11 Facts About Scanian dialects

Scanian dialects is an East Scandinavian dialect spoken in the province of Scania in southern Sweden.

Older Scanian formed part of the old Scandinavian dialect continuum and are by most historical linguists considered to be an East Danish dialect group, but due to the modern-era influence from Standard Swedish in the region and because traditional dialectology in the Scandinavian countries normally has not considered isoglosses that cut across state borders, the Scanian dialects have normally been treated as a South Swedish dialect group in Swedish dialect research.

Many of the genuine rural Scanian dialects have been in decline subsequent to the industrial revolution and urbanization in Sweden.

Scanian dialects appeared in writing before 1200, at a time when Swedish and Danish had yet to be codified, and the long struggle between Sweden and Denmark over the right to claim the Old Scanian dialects manuscripts as an early form of either of the two national state languages has led to some odd twists and turns.

Two Scanian dialects fragments dated to around 1325 were initially claimed to be Old Swedish, but further research in modern times has claimed that the language was not Swedish, but Scanian dialects.

Related searches

In modern Scandinavian linguistic research, the assertion that Old Scanian dialects was a Swedish dialect before the Swedish acquisition of most of old Skaneland is seldom argued by linguistic scholars, although the comparative and historical research efforts continue.

One of the artifacts sometimes referred to as support for the view of Scanian dialects as separate from both the Swedish and Danish language is a letter from the 16th century, where the Danish Bible translators were advised not to employ Scanian dialects translators since their language was not "proper Danish".

Scanian dialects once had many unique words which do not exist in either Swedish or Danish.

Several Scanian dictionaries have been published over the years, including one by Sten Bertil Vide, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the names of plants in South Swedish dialects.

The phonemes of Scanian correspond to those of Standard Swedish and most other Swedish dialects, but long vowels have developed into diphthongs that are unique to the region.

Scanian dialects used to have many words which differed from standard Swedish.