Editing Swedish language (section)

===Old Norse===
{{Main|Old Norse}}
{{Old Norse language map}}
In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, [[Proto-Norse language|Proto-Norse]], evolved into Old Norse. This language underwent more changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects: ''Old West Norse'' (Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland) and ''Old East Norse'' (Denmark and Sweden). The dialects of Old East Norse spoken in Sweden are called ''[[Runic Swedish]]'', while the dialects of Denmark are referred to as ''Runic Danish''. The dialects are described as "runic" because the main body of text appears in the [[runic alphabet]]. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the [[Elder Futhark]] alphabet, Old Norse was written with the [[Younger Futhark]] alphabet, which had only 16 letters. Because the number of runes was limited, some runes were used for a range of [[phoneme]]s, such as the rune for the vowel ''u'', which was also used for the vowels ''o'', ''ø'' and ''y'', and the rune for ''i'', also used for ''e''.<ref name=Edlund2010p26-31>Lars-Erik Edlund, "Språkhistorisk översikt" in {{harvnb|Dahl|Edlund|2010|pp=26–31}}</ref>

From 1200 onwards, the dialects in Denmark began to diverge from those of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark, creating a series of minor dialectal boundaries, or [[isogloss]]es, ranging from [[Zealand (Denmark)|Zealand]] in the south to [[Norrland]], [[Ostrobothnia (historical province)|Österbotten]] and northwestern [[Finland]] in the north.<ref name=Edlund2010p26-31/>

An early change that separated Runic Danish from the other dialects of Old East Norse was the change of the [[diphthong]] ''æi'' to the [[monophthong]] ''é'', as in ''stæinn'' to ''sténn'' "stone". This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read ''stain'' and the later ''stin''. There was also a change of ''au'' as in ''dauðr'' into a long open ''ø'' as in ''døðr'' "dead". This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from ''tauþr'' into ''tuþr''. Moreover, the ''øy'' diphthong changed into a long, [[close vowel|close]] ''ø'', as in the Old Norse word for "island". By the end of the period, these innovations had affected most of the Runic Swedish-speaking area as well, with the exception of the dialects spoken north and east of [[Mälaren Valley|Mälardalen]] where the diphthongs still exist in remote areas.<ref>{{Harvnb|Bergman|1984|pp=21–23}}</ref>