Old Swedish

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

It was the first Swedish language document written in the Latin alphabet, and its oldest fragments have been dated to around the year 1225.

The phonological and grammatical systems inherited from Old Norse were relatively well preserved and did not experience any major changes.

[5] The Middle Low German language also influenced Old Swedish due to the economic and political power of the Hanseatic League during the 13th and 14th centuries.

Accordingly, loanwords relating to warfare, trade, crafts and bureaucracy entered the Swedish language directly from Low German, along with some grammatical suffixes and conjunctions.

It is speculated that the influence of Low German was so strong that it helped break down the inflectional system of Old Swedish.

In this period Old Swedish had taken in a large amount of new vocabulary primarily from Latin, Low German and Dutch.

When the country became part of the Kalmar Union in 1397, many Danish scribes brought Danicisms into the written language.

The graphemes ⟨u⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨w⟩ were used interchangeably with the phonemes /w/ ~ /v/ and /u/ (e.g. vtan (without), utan in modern Swedish), and ⟨w⟩ could also sometimes stand for the consonant-vowel combinations /vu/ and /uv/: dwa (duva or dove).

The root syllable length in Old Swedish could be short (VC), long (VːC, VCː) or overlong (VːCː).

in Old Swedish and did so into modern times in said dialects, as well as in the Westro- and North Bothnian tongues in northern Sweden.

In Old Swedish nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative), whereas modern standard Swedish has reduced the case system to a common form and a genitive (some dialects retain distinct dative forms).

[15] The verbs in the table below are bīta (bite), biūþa (offer), wærþa (become), stiæla (steal), mæta (measure) and fara (go).

Both referential and nonreferential subjects could be left out as verbal structures already conveyed the necessary information, in much the same way as in languages such as Spanish and Latin.

[11] This is an extract from the Westrogothic law (Västgötalagen), which is the oldest continuous text written in the Swedish language, and was compiled during the early 13th century.