islands in the present-day Danish Kattegat, a strait between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.

In modern times, referring to Scandinavia and its languages requires some delicacy of nomenclature: Scandinavian, as used by linguists to refer to languages, peoples, and cultures, includes Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese, and Icelandic (all daughter languages of Old Norse, itself a Germanic language). In the American idiom, more casual use of Scandinavian often includes Finnish, and less often Sámi, people, languages, and cultures; for example, North American universities’ programs in Scandinavian studies commonly include both the Germanic and the Finno-Ugric languages of the region.

For geographers, the Scandinavian Peninsula, or simply Scandinavia, is made up of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, including Lapland (or Sápmi). This geographic sense excludes three Scandinavian-language-speaking nations: Denmark, not on the Scandinavian Peninsula but rather on the European mainland and several nearby islands; and the North Atlantic Faroe Islands and Iceland. Fennoscandia is a geographic term used for Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russian Karelia, and the Russian Kola Peninsula.

Lapp and Lappish, old names, not used by the Sámi themselves, are now considered pejorative but once were used by other Scandinavians for the Sámi (sometimes spelled Saami) people or the Sámi language. In Swedish, though, Lappland is still the name of a northern Swedish province; and, in both Finnish and Northern Sámi, Lappi is the name of the northern region of Finland, Lappilainen the descriptor of a (non-Sámi) Finn who lives in that region.

The Sámi people and many linguists regard Sámi as not one but several languages, among other reasons because its regional variants are so strongly differentiated; some are barely mutually understandable (more about this in chapter 7). But for ease of reference, in this volume the Sámi language group is considered as a unit.

A descriptor that covers them all, languages, geography, and peoples of the seven sisters, is Nordic (though it is not as commonly used in the United States as in Scandinavia) or, as often heard in all these nations, the North (Swedish/Norwegian/Danish Norden; Finnish Pohjola; Sámi Davvi).

The metaphor of seven sisters will suggest to many readers the Pleiades, the seven-star cluster especially prominent in the skies of the North and mythologized by the Ancient Greeks as the Seven Sisters. But I also intended it a literary reference to the seven brothers of Finland’s first novel, and still the one most widely known, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän Veljestä (Seven brothers), of 1870.

Like the seven brothers, the seven languages grew together for a while and then went their own ways. Faroese and Icelandic, for example, developed separately in their island realms from the Old West Norse brought first to the Faroe Islands and then to Iceland in the ninth century by Norwegian Viking settlers. Hence Modern Norwegian (including both variants, Nynorsk and Bokmål) is a daughter of Old West Norse, while Danish and Swedish are daughter languages of Old East Norse, developed during centuries of national struggle for territorial control in Denmark and Sweden. Faroese and Norwegian were each suppressed for a time by the government of Denmark, and Finnish by the government of Sweden, but afterward rose again to become the predominant languages of their nations, although in each case not without experiencing considerable linguistic change from the period of suppression. Nine of the ten extant variants of Sámi are in serious decline, at least partly because of past language policies of the politically and economically dominant Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish governments. But, as with the mischievous brothers of Kivi’s novel, such family feuds can be set aside: these languages, and their speakers, remain close.

FAMILY RESEMBLANCES

The three Scandinavian languages with the largest numbers of speakers, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, are sometimes referred to by linguists as a dialect continuum. They are to a great extent mutually understandable in reading, writing, and speaking. If it were not for the fact that they are national languages of three sovereign nations that do not wish to unify their languages, they might be regarded as dialects, or variants. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, often referred to together as Mainland Scandinavian, are not subdivisions of a single modern language but are all daughters of long-extinct Old Norse.

Icelandic and Faroese, the Insular Scandinavian languages of the North Atlantic islands, are also daughters of Old Norse. They are similar to each other in their written forms (although strongly differentiated in pronunciation), and they might also be considered a dialect continuum. Partly because of their geographic isolation from the Scandinavian Peninsula, both Icelandic and Faroese have kept many ancient characteristics of Old Norse and resemble it far more than they resemble Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Both Insular and Mainland Scandinavian developed from the Germanic language that was spoken in Northern Europe from the sixth century BC or even earlier (evidence does not admit of a certain date). The breakup of ancient Germanic into dialects, some of which became separate languages (see family tree in fig. 2), accompanied massive emigration of Germanic speakers into virtually all of Europe and even North Africa.

Finnish, living as it did in a nation dominated by Sweden for six centuries, has definitely been influenced by Swedish. In spite of that influence, though, Finnish and Swedish are not genetically related and are not mutually intelligible. Nor are Finnish and Sámi mutually intelligible in speaking or in writing. Nonetheless, they are daughters of a single extinct ancestor language, and they share fundamental linguistic similarities. Their ancestors Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Uralic (a related, broader, category that includes the Samoyedic languages of what is today Siberia) present a history as complex as that of Proto-Indo-European.

