Old Norse Pronunciation Guide

Something I’ve run into a couple times lately is people looking for good pronunciation guides for Old Norse, and not knowing how to sort through the conflicting results that turn up when looking online.

As with so many other things, a major problem is that the more accurate you want to be, the more difficult it’s going to be to get it right.  “Old Norse” is not a very precise term. In most contexts, if someone says “Old Norse” and leaves it at that, they’re talking about Classical Old Icelandic, spoken in Iceland in the early 13th century, or around the time of Snorri Sturlusson. This is markedly different from the language written on Viking-age runestones, just as one example — most of which were carved by speakers of an East Norse dialect, unlike Old Icelandic which is  West Norse dialect.

Most pronunciation guides that I’ve found, I find to mix and match features anachronistically. For example, the guide in Michael Barnes’ A New Introduction to Old Norse (a book I otherwise highly recommend) suggests pronouncing á like the a in father but also says that the guide was written for the language after the letter ǫ́ was lost. This is wrong, however — after á and ǫ́ merged, the written symbol á continued to be used, but it stood for the sound previously represented by ǫ́ (a sound like in English boss). Most pronunciation guides also maintain that the difference between a short (unaccented) and long (accented) vowel is just a matter of length, but there is reason to believe that already by the thirteenth century this had started to change.

One of the difficulties in constructing a pronunciation guide is of course that we can never actually know for sure. What linguists are typically able to reconstruct is kind of a framework or model of the language that tells how sounds are related to each other (phonemes) — not necessarily the actual sounds themselves (phones). This isn’t to say that we can’t narrow down the possibilities quite far, just that it’s not as simple as one might think. For example, we can describe an Old Icelandic phoneme /e/ for the mid-twelfth century (the time of the First Grammatical Treatise) and we can suspect that its actual sound may have fluctuated a bit when surrounded by different words, because the First Grammarian described it as two different sounds, e and ę (at an earlier time, these really WERE two separate phonemes, but the fact that they had merged is shown by the First Grammarian’s inability to keep them apart in a way that is etymologically meaningful). Indeed, the “real” e and the e that “should” have been ę (from i-umlaut of a) already rhyme with each other in skáldic poetry as far back as the 10th century.

(Side note: these are some of the reasons I tend to suggest speaking with modern Icelandic pronunciation).

Because of all of these issues, I’ve decided to make a couple of different pronunciation guides for different contexts. I will use IPA notation and also try to match sounds to English words when possible, or words from other, better-known, modern languages when not. The consonants don’t change all that radically between periods, so I will list them once and then just mark the changes after that.

Disclaimer:

As usual I am taking many shortcuts. This is meant to keep to the goal of the website — to be a middle ground between accessible and easy to swallow on one hand, and precise but impenetrable on the other. This is meant for people who want to say words out loud right now and to feel pretty good that they’re doing it close to right, NOT for someone who is studying historical phonology.

Note that this is written for English-speakers with an American accent.