"Icelandic and Norwegian remained very similar until the 13th
century, when important differences began to appear. There were
dialects within Norwegian itself, which may be divided into two
groups, East and West Norwegian. The dialectical boundary was
roughly a line drawn from Grenland to Raumsdal. East Norwegian
differed from Icelandic more than West Norwegian, agreeing with Old
Swedish in most of the additional differences."
I fully agree with Gordon on this. Having recently examined some of
the surviving early manuscripts in Old Norwegian of the western
variety, I have come to the rather old conclusion that Norway is
linguistically speaking two separate countries. One can understand
why speakers of surviving West Norse dialects in Norway have had to
fight an unending battle for recognition against the richer and more
numerous Danish-speakers in the south. Had it been up to linguists
to decide where the boundary lines were drawn, they would likely
have followed Gordon and partitioned Norway into two countries. I
can testify from my own personal reading that the languages of the
Faroe Islands, Iceland and Northern and Western Norway were for all
practical purposes the same language into the 13th century. In fact,
the diffences were so few that one could almost get away with using
the phrase 'exactly the same'. Old West Norse is a unique language,
even within Scandinavia. It differs at times rather widely from the
Eastern Scandinavian languages in various ways, including the way in
which it re-analyzed the Proto-Norse vowel-system. It even differs
at times in the gender and declension of nouns, the conjugation of
verbs, and other obvious features. Before the Black Death killed off
more than half the population of Norway and what remained fell under
Danish administration, the seat of Norwegian power was in the north.
It is strange for those of us living today to imagine a Norway where
West Norse was not only spoken over a rather wide area, but was even
the administrative language of the land. Most of the surviving manu-
scripts in Old Norwegian are in West Norse and are believed to have
been written in some of the numerous monastaries which once existed
throughout Norway before the Black Death and the Reformation. To say
that the loss of Norway was a major tragedy for the West Norse world
would be an understatement. It was a near death-blow. The changes
that began in Norway with the Black Death effectively wiped out the
majority of West Norse speakers and most of the language itself in
less than 100 years. When the seat of national power moved to Oslo
in the south, the process was complete - West Norse had effectively
become extinct. During the many centuries to come, the emerging
merchant class centered in the south would determine the future of
the country. Unfourtunately for West Norse speakers, this merchant
class consisted mostly of 3 non-West Norse speaking groups: 1) the
descendants of East Norse speaking natives from before the Black
Death 2) the Danish East Norse speaking immigrants who came to fill
in the buisness and administrative void 3)Germans and others from
the mainland of continental Europe, including many Scots and Dutch.
When Snorri uses the phrase 'dönsk tunga' to describe his language,
he is merely applying a formal title to the speech of Scandinavia
during the centuries leading up to his time. 'Dönsk Tunga' makes a
fine proper title for the common language of Gothic Scandinavia - it
has a formal ring to it (at least to West Norse ears). However, from
a strictly linguistic point of view, it is rather obvious why West
Norse was and is properly called 'Norroena' (or more correctly 'Norð-
roena') - no serious linguist would take issue with this. There are
simply too many differences between the East and the West, both in
Norway itself as in all of Scandinavia.