The
Younger Futhark, also called
Scandinavian runes, is a
runic alphabet, a reduced form of the
Elder Futhark, consisting of only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" which lasted during the 7th and 8th centuries. The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when
Proto-Norse evolved into
Old Norse. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and
minimal pairs which were not separate in writing.