We discussed Elfdalian back in 2016; now Dmitry Pruss sends me Miranda Bryant’s Guardian report on it:
It is a distinct language that has survived against the odds for centuries in a tiny pocket of central Sweden, where just 2,500 people speak it today. And yet, despite bearing little resemblance to Swedish, Elfdalian is considered to be only a dialect of the country’s dominant language. Now researchers say they have uncovered groundbreaking information about the roots of Elfdalian that they hope could bolster its standing and help it acquire official recognition as a minority language.
Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries. They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.
Yair Sapir, the co-author of a new book on Elfdalian grammar, the first to be published in English, said: “There is research that compares the distance between Elfdalian vocabulary and it shows the distance is as large [between Swedish and Elfdalian] as between Swedish and Icelandic. So there is higher mutual intelligibility between speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than between Swedish and Elfdalian.”
Until around 1400, as a trade and transit area, the region was influenced linguistically and culturally from Norway and other parts of Sweden. But when the Kalmar Union was established and trade patterns dramatically changed, innovations in the language suddenly stopped. It was not until about 1900, with the arrival of schools, industrialisation and urbanisation, bringing with it a strong Swedish influence, that the language started to change again. This, in effect, said Sapir, made it “a medieval language that survived up to modern times”.
Before then there were multiple highly specific dialects that varied between villages and sometimes even within villages. “People did not move so much, there was not so much mobility and the units were quite self-reliant. They didn’t need to have so much contact with the outside world.” While runes had became obsolete in most of Sweden as early as the 14th century, there is evidence of runes being used in Älvdalen as late as 1909, making it the last place in the world where they were used. […]
“The linguistic landscape has also changed in the last 20 years or so, you see many more signs in Elfdalian in Älvdalen. You can also see that the feelings of shame have been replaced with feelings of pride.”
But as the influence of Swedish on the language grows even stronger, weakening the structure of the language and replacing Elfdalian words, greater protection is needed. “Sometimes it’s difficult to know if a word is Swedish or Elfdalian because they are related to each other.” Bringing back some of the linguistic features of the pre-1900 version, known as Late Classical Elfdalian, is helping native speakers to reclaim the language and allow new speakers in, argue Sapir and his co-author Olof Lundgren in their book A Grammar of Elfdalian. But it would benefit even more from official recognition as a language, they write.
Thanks, Dmitry!
The book, which came out a month ago, is here, and it’s Open Access, Free-As-In-Free-Beer.
Excellent, thanks for finding that!
Didn’t I report on the Swedish officialdom’s stance here within the last year? Too late at night to find it again, but their stance is that anything North Germanic spoken in Sweden is ipso facto to be regarded as a dialect of Swedish (unless it’s another national language, or some such). Hey, if they can do it in Italy…
I don’t think any politicians at the national level have cared so far but the ECHR might, especially given that new book. Gutnish is also said to have been a branch separate from the East Norse that became Danish and Swedish, but there may be too much mixing with Standard Swedish now to make a case. And Scanian is not a variety of Danish any more.
Didn’t I report on the Swedish officialdom’s stance here within the last year? Too late at night to find it again, but their stance is that anything North Germanic spoken in Sweden is ipso facto to be regarded as a dialect of Swedish (unless it’s another national language, or some such).
That does ring a bell.
Isn’t the eighth century rather late for hunter-gatherers in those parts?
David E.: Isn’t the eighth century rather late for hunter-gatherers in those parts?
Maybe they are better understood as specialized hunters and trappers since they produced iron, kept some animals, and were integrated into the wider economy. Which seems to be part of the argument.
I’ll read the book. Until then I’ll note that “paleo North Scandinavian” is an interesting construction. I wonder if there’s evidence of something that wasn’t Sami. Sami is thought to have spread from Southern Finland a few centuries earlier, so maybe they think Proto-Norse became the lingua franca in the southern parts of Scandinavia, Sami in the north.
It will also be interesting to see if there’s firm evidence on continuous runic literacy in Övdalen. However sympathetic I am to the idea, 1909 is so late that every living Swede would have had history classes at school and introductions to the runic alphabet had been published regularly in popular magazines for decades.
Among other gems that UCLPress has published as Open Access is The First Hebrew Shakespeare Translations; the Preface to Ithiel the Cushite of Venice is perhaps relevant to the other thread.
paleo North Scandinavian
Perhaps they mean this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Laplandic_languages
Who doesn’t love a hypothetical substrate?
“Who Doesn’t Love a Hypothetical Substrate?” sounds like a Gilbert and Sullivan tune (cut from Princess Ida, but originally to have been performed by the men’s chorus).
Who doesn’t love a hypothetical substrate?
Who doesn’t love a basis they’ve never seen?
If you can bend an iron-clad circular tub straight,
Then you can create a language that’s never been!
FWIW a short reddit thread is skeptical of the distinctiveness of Elfdalian. Not sure how many of them have actually read the grammar.
Seems I guessed right, though the supposed palaeo-whatever substrate is actually only invoked indirectly:
(Page 11, fn 23):
[Hatters will immediately recognise that the incorporation of adjectives with their head nouns is simply an inheritance from Scandi-Congo; the construction remains regular in Oti-Volta.]
One thing that I hadn’t realised is that the language described here is partly an artficial de-Swedified revival. The actual current spoken language is apparently much closer to Swedish. (Perhaps this explains some of the disagreements about the degree of distinctiveness of the language.)
@Hat: Your first two lines have “Maria” (“How do you solve…”) from The Sound of Music going through my head.
I smell a Broadway hit!
Who is not enamoured of a substrate hypothetical,
That answers each and every dialect anomaly
With the ghosts of past inflections of a language quite theoretical
Constructed from vague fragments out of quite a different family?
Brilliant!
Bengt Pamp’s book Svenska Dialekter (Natur och Kultur, 1978), which I bought on 20th October 1978 and have just managed to find, introduces the chapter on Dalarna with quite a long piece in Elfdalian, with a parallel translation into Swedish. He mentions that the area contains some of Sweden’s most unusual dialects, and that ‘in hardly any other district of Sweden has dialect fragmentation gone so far; dialects differ not just from parish to parish but from village to village, and in some cases one can even find different dialects within the confines of a single village’.
Brilliant indeed. I am honoured to have been the occasion of it.
It occurs to me that two rather different questions are in danger of getting confused with one another in this business of whether Elfdalian is a distinct language from Swedish.
One is whether the current language is really not mutually comprehensible with (other?) Swedish dialects. This is the usual can of worms, further complicated by the fact that the language described in this book is artificial, and has been deliberately “purified” of some “Swedish” elements. It also sounds rather as if the proponents of separatism are greatly underestimating the dialect variation within the boundaries of what is usually and uncontroversially regarded as Swedish.
The other is whether Elfdalian is, or is not, part of the same primary branch of proto-Norse as Swedish historically. This is a quite different question, particularly in the context of Scandinavia. Gordon’s grammar (which is all I know about this, and is presumably very outmoded here) describes a primary division between Norwegian-Faroese-Icelandic and Danish-Swedish; this is of course quite different from how things now look after a millennium of mutual influences (or not) among the various languages.
If Elfdalian really does show significant substrate effects from Sámi (which needs a lot better evidence than a simple list of similarities), this would actually undermine the argument that it was a “different language” from Swedish in this second sense, by creating differences which had nothing to do with historical branching.
As an outsider in the sense of Knowing Nothing About This, it seems to me that claims are regularly made that two or more distant things are actually related, and that these are generally nonsense.
Are claims that two apparently close things are actually distant more likely to be true? Claims that two close things are actually close wouldn’t get in the papers, after all – but maybe it is like cryptic species and there’s work still to be done.
As an outsider in the sense of Knowing Nothing About This
Me too.
Basically, I’m just waiting for Trond to finish the book …
Are claims that two apparently close things are actually distant more likely to be true?
In Oti-Volta too (not that it is very relevant, though at least I actually do know something about that) a fair number of distant things thought to be different actually turn out to be close, but not so much the opposite. Though I think I have managed to show that Waama actually isn’t closely related to its Eastern Oti-Volta neighbours, as traditionally supposed, so it can happen. And there are a couple of cases of close things thought to be different turning out to be close after all …
I suppose the moral is that commonly accepted opinions actually are pretty often quite right after all, on account of having become commonly accepted for plausible reasons in the first place.