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Old Norwegian

Old Norwegian (Norwegian: gammelnorsk and gam(m)alnorsk), also called Norwegian Norse, is an early form of the Norwegian language that was spoken between the 11th and 14th century; it is a transitional stage between Old West Norse and Middle Norwegian.

Its distinction from Old West Norse is mostly a matter of convention, but it is also the period when the language begun to develop its immense diversity. Old Norwegian is typically divided into the following dialect areas:

No sources appear to exist from which the dialectal variation of the rest of Norway might be discerned. There do, however, seem to be reasons to believe the region of Oppland constituted its own dialect area, though it is unclear whether this would fall within the Western or Eastern dialect group, as well as that Greenlandic Old Norse had begun to develop its own linguistic variety.

One of the most important early differences between Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic is that h in the consonant combinations hl-, hn- and hr- was lost in Old Norwegian around the 11th century, while being preserved in Old Icelandic. Thus, one has e.g. Old Icelandic hlíð 'slope', hníga 'curtsey' and hringr 'ring' and Old Norwegian líð, níga and ringr, respectively.

Many Old Norwegian dialects feature a height based system of vowel harmony: Following stressed high vowels (/i/, /iː/, /y/, /yː/, /u/, /uː/) and diphthongs (/ei/, /ey/, /au/), the unstressed vowels /i/ and /u/ appear as i, u, while they are represented as e, o following long non-high vowels (/eː/, /øː/, /oː/, /æː/, /aː/). The situation following stressed short non-high vowels (/e/, /æ/, /ø/, /a/, /o/, /ɔ/) is much debated and was apparently different in the individual dialects.

The u-umlaut of short /a/ (written ǫ in normalized Old Norse) is not as consistently graphically distinguished from non-umlauted /a/ as in Old Icelandic, especially in writings from the Eastern dialect areas. It is still a matter of academic debate whether this is to be interpreted phonologically as a lack of umlaut or merely as a lack of its graphical representation.

Old Norwegian had alternative dual and plural first person pronouns, mit, mér, to the Common Norse vit, vér.

Norn is an extinct language derived from the North Germanic language family that died out in the late 19th or early 20th century. It was primarily spoken in the Northern Isles, or Orkney (Orkneyjar) and Shetland (Hjaltland), and Caithness on the northern tip of Scotland. Little remains of Norn other than a few literary works in Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn, while Caithness Norn is expected to have died out in the 15th century, replaced by Scots.

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