I am not a Linguist, therefore I find that in many cases in my research, I have had to go over the same material several times in order to make sense of it. Sometimes the deeper implications of a passage may escape me completely. Still, I find enough digestible material (particularly in Richard Nielsen's work, published in ESOP (Epigraphically Society Occasional Papers) vols. 15-18) , that I am convinced that the linguistics of the Runestone, instead of as previously thought to be a case for forgery, now becomes in several instances a strong case for authenticity.
Linguistics is at best a difficult proposition, a complex picture puzzle where many pieces are missing. One can perhaps attempt to determine from the rest of the puzzle what the missing pieces are - indeed much of the real work of linguistics is such inference - but in the long run, until more pieces come in in terms of newer finds, it is all guesswork.

There are particular difficulties in 14th century Norway, due to internal changes and the influences of other languages. Clarence Peterson in "America's Rune Stone" quotes several scholars on this subject:

"The languages of the two kingdoms (Sweden and Norway), which had always much resembled each other, were now (due to the union in 1319) in the process of amalgamation... The melodious and highly inflected Old Norse language was being displaced by a less elegant transition language, marked by lacerated word forms and the lack of strict grammatical rules and therefore probably not written the same way by any two writers... The regular grammatic inflections which distinguished all old languages were the first to be discarded. The neglect of inflectional endings and the substitution of particles or the use of certain modified sentence structures became characteristic." (p 29-30 quoting Professor Munch - no citation)

"In Norwegian from the latter part of the Middle Ages it is even more difficult than in the neighboring languages to reconstruct the real sound and forms of the spoken language... We can see from this that people attempted to write as they had learned, not as they spoke. What the spoken language was, can therefore not be found in statistics, but by comparison with the dialects of the present from the same or near-by places" (p30-31 quoting Professor Amund Larsen, "ARKIV")

"From 1360 and onward the Norwegian shows a strong Swedish influence... German influence on the Norwegian language is of an old date. Just as in Sweden and Denmark the Hanseatic League occupied a dominant place in Norway in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the documents, scores of German words crowded in through Swedish and Danish channels." (p31 quoting Falk and Torp "Dansk-Norskens Syntax)
It is interesting to here note that one reason that Breda was opposed to the KRS was because "the inscriptions seem to be a jumble of Swedish and Norwegian in late grammatical forms.." The grammatical forms we will attend to later, but one can expect in the 14th century to see a jumble of Swedish and Norwegian. It is easy to see from the above, that linguists dealing with 14th century Norwegian must deal not only with the difficulties of a single language, but with the chaos of several rival forms. There is no 'standard' Norwegian for this time period, and objections raised against the Kensington Rune Stone based on some linguistic standard cannot be legitimized.
Recent discoveries have shown that Runic writing was not as uncommon as once believed. Over 600 runic inscriptions dating from the 12-15th centuries have been recovered in Bergen. These inscriptions were carved into wood, rather than stone, and contain such mundane items as proof of ownership, personal letters, love poetry, incantations, commercial records and even graffiti (Ingeborg loved me when I was in Stavanger') These inscriptions, by the way, have been classified and put up on the net at http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/ncch-docs/Runehtml/RiBWWW/English/runeindex.html this archive includes a number of photographs of the runic carvings as well. Thus our rune carver need not have been an experienced rune master, He (or they if other members of the parties added their input) may have been working on incomplete knowledge, with no recourse to any other inscriptions. This might particularly be true in cases of rarely used letters, so that runes which do not conform to the more or less 'standard' futhorks (alphabets) of the era should not be considered overly strange.

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