The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North

About this book

From fjords to mountains schools of herring to herds of reindeer Scandinavia is rich in astonishing natural beauty. Less well known however is that it is also rich in languages. Home to seven languages Scandinavia has traditionally been understood as linguistically bifurcated between its five Germanic languages (Danish Norwegian Swedish Icelandic and Faroese) and its two Finno-Ugric ones (Finnish and Smi). In The Languages of Scandinavia Ruth H. Sanders takes a pioneering approach: she considers these Seven Sisters of the North together. While the two linguistic families that comprise Scandinavias languages ultimately have differing origins the Seven Sisters have coexisted side by side for millennia. As Sanders reveals a crisscrossing of names territories and even to some extent language geneticsintimate language contacthas created a body of shared culture experience and linguistic influences that is illuminated when the story of these seven languages is told as one. Exploring everything from the famed whalebone Lewis Chessmen of Norse origin to the interactions between the Black Death and the Norwegian language The Languages of Scandinavia offers profound insight into languages with a cultural impact deep-rooted and far-reaching from the Icelandic sagas to Swedish writer Stieg Larssons internationally popular Millennium trilogy. Sanderss book is both an accessible work of linguistic scholarship and a fascinating intellectual history of language.