Viking language

Good evening!


Today we are going to talk about the language that Vikings used and its repercution in the nowadays english language. I think it could be interesting to know the way in which it has developed over the time.

Here you can apreciate some of the letters of the viking alphabet and their pronunciation!

Old Norse pronunciation

What was the language vikings spoke?

Well, vikings started to speak Old Norse, which was an ancient Germanic language from the north of Germany. It is closely related to Old English and it was also the language the modern Scandinavian Languages sprang, such as Swedish, Danish or Norwegian.

Nouns had three genders; masculine, femenine ans neuter, two numbers as in nowadays english ( singular and plural) but declined into four cases; nominative, acusative, dative and genitive.

Verbs were conjugated for person ( first,second or third), number ( singular,plural or dual), tense ( present or preterite) and mood ( indicative or subjuntive). Most of this inflection has been lost in the Modern Scandinavian languages which have moved towards more analytical structure. 

Most probably that was a language similar to the one used by the Norsemen. Nowadays the most similar one would be Icelandic as an example of  isolated medieval Norwegian.

Now I wanted to show you some text written in Viking language. So I have found this one:

Sample texts in Old Norse:

Þórr heitir áss, ok er sterkr mjök ok oft reiðr. Hann á hamar góðan. Þórr ferr oft til Jötunheima ok vegr þar marga jötna með hamrinum. Þórr á ok vagn er flýgr. Hann ekr vagninum um himininn. Þar er Þórr ekr, er stormr.

Translation:

A god is named Thor. He is very strong and often angry. He has a good hammer. Thor often goes to Gianthome and slays many giants there with the hammer. Thor also has a carriage that flies. He drives the carriage through the sky. Where Thor drives there is storm.

 This text I have found it in the next web page: 

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldnorse.htm