Fig. 2. Germanic language family tree. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

As we will see in later chapters, though it is not at all evident on the surface, closer observation reveals cross-linguistic influence, possibly even codevelopment, between the Finno-Ugric and the Germanic languages of the North. In historical times, this influence has more often been from the Germanic group on the Finno-Ugric group; there are many Germanic loanwords in Finno-Ugric. There is some evidence that influence flowed in the opposite direction in prehistoric times, when both flourished in the same territories in what is today northwestern Russia.

Indeed, Schrijver argues that several thousand years ago, native speakers of Proto-Finno-Ugric played a seminal role in the development of Proto-Germanic, first by altering the accent pattern of Proto-Indo-European as it was spoken in the Baltic. This happened over many generations as the bilingual Proto-Finnic speakers spoke the Baltic language with their native first-syllable word stress, altering it for good. In time, this Baltic Proto-Indo-European became Proto-Germanic, and its first-syllable word stress became universal in the Germanic-language world. Schrijver argues further that in the first centuries AD, speakers of Sámi or a Sámic language introduced other sound changes that caused the breakup of Germanic into West Germanic and North Germanic, thereby starting a wave of development that culminated in the Germanic Scandinavian languages (2014, 179–97).

Family trees are not the only way to represent genetic, or historical, relationships among languages, but they do give a quick visual representation of complex information. See figures 2 and 3, language trees depicting the Germanic branch of Indo-European and the Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic.

Fig. 3. Finno-Ugric language family tree. This tree has been considerably simplified to include only the languages mentioned in this volume, partly because the exact historical relationship of the numerous Finno-Ugric languages has not yet been firmly established. In addition, a more nearly complete account would result in a complex, even unmanageable tree (see Salminen 2002). Illustration by Lara Thurston.

THE LANGUAGES: PARALLEL TEXTS

Tables 1 and 2 each present the same text from the Bible, that is, a portion of the Lord’s Prayer. It is often used to make comparisons among languages, not for religious reasons but because parallel translations in many languages of the same biblical text are easily found. Matthew 6:9–13, in the King James Version, reads, 9. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11. Give us this day our daily bread. Although the Scandinavian texts in the tables are not all the most current available translations, they are all completely understandable by contemporary speakers of the languages; some phraseology may seem archaic (as the King James translation does to twenty-first-century Americans), but the various versions illustrate the commonalities of the languages.

Table 1. The Lord’s Prayer in Germanic Scandinavian languages

To compare the texts in table 1, watch for nearly identical words in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish: Vår Far/Vor Fader; himlen/himmelen ‘heaven’. Similarly, in Icelandic and Faroese: Faðir vor/Faðir okkara ‘Our father’. Also note strong resemblances among all five: bröd/brauð/breyð ‘bread’.

Table 2. The Lord’s Prayer in Finno-Ugric Scandinavian languages

As you compare the texts in table 2, note that rarely, a word may be identical in Finnish and Sámi (example: ja ‘and’, itself an ancient loanword from Germanic into both languages; see chapter 4). More commonly, only the initial sounds are the same: nimesi, namma ‘name’; anna, atte ‘give’; leipämme, láibbi ‘bread’; äläkä, ala ‘don’t’; and, where there is a p in Finnish, there is a b in Sámi: Finnish päivänä ‘daily’ vs. Sámi beaivválaš.

THE FOCUS OF THIS BOOK

The focus is on the crucial intersections, sometimes amounting rather to collisions, among the seven languages and their speakers. I tell the story of their shared past, their continuing contact with each other, and how the languages have influenced each other’s development.

Information and analysis of some other traditional aspects of language history is not the book’s focus. For example, there is no comprehensive, or even chronological, account of the history, phonology, structure, or typology of each language. Also not found here is the history of the literature in the languages. Further, I offer only brief sketches of the relevant historical events involving the northern nations. Informative, up-to-date, and expert discussion of all of these further aspects of language may, however, be found in many other specialized books, some of which are cited in this volume.

Not counted among the seven languages is another language of the North Atlantic, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), from still another language family. It did not undergo codevelopment with them; Norse settlement of Greenland was relatively brief, and mutual language contact in premodern times was almost nonexistent. For this reason, Greenlandic is discussed only briefly, in chapter 2.

This book sets the story of the seven languages in the context of their neighboring languages and the histories and societies of the speakers. The narrative is informed not only by linguistics but also by social history, archaeology, anthropology, and human genetics. Like all other languages, the Seven Sisters were, and continue to