Orkney. Walter Sutherland is generally considered the last native speaker of the language, dying in 1850, though many claims describe the language, probably in verses and songs, spoken in the islands of Foula and Unst as late as the 20th century. Old Faroese Middle Norwegian The Black Death struck Norway in 1349, killing over 60% of the population. This probably precipitated the current process of language development. The language in Norway after 1350 up to about 1550 is generally referred to as Middle Norwegian. The language went through several changes: morphological paradigms were simplified, including the loss of grammatical cases and the levelling of personal inflection on verbs. A vowel reduction also took place, in some dialects, including in parts of Norway, reducing many final unstressed vowels in a word to a common "e". The phonemic inventory also underwent changes. The dental fricatives represented by the letters þ and ð disappeared from the Norwegian language, either merging with their equivalent stop consonants, represented by t and d, respectively, or being lost altogether. See also Norwegian language Icelandic language Faroese language Norn language References External links «Kulturformidlingen norrøne tekster og kvad» Norway. «Medieval Nordic Text Archive» Organization working with Medieval Nordic texts. «Dokumentasjonsprosjektet» Includes old Norse dictionary and includes Diplomatarium Norvegicum which is a collection of texts from before 1570 (originally 22 books with 19 000 documents) and Regesta Norvegica which contains letters and official documents (it's a more detailed description on "Om Regesta Norvegica") from 822 to 1390. This page is partly available in English. (not Regesta Norvegica) Old Norwegian online dictionary Norwegian, Old Norwegian language Norwegian Norwegian manuscripts Languages attested from the 11th century