The Old Norse language

Old Norse was the language spoken by the Vikings, and the language in which the
Eddas, sagas, and most of the other primary sources for our current knowledge of
Norse mythology were written.
Old Norse is a member of the Germanic family of languages, which also includes
English, German, and several other languages that are widely spoken today.
During the first several centuries of the Common Era, a distinctly northern dialect
of Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of the Germanic languages) formed in
Scandinavia, which gradually morphed into Proto-Norse, which, by 750 CE or so –
that is, by the beginning of the Viking Age – had become the language we would
today recognize as Old Norse. Over the centuries, Old Norse continued to fragment
into more regionally-specific languages, and by the early modern era, it had been
transformed into Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Faroese.

The linguistic genealogy of Old Norse begins with the spread of Proto-Indo-
European. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) refers to a language reconstructed by
linguists and presumably extant before the advent of writing in its speaking area.
The term can likewise refer to the presumed speakers of this language: a group
united by a linguistic identity, though perhaps ethnically diverse, as we see among
modern languages like English and Spanish.  PIE provides the root of a linguistic
family tree including, aside from Germanic, other branches such as Slavic, Celtic,
Indo-Iranian, Romance, and Greek languages.  Schematically, we may imagine
that a certain dialect group within the PIE speaking community began to distance
itself from the remainder of the community.  This might have happened, for
example, through migration, increased commerce with neighboring cultures, or an
influx of speakers of non-Indo-European backgrounds. Over time this speech
community became sufficiently distinct from other PIE speakers to allow for
independent language evolution.  Through ensuing centuries of population influx,
shifting geographic frontiers, and intermingling with neighboring cultures this
dialect developed into what we may term Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic
(PGmc). The same process then repeated, so that PGmc itself came to display ever
more dramatic regional variation. By the late pre-Christian, early Christian era,
there emerged three distinct dialects: East, West, and North Germanic. From West
Germanic developed Old English and Old Frisian, as well as Old High German and
Old Saxon. From North Germanic are descended the Scandinavian languages, with
the oldest literature in Old Norse. East Germanic is only attested in Gothic, which
has no modern descendants.

Old Norse shares some features with West Germanic, to the exclusion of Gothic. In
Old Norse and West Germanic both -dōm and -skapi are used as suffixes to
produce abstract nouns, whereas they are only used as root nouns in Gothic. Old
Norse and the West Germanic languages also show the pervasive traces of umlaut,
which is absent in Gothic. Gothic exhibits the change of initial fl- to þl-, absent in
both North and West Germanic. Reduplicated verbs are still somewhat productive
in Gothic, but completely marginalized in Old Norse and West Germanic.

Recent theories place the speech area of Proto-Germanic in the region of what is
now Denmark and southern Sweden. Although archaeological evidence shows that
the area was inhabited as far back as 10,000 BC, the Germanic presence is usually
associated with the "Battle-Axe Culture", a group which invaded the region
sometime in the third millenium BC. It seems that the speakers of North Germanic
did not move far from this area in the earliest migration phases of the Germanic
tribes. There is a general consensus that the locus of Norse speakers was still
centered on this region just before their entrance into wider European historical
traditions.
 References

 Barnes, Michael. 1999. A New Introduction to Old Norse. p. 1-2

 Byock, Jesse L. 2013. Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and
Icelandic Sagas. p. 20-23.
 Old Norse Online :Series Introduction , Todd B. Krause and Jonathan
Slocum https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/norol