Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Blaðsíða 228

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LE NORD
throughout the North. The Icelandic law speaks of Danes, Swedes,
and Norwegians as men of the three Kingdoms “in which our
language is spoken.” And Saxo Grammaticus declares that his
native country includes Sweden and Norway, “our neighbours
both geographically and in language.” As late as the middle of
the i3th century, Icelandic skalds used to visit the courts of
Scandinavian kings in order to recite their poetry.
By this time, however, the differentiation had proceeded so
far that the different dialects which form the basis of the present
literary languages can already be discerned in the national
literatures which now began to develop. At first the most marked
differences were those between East and West, i. e. between the
settled districts of Denmark and Sweden on one side, and of Nor-
way and Iceland on the other. To a certain extent, we may speak
of an Eastern Scandinavian branch, comprising Swedish and
Danish, and a 'Western, comprising Norwegian and Icelandic.
But to this there comes gradually another cleavage, viz. between
a Northern and a Southern branch of East Scandinavian, i. e.
between Swedish and Danish, and this cleavage becomes gradually
more and more accentuated, as Swedish and Norwegian pronun-
ciation to an increasing extent develop along parallel lines.
The Scandinavian regional dialects are descended from the
common Primitive Scandinavian language. They form one con-
tinuous chain from Slesvig in the south to Kalix in the north,
from the Swedish settlements in Finland and Esthonia in the east
to the Faeroes and Iceland in the west. Leaving out of account
the last-mentioned remote islands in the North Atlantic, there
are hardly any marked language frontiers anywhere in the Scan-
dinavian area, not even between Danish and Swedish, or Swedish
and Norwegian, on the present political frontiers. The dialect
of one district forms a transition to that of the next. Historically
the Scandinavian languages constitute one single speech with geo-
graphical variations. On the other hand, the language differentia-
tion has gradually become so great that pure dialect speakers
from districts separated by great distances no longer understand
each other. The rise of standard languages has been the unifying
factor in the linguistic development, and it is this factor which
has saved the Scandinavian community of language from total
dissolution.
The Northern countries might quite conceivably have devel-
oped one common Standard literary language for the whole of
Scandinavia. In fact, the dialect division of the North is hardly