Excerpt from Trubner's Collection of Simplified Grammars: Of the Principal Asiatic and European Languages The Swedish language belongs to a northern offshoot of the Old Germanic, which in course of time gave origin to two slightly differing forms of speech, known to Scandinavian grammarians as Forn-Svenskan, the Old Swedish, and Forn-Norskan, the Old Norse. The former of these was spoken by the Svear and Gotar, or ancient Swedes and Goths; while the latter, as the name implies, was the language of the Norsemen, and probably identical with the Norr?na, or Donsk Tunga, of the Northmen who first made themselves known to the nations of Christian Europe. We have evidence that these two main branches of the Old Northern never deviated sufficiently from each other to interfere with their comprehension by all the Scandinavian peoples, although each possessed certain inherent and persistent characters peculiar to itself, of which traces may still be found in the modern forms of...