General comment

Old Norse a western variety of North Germanic and is the precursor to Modern Icelandic, with which it shares a substantial deal of morphology and lexicon. As the oldest and best attested variety of North Germanic, Old Norse is representative of that branch.

Characterization of flagging resources

Old Norse has four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. These are marked on nouns, pronouns, all adjectival elements and the definite article. Adjectives have two inflections, strong and weak. The former applies to adjectives used indefinitely attributively and predicatively. The weak adjectival declension is used when the modified noun is definite, either by means of a definite article or otherwise inherently definite such as the name of a person. The definitite article is usually cliticized on nouns, following an inflectional morpheme, so that definite nouns have double case marking.

Characterization of indexing resources

Old Norse shows nominative-verb agreement so that the verb agrees with the noun in the nominative case. If no noun is in the nominative case, the verb is inflected in the third person singular.

Characterization of ordering resources

Generally, Old Norse is a V2 language with a quite stable SVO word order. However, deviances from this may appear in the sources, especially in the form of scrambling and topicalizations. An older SOV situation may at times surface in the language.

Source of the data and generalizations/background of the contributor(s)

The Old Norse data was elicited from the standard dictionary for Old Norse Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. Matteo Tarsi holds a PhD in Icelandic linguistics from the University of Iceland (2020).

Language Old Norse