Elfdalian or Övdalian (Övdalsk or Övdalską in Elfdalian, Älvdalska or Älvdalsmål in Swedish Swedish ( svenska ) is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along) is a linguistic variety of the Scandinavian The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is sometimes referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common language branch spoken in the old parish of Övdaln, which is located in the south-eastern part of Älvdalen Municipality in Northern Dalarna Dalarna is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. English language forms established in literature include Dalecarlia and the Dales. Places involving the element Dalecarlia still exist in the United States, Sweden Sweden (pronounced /ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən, Swedish: Sverige [ˈsvær.jə]), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and water borders with Denmark, Germany and.

Traditionally regarded as a Swedish dialect, Elfdalian is today regarded by several linguists as a separate language. As some other Dalecarlian Dalecarlian is a group of dialects or inofficial languages spoken in Sweden, Dalecarlia. The most prominent is Elfdalian vernaculars A vernacular, mother tongue or mother language, and less frequently one sense of idiom and dialect, is the native language of a population located in a country or in a region defined on some other basis, such as a locality. For example, Navajo is a local language in the southwest of the United States, and English is the state language of a number spoken north of the Lake Siljan Siljan, in Dalarna in central Sweden, is Sweden's sixth largest lake. The cumulative area of Siljan and the adjacent, smaller lakes Orsasjön and Insjön is 354 km². Siljan reaches a maximum depth of 120 m, and its surface is situated 161 metres above sea level. The largest city bordered by its shore is Mora, Elfdalian retains numerous old grammatical and phonological features that have not changed considerably since Old Norse Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300 and is considered to be the most conservative and best preserved vernacular within the Dalecarlian branch. Having developed in relative isolation since the Middle Age, quite a few linguistic innovations are also present in the language.

Elfdalian has around 3,000 speakers and its existence is severely threatened. However, it is possible that it will receive an official status as a minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities in Sweden, which would entail numerous protections and encourage its use in schools and by writers and artists. In 2007 the Swedish Parliament was due to address this issue, but it has apparently not yet been treated.[2] The European Council has urged the Swedish government to reconsider the status of Elfdalian/Övdalian three times, most recently in May 2009.

Contents

Grammar

Morphology

Elfdalian has a highly complex morphological structure, partially inherited from its Old Norse ancestor. Thus, it has personal conjugations on the verb, three genders, and makes case distinctions. As in other Scandinavian languages, nouns have definite (def.) and indefinite (indef.) forms. The length of the root syllable plays a major role in the Elfdalian declensional and conjugational system. The conjugation of warg 'wolf' (long-syllabic, strong masculine noun) was as follows in what is sometimes called "Classic Elfdalian" (as described by Levander 1909):

warg 'wolf' sg.indef. sg.def. pl.indef. pl.def.
nominative warg wargen warger wargär
accusative warg wardjin warga wargą
dative wardje wardjem wargum wargum(e)
genitive (wardjes) wardjemes — wargumes

Today the distinction between nominative and accusative may have been lost in full nouns, and the genitive has generally been replaced by -es forms (see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2005); but many speakers retain the distinct dative case, used especially after prepositions and also certain verbs (such as jåpa, 'help').

Syntax

Unlike other Swedish vernaculars, the syntax of Elfdalian was investigated in the early 20th century (Levander 1909). However, although Elfdalian syntax attracts increased attention, a majority of the syntactic phenomena is still uncharted. In May/June 2007 a group of linguists from the pan-Scandinavian NORMS network[3] conducted a fieldwork in Älvdalen especially aimed at investigating the syntactic properties of the language.

Presented with the help of generative syntax, the following interesting Elfdalian features can be pointed out:

Null referential subjects are grammatical, but only 1st and 2nd person plural (Rosenkvist 2006), and 1st person plural pronouns cannot be covert unless directly in front of the finite verb. Verb raising occurs, although there is variation between generations (Garbacz 2006). Especially intriguing are the multiple subjects (Levander 1909:109), which seem to occur in clauses with the adverbial sakta ('actually') or the verb lär ('is possible'):

Du ir sakt du uvendes duktin dalsk.
you are advl you very good speak-Övdalian
’you are actually very good at speaking Övdalian’

This has recently been studied more closely from a generative perspective in Rosenkvist (2007).

Other interesting syntactic properties are (from a Germanic perspective) negative concord, stylistic inversion, long distance reflexives, verb controlled datives, AV- word order in coordinated clauses with deleted subjects etc. Some of these properties are archaisms (they also appeared in Old Swedish), whereas other are inventions, but none of them has yet been studied in any detail. It appears that Elfdalian displays a number of syntactic features that make it one of the most interesting Germanic languages. It is also, concerning syntax, one of the least studied. In the fall 2009, Piotr Garbacz will however defend his thesis "Issues in Övdalian Syntax (Lund University) and the book "Studies in Övdalian Syntax" will be published in 2010 (John Benjamins).[dated info]

Writing systems

See also: Dalecarlian alphabet

History

In Älvdalen Älvdalen is a locality and the seat of Älvdalen Municipality in Dalarna County, Sweden, with 1,812 inhabitants in 2005 the Germanic Runes The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark ; the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the same have survived the longest. The last record of the Elfdalian Runes is from 1900; these runes are a variant of the Dalecarlian runes. Älvdalen can be said to have had its own alphabet during the 17th and 18th century.

Due to the great phonetic differences between Swedish and Elfdalian, the use of Swedish orthography for Elfdalian has been unpredictable and individual, e.g. as applied in Prytz' theatre piece from 1622, containing long passages in Elfdalian, or in the Elfdalian material published in the periodical Skansvakten.

A first attempt to create a separate Elfdalian orthography was made in 1999 by Bengt Åkerberg. Åkerberg's orthography was applied in some books and used in language courses. This orthography is based on Loka dialect and is highly phonetic, involving a great deal of diacritics (Sapir 2006).

Råðdjärum's Orthography

In March 2005, a uniform standard orthography for Elfdalian presented by Råðdjärum (lit. "Let us confer"), The Elfdalian Language Council, and accepted by Ulum Dalska (lit. 'Let us speak Dalecarlian'), The Organization for the Preservation of Elfdalian. The new orthography has already been applied by Björn Rehnström in his book Trair byönner frå Övdalim 'Three Bears from Älvdalen' published in 2007. Råðdjärum's orthography was also used in Bo Westling's translation of Saint-Exupéry's Le petit prince The Little Prince , published in 1943, is French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's most famous novella. Saint-Exupéry wrote it while living in the United States. It has been translated into more than 180 languages and sold more than 80 million copies making it one of the best selling books ever, Lisslprinsn.

The Elfdalian Alphabet

The Elfdalian alphabet consists of the following letters:

Aa Ąą Bb Cc Dd Đð Ee Ęę Ff Gg Hh Ii Įį Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Ųų Vv Ww Xx Yy Y̨y̨ Zz Åå Ą̊ą̊ Ää Öö

Besides letters occurring in the Swedish alphabet, Elfdalian has letters with ogonek The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages, denoting nasal vowels A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation. Note that these terms can be slightly misleading as the air does not come exclusively out of the: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨ and Ą̊ą̊. Additionally, it contains the letter Ð Eth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line partially through the vertical stroke. The lower case resembles an insular d with a line through theð for the voiced dental fricative The voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is ð, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is D. The symbol ð was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced.

Preservation and standardization

Ulum Dalska, The Organization for the Preservation of Elfdalian, was established in 1984 with the aim to preserve and document the Elfdalian language. In 2005, Ulum Dalska launched a process aiming to bring about an official recognition of Elfdalian as a language by the Swedish authorities.

Råðdjärum, The Elfdalian Language Committee was established in August 2004 within Ulum Dalska, its first task being to create a new standard orthography for Elfdalian. In March 2005 the new orthography created by Råðdjärum was accepted by the Ulum Dalska annual meeting. Råðdjärum consists of five permanent members: Prof. Östen Dahl (linguist), Mr. Gunnar Nyström (dialectologist), Mrs. Inga-Britt Petersson (teacher), Dr. Yair Sapir (the Committee's Coordinator, linguist), Prof. Lars Steensland (linguist).

As an initiative from Ulum Dalska to encourage children to speak Elfdalian, all schoolchildren in Älvdalen who finish the ninth grade in 2010 and prove that they can speak Elfdalian receive a 6000 SEK The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. It is locally abbreviated kr. The plural form is kronor and one krona is subdivided into 100 öre (singular and plural). The currency is sometimes informally referred to as the "Swedish crown" in English (since krona literally means crown in Swedish). The Swedish krona also circulates stipend A stipend is a form of monetary payment or salary, such as for an internship or apprenticeship. It is often distinct from a wage or a salary because it does not necessarily represent payment for work performed, instead it represents a payment that enables somebody to be exempt partly or wholly from waged or salaried employment in order to.[4]

Notes

  1. ^ "Ulum Dalska". Ehf.se. http://www.ehf.se/ulumdalska/index4.html. Retrieved 2010-06-19.
  2. ^ Uppsala University, Second Conference on Elfdalian, Älvdalen 12–14 June 2008
  3. ^ Nordic Center of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax
  4. ^ [1]

References

External links

In English

In Swedish or in Darlecarlian

Categories: Dalarna | North Germanic languages Categories: Germanic languages | Scandinavia | Nordic countries | Swedish dialects | Languages of Sweden

 

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icelandic, faroese (in which it is called edd), and . elfdalian. . it was also used in scandinavia during the middle ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. the capital eth resembles a d with a line partially ...

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