Åland Swedish is a dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

 of Swedish spoken in the Åland Islands

Åland Islands

The Åland Islands form an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. They are situated at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia and form an autonomous, demilitarised, monolingually Swedish-speaking region of Finland...

, an autonomous province of Finland. Åland Swedish has similarities to both Finland Swedish and the historical dialects of Uppland

Uppland

Uppland is a historical province or landskap on the eastern coast of Sweden, just north of Stockholm, the capital. It borders Södermanland, Västmanland and Gästrikland. It is also bounded by lake Mälaren and the Baltic sea...

, but it is generally considered to be a variant of Eastern Swedish

Swedish dialects

Swedish dialects can be categorized into Traditional Dialects and Modern Dialects .-Traditional dialects:...

 (östsvenska mål, varieties of Swedish spoken in Finland and Estonia).

Swedish is the sole official language of Åland

Languages of Åland

Åland, an autonomous region of Finland, has the largest Swedish-speaking majority in Finland, with about 90% of the province, or about 25,000 people, speaking Swedish as their first language . Swedish is also the sole official language of the province...

, and its status is protected in the självstyrelselag, a law that guarantees the islands' autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...

 within Finland.

Phonology

As in Finland Swedish, the tonal word accent

Pitch accent

Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...

 that distinguishes certain minimal pairs is not present in Åland Swedish. Of the two accents—the acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

 (accent 1) and the grave accent

Grave accent

The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...

 (accent 2) — only the acute exists in Åland Swedish. Thus ˈandɛn (the duck) and [ˈanˈdɛn] (the spirit) are both pronounced [ˈandɛn].

Characteristics

Certain expressions are typical of Åland Swedish. For example, the double genitive in Vemses flicka/pojke är du då? ("Whose's boy/girl are you?" (Vems flicka/pojke är du då in Standard Swedish)) carries the implication that the asker might know the parents of the person asked, likely in a small society such as Åland. Another characteristic is the substitution of inte (not) with inga (no, nobody, none; in Standard Swedish a plural form): Jag har inga varit där ("I have not been there").

A feature that Åland Swedish shares with Finland Swedish is the reduction of the words inte (not), skulle (should) and måste (must) to int, sku and måst respectively.

Vocabulary

The dialectal vocabulary of Åland Swedish is composed of words that are either characteristic of Eastern Swedish or have passed out of use (but are still understood) in the Swedish spoken in Sweden. Traces of Finnish, Russian and English can also be found in the dialect because of historical contact.

Below is a selection of dialectal words and expressions used in Åland Swedish:

Åland Swedish	Standard Swedish	Translation	Notes
batting n.	(trä)regel	batten	batting in standard Swedish means baby. Probably from English batten Batten A batten is a thin strip of solid material, typically made from wood, plastic or metal. Battens are used in building construction and various other fields as both structural and purely cosmetic elements... .
batteri n.	(värme)element	radiator	batteri in standard Swedish means battery.
butka n.	fängelse	jail	From Russian (cf. Finnish putka)
byka v.	tvätta (kläder)	wash clothes	From byk, laundry. Byk is archaic in Sweden ("cf." Finnish "pyykki").
bykmaskin n.	tvättmaskin	washing machine	See above
egnahemshus n.	villa	(detached) house	Archaic in Sweden.
jo interj.	ja	yeah	Variant form in Sweden, a positive answer to a negative question, cf. French si
julgubbe n.	jultomte	Santa Claus
jåla v.	tramsa, prata strunt	fool around, talk rubbish
nojsa v.	bråka, tjata, föra oväsen	kick up a fuss, nag, make a noise	Archaic in Sweden. From English noise
Nåssådå! exp.	—	—	Consoling expression used when something does not go as expected
si v.	se	see	Åland Swedish pronunciation of se (see Swedish phonology Swedish phonology The phonology of Swedish is notable for having a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree quantity, making 17 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Swedish pronunciation of consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages... )
Siddu barra! exp.	lit. Ser du bara, i.e. Ser man på	Just watch
småkusin n.	syssling	second cousin	Possibly a semantic loan from Finnish pikkuserkku, ‘small cousin’
stöpsel n.	stickpropp	electric plug	From Russian штепсель (shtepsel), ultimately from German Stöpsel
tövla v.	vara klumpig, fumlig	be clumsy, fumbling
vilig adj.	riktigt bra	very good, awesome
ämbar n.	hink	bucket	Archaic in Sweden. Word borrowed from Low German, derived from Latin amphora.

External links

• Ryska lånord i åländskan (Russian loanwords in Åland Swedish)
• Listen to spoken Åland Swedish