Skne in southern Sweden

Scanian ( sknska (helpinfo)) is a closely related

group of South Swedish dialects spoken in the
province of Scania in southern Sweden. Scanian
formed part of the old Scandinavian dialect
continuum and are by most historical linguists
considered to be an East Danish dialect group,[2]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. However, many of the early
Scandinavian linguists, including Adolf Noreen and G.
Sjstedt, classified it as "South Scandinavian", and
some linguists, such as Elias Wessn, also considered
Old Scanian a separate language, classified apart from
both Old Danish and Old Swedish.
Status
There has been active campaigning from local Scanian
interest groups to promote Scanian as a separate
language on par with the official minority languages,
though this has been rejected by Swedish authorities.
Swedish linguists generally view Scanian as just one of
many local or regional Swedish (or Scandinavian)
dialects, some of which differ considerably
from Standard Swedish but don't meet the criteria of
a separate language.
Scanian
was
originally
classified
as
a
separate language in ISO 639-3, but was declassified
as a language in 2009. A request for reinstatement
was submitted during the 2009 annual review
process, but rejected on the grounds of mutual
intelligibility; it is listed in ISO 639-6 with code scyr.

Within the previous SIL International classification of

Scanian were the dialects in the province of Scania,
some
of
the
southern
dialects
of Halland (hallndska in Swedish), the dialects
ofBlekinge (blekingeml in Swedish) and the dialects
of the Danish island of Bornholm (bornholmsk in
Danish).
With the establishment of the Scanian Academy and
with recent heritage conservation programs, funded
by Region Skne and the Swedish Government, there
is a renewed interest in the region for Scanian as a
cultural language and as a regional identity, especially
among younger generations of Scanians. Many of the
genuine rural dialects have been in decline
subsequent
to
the industrial
revolution and urbanization in Sweden.
The population of Skne County consists of around
13% of the total population in Sweden.
History
Swedish and Danish are considered to have been the
same dialect, Old East Norse, up until the 12th
century. However, some scholars speculate that there
might have been certain dialect differences within
the Nordic language area as early as the ProtoNordic period. The term Swedish is not mentioned

specifically in any source until the first half of the 14th

century and no standard spoken language had
developed in either Sweden or Denmark before 1500,
although some scholars argue that there may have
been tendencies towards a more formal "courteous"
language among the aristocracy.

Anders Sunesn's 13th century version of the Scanian

Law and Church Law, containing a comment in the
margin called the "Skaaningestrof": "Hau that
skanunga rliki mn toco vithar ort aldrigh n."
(Let it be known that Scanians are honorable men
who have never tolerated injustice.)
Scanian 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 manuscripts as an
early form of either of the two national state

languages has led to some odd twists and turns. Two

Scanian fragments dated to around 1325 were initially
claimed to be (younger) Old Swedish, but further
research in modern times has claimed that the
language was not Swedish, but Scanian. During the
20th century the fragments were thus relabeled early
Old Danish by Scandinavian linguists, and as explained
by Danish linguist Britta Olrik Frederiksen, the
fragments are now thought to "represent as such a
newly claimed territory for the history of the Danish
language". Like the Scanian Law, one of the
fragments, a six-leaf fragment (catalogued as SKB A
120), is written in the runic alphabet. The place of
writing, according to Frederiksen, has been
tentatively identified as the Cistercian monastery
at Herrevad Abbey in Scania. The fragment contains a
translation of Mary's lament at the cross. The other
fragment (catalogued as SKB *A 115) is a bifolium
with just over a hundred metrical lines of knittelvers,
a translation from Latin of the apocryphal
gospel Evangelium Nicodemiabout Christ's descent
into hell and resurrection.
In modern Scandinavian linguistic research, the
assertion that Old Scanian was a Swedish dialect
before the Swedish acquisition of most of old
Skneland is now 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 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 translators since their
language was not "proper Danish".
Language politics
After the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, the
former Danish provinces
of Blekinge, Halland andScania became
a Swedish
dominion, but they were allowed to keep their old
privileges, laws and customs. However, from the
1680s, a process of Swedification was introduced,
including a switch of languages used in churches and
restrictions imposed on cross border travel and trade.
The situation in Scania was unique from a linguistic
point of view; modern sociolinguistic studies often
approach it as a way to study the roots of linguistic
nationalism. As pointed out by the Norwegian scholar
Lars S. Vikr, professor, Nordic and Linguistics
Studies, University
of
Oslo,
in
the
2001
book Language and Nationalism, the "animosity
between the two countries [Sweden and Denmark],

and the relative closeness of their standard languages

(dialectal differences within each of the two countries
were greater than the two standards), made it
imperative to stress the difference between them in
the standardization process". According to Vikr, the
"Swedish treatment of the Scanians perhaps shows
[that] the most important element of the [linguistic
nationalism] ideology is the desire to stress the
difference from another linguistic entity that in some
way may be considered threatening or challenging
one's own autonomy."
In Scania, the Swedish government officially limited
the use of Scanian in 1683 by nullifying the self-rule
granted in the Treaty of Roskilde and the Malm
Recess, where Scania had been granted the right to a
certain degree of autonomy including preservation of
its old laws and customs. Scania became fully
integrated into the Swedish Kingdom in 1719, and the
assimilation has accelerated during the 20th century,
with the dominance of Standard Swedish-language
radio and television, urbanization, and movement of
people to and from the other regions of Sweden.
Bornholm was once part of Skneland, but rebelled
and returned to Denmark in 1659. The Scanian dialect
of Bornholm remained in use as a functioning
transitional stage, but Standard Danish soon became

dominant in official contexts and the dialect is

thought to be disappearing.
Historic shifts
The gradual transition to Swedish has resulted in the
introduction of many new Swedish characteristics into
Scanian since the 18th century, especially when it
comes to vocabulary and grammar. In spite of the
shift, Scanian dialects have maintained a non-Swedish
prosody, as well as details of grammar and vocabulary
that in some aspects differ from Standard Swedish.
The prosody, pronunciation of vowels and consonants
in such qualities as length, stress and intonation, has
more in common with Danish, German and Dutch
(and occasionally English) than with Swedish. [17] The
degree of contrast between Scanian dialects and
standard Swedish is sometimes in the popular press
compared to the differences between British
English and Australian English. However, as pointed
out by the researchers involved in the project
Comparative Semantics for Nordic Languages, it is
difficult to quantify and analyze the fine degrees of
semantic differences that exist between the
Scandinavian languages in general, even between the
national languages Danish, Swedish and Norwegian:
"[S]ome of the Nordic languages [..]are historically,
lexically and structurally very similar.[]Are there

systematic semantic differences between these

languages? If so, are the formal semantic analytic
tools that have been developed mainly for English and
German sufficiently fine-grained to account for the
differences among the Scandinavian languages?"[
The characteristic Scanian diphthongs, which do not
occur in Danish or Swedish, are in popular belief often
seen as signs of Scanian natives' efforts to adapt from
a Danish to a "proper" Swedish pronunciation.
However, linguists reject this explanation for the
sound change; at present, there are no universallyaccepted theories for why sound changes occur.
Research that provides a cross-border overview of the
spectrum of modern dialects in the Nordic region has
recently been initiated through the Scandinavian
Dialect Syntax Project, based at the University of
Troms in Norway, where nine Scandinavian research
groups collaborate to systematically map and study
the syntactic variation across the Scandinavian dialect
continuum.
Historic preservation
Scanian once possessed many unique words which do
not exist in either Swedish or Danish. In attempts to
preserve the unique aspects of Scanian, these words
have been recorded and documented by the Institute

for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research in

Sweden. Preservation is also accomplished through
comparative studies such as the Scanian-SwedishDanish dictionary project, commissioned by the
Scanian Academy. This project is led by Helmer Lng
and involves a group of scholars from different fields,
including Birger Bergh, linguistics, Inger Elkjr and
Inge Lise Pedersen, researcher of Danish dialects.
Several Scanian dictionaries have been published
through the years, including one by Sten Bertil Vide,
who wrote his doctoral thesis on the names of plants
in South Swedish dialects. This publication and a
variety of other Scanian dictionaries are available
through the Department of Dialectology and
Onomastics in Lