Scandinavian languages

[Adam Hyllested]

On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> So, are you saying that Bokmål is pretty much Norwegianized Danish?

>From the middle of the 15th century till the liberation from Denmark in
1814, the written language of Norway was Danish, whereas the spoken
language continued to be Norwegian. From this state of diglossia, two
modern standard languages evolved: the somewhat artificial, but entirely
West Nordic *Nynorsk*, a mixture of local dialects, and the increasingly
Norwegianized *Bokmål*, based on the written language (Danish). Nowadays,
despite its obviously East Nordic character, Bokmål contains some
important West Nordic features such as (1) the three-gender distinction,
(2) the postpositive possessive pronoun: Bokmål <læreren min> ~ Danish
<min lærer> 'my teacher', (3) some retained diphthongs <øy, stein> ~
Danish <ø, sten> 'island, stone'. But the similarities between Bokmål
and Nynorsk are far outnumbered by the features uniting Bokmål and Danish
in opposition to Nynorsk: Bokmål <hun, dere, hvem, kommer, løk, køre,
ensomhet, forlengelse> ~ Danish <hun, jer, hvem, kommer, løg, køre,
ensomhed, forlængelse> ~ Nynorsk <ho, dykk, kven, kjem, lauk, køyra,
einsemd, lenging> 'she, you (acc.pl.), who (interr.), comes, onion,
(to) drive, loneliness, prolongation'.

> Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern
> Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into
> people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is
> spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages?

Gutnish is an extinct East Nordic language, spoken on the Swedish island
of Gothland in the viking age and medieval times. Gutnish retained old
diphthongs (already at that time monophthongized in Swedish and
Danish) and sometimes even developed triphthongs as in <hiaul> ~ Danish
<hjul> 'wheel'. Some say that Gutnish features are reflected in the
pronounciation of modern Gothland Swedish.

Today, Scanian is a Swedish dialect (on an East Danish substratum),
phonetically very distinct from its northern sisters.

The Bornholm dialect is the last real representative of East Danish.
It shares a lot of features with Swedish, and Swedes understand the
dialects of Bornholm much more easily than they understand standard
Danish.

Adam Hyllested