Version 1.0 — Last updated: 7 September 2026
“Old Norse” is a convenient umbrella term, but it wasn’t spoken identically everywhere. Scholars generally divide it into three main branches, distinguished mainly by geography and by a set of sound changes that separated them over time. This page is a broad orientation, not a full dialectology — real regional and period variation was more continuous and gradual than any three-way split can fully capture.
The three main branches
| Branch | Where it was spoken | Closest modern descendants |
|---|---|---|
| Old West Norse | Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Norse settlements in Ireland, Scotland, and Greenland | Icelandic and Faroese (which changed comparatively little from Old Norse) |
| Old East Norse | Denmark and Sweden (and Danish settlement areas in eastern England, sometimes discussed separately) | Danish and Swedish |
| Old Gutnish | The island of Gotland | Modern Gutnish, a distinct minority language/dialect still spoken today, alongside Gotland Swedish |
What actually separated them
The clearest, most commonly cited difference is a set of vowel changes: Old West Norse generally kept certain diphthongs (like ei and au) that Old East Norse simplified into single vowels (monophthongization) in many words. There are also differences in verb endings, pronoun forms, and vocabulary. None of these differences were absolute or sudden — they represent broad tendencies across a dialect continuum, not a hard border you could point to on a map.
Which dialect does this site use?
Our Dictionary, Translator, and Pronunciation Guide are all built around classical Old Icelandic — the Old West Norse variety that most textbooks, dictionaries (including Cleasby & Vigfússon, our main source — see Sources & Corpora), and university courses default to, mainly because it’s the best-documented branch thanks to Iceland’s large surviving body of saga literature. Content on this site that doesn’t specify otherwise should be read as representing this variety, not a single unified “Old Norse” spoken identically from Greenland to Sweden.
A note on dates
“Old Norse” is generally used for the language from roughly the 9th to the 13th/14th centuries, developing out of Proto-Norse before it and gradually diverging into the separate medieval and modern Scandinavian languages after it. Exact boundary dates vary between sources and aren’t a hard cutoff — language change is gradual, not a single event.
Related pages
See our Grammar overview, our Pronunciation Guide, and our Sources & Corpora page for where this information comes from.