A curious difference between the Scandinavian languages concerns the standard negator: Swedish uses inte, whereas the others use ikke/ekke. The change in default negator from ej to icke is common to the early Scandinavian languages, but Swedish goes further in changing from icke to inte. Still, all three negators remain synchronically available in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Neither the historical development nor the synchronic functionality of these elements is well understood. Based on corpus studies of stylistically diverse texts, the overarching empirical goal of this project is to provide a detailed description of the changes involved in the rise and fall of these three negators and their respective functions in the history of Swedish (c. 1200–2000). The overarching theoretical goal is to incorporate these empirical findings into a theory of language change in general and negation change in particular. The project builds on a solid theoretical foundation involving testable hypotheses and statistical analysis, not only in historical syntax and pragmatics but also sociolinguistics. The project will explicitly address the role of gender and social class in the spread of new forms, which will help clarify the relation between language change and the emergence of new linguistic norms at a crucial time in the history of Swedish. As these aspects have been overlooked with regard to Swedish, this project has the potential to produce clear and groundbreaking results.