Älvdalsmål
Encyclopedia
Elfdalian or Övdalian is a linguistic variety of the Scandinavian
language branch spoken in the old parish of Övdaln, which is located in the south-eastern part of Älvdalen Municipality
in Northern Dalarna
, Sweden
.
Traditionally regarded as a Swedish dialect, Elfdalian is today regarded by several linguists as a separate language. As some other Dalecarlian vernacular
s spoken north of the Lake Siljan
, Elfdalian retains numerous old grammatical and phonological features that have not changed considerably since Old Norse
and is considered to be the most conservative and best preserved vernacular within the Dalecarlian branch. Having developed in relative isolation since the Middle Ages, 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
in Sweden, which would entail numerous protections and encourage its use in schools and by writers and artists. The Swedish Parliament was due to address this issue in 2007, but apparently has not yet done so. The European Council has urged the Swedish government to reconsider the status of Elfdalian/Övdalian on four different occasions, most recently in October 2011. The Committee of Experts now encourages the Swedish authorities to investigate the status of Övdalian through an independent scientific study.
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the distinction between nominative and accusative may have been lost in full nouns, and the genitive has generally been replaced by -es forms (see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2005); but many speakers retain the distinct dative case, used especially after prepositions and also certain verbs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').
Presented with the help of generative syntax, the following interesting Elfdalian features can be pointed out:
Only 1st and 2nd person plural (Rosenkvist 2006, 2010) can be dropped grammatically; 1st person plural pronouns may be dropped only if they appear directly in front of the finite verb. Verb raising occurs, although there is variation between generations (Garbacz 2006, 2010). 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'):
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, agent-verb 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 one whose syntax has been the least studied.
the Germanic Runes
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).
, Lisslprinsn.
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
, denoting nasal vowels: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨ and Ą̊ą̊. Additionally, it contains the letter Ð
ð for the voiced dental fricative
.
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
stipend
.
North Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages, the languages of Scandinavians, 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...
language branch spoken in the old parish of Övdaln, which is located in the south-eastern part of Älvdalen Municipality
Älvdalen Municipality
Älvdalen Municipality is a municipality in Dalarna County in central Sweden. Its seat is located in the town of Älvdalen....
in Northern Dalarna
Dalarna
', English exonym: Dalecarlia, is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. Another English language form established in literature is the Dales. Places involving the element Dalecarlia exist in the United States....
, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
.
Traditionally regarded as a Swedish dialect, Elfdalian is today regarded by several linguists as a separate language. As some other Dalecarlian vernacular
Vernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
s spoken north of the Lake Siljan
Siljan (lake)
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 . Siljan reaches a maximum depth of , and its surface is situated above sea level...
, Elfdalian retains numerous old grammatical and phonological features that have not changed considerably since Old Norse
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 Ages, 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
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.-International politics:...
in Sweden, which would entail numerous protections and encourage its use in schools and by writers and artists. The Swedish Parliament was due to address this issue in 2007, but apparently has not yet done so. The European Council has urged the Swedish government to reconsider the status of Elfdalian/Övdalian on four different occasions, most recently in October 2011. The Committee of Experts now encourages the Swedish authorities to investigate the status of Övdalian through an independent scientific study.
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 declension 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 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:
Only 1st and 2nd person plural (Rosenkvist 2006, 2010) can be dropped grammatically; 1st person plural pronouns may be dropped only if they appear directly in front of the finite verb. Verb raising occurs, although there is variation between generations (Garbacz 2006, 2010). 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 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, agent-verb 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 one whose syntax has been the least studied.
History
In ÄlvdalenÄlvdalen
Älvdalen is a locality and the seat of Älvdalen Municipality in Dalarna County, Sweden, with 1,812 inhabitants in 2005....
the Germanic Runes
Runic alphabet
The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
have survived the longest. The last record of the Elfdalian Runes is from 1900; these runes are a variant of the Dalecarlian runes
Dalecarlian runes
The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes, was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century...
. 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 princeThe Little Prince
The Little Prince , first published in 1943, is a novella and the most famous work of the French aristocrat writer, poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ....
, 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
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.-Use:...
, denoting nasal vowels: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨ and Ą̊ą̊. Additionally, it contains the letter Ð
Ð
A Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
ð for the voiced dental fricative
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 . The symbol 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
Swedish krona
The krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
stipend
Stipend
A stipend is a form of 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...
.
In English
- Language Tree - Ethnologue report
- Yair Sapir: Elfdalian, the Vernacular of Övdaln
- The NORMS fieldwork in Älvdalen 2007, a page with blog entries written during and after a linguistic field trip to Älvdalen.
- Omniglot: Elfdalian alphabet
In Swedish or in Darlecarlian
- Dalarnas tidningar - article on the establishment of the first spelling standard by Ulum Dalska (in Swedish)
- Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska ("Project for a unified orthography for Elfdalian").
- Älvdalskan är ett språk – inte en svensk dialekt ("Elfdalian is a language - not a Swedish dialect"), debate article from 9 February 2007 in Swedish in the newspaper AftonbladetAftonbladetAftonbladet is a Swedish tabloid founded by Lars Johan Hierta in 1830 during the modernization of Sweden. It is one of the larger daily newspapers in the Nordic countries. Aftonbladet is owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and Norwegian media group Schibsted, and its editorial page...
- Svenska språket – ett hot mot älvdalskan ("The Swedish language – a Threat to Elfdalian"), op-ed piece in Swedish in Dalarnas Tidningar 2 October 2007 by Lars-Olof Delsing, Janne Margrethe Bondi Johannessen, Christer Platzack, Henrik Rosenkvist, Peter Svenonius, Øystein A. Vangsnes, and Jan-Ola Östman.
- Att sätta älvdalskan på kartan ("Putting Elfdalian on the map"), by Östen Dahl. (Has a summary in English at the end.)
- Volume of The First Conference on Elfdalian/Fuost konferensn um övdalskų, with English summaries
- Volume of The Second Conference on Elfdalian/Oðer råðstemną um övdalskų, with English summaries
- Two Essays about Elfdalian, with comments
- Älvdalen Municipality: Älvdalskan (in Dalecarlian and Swedish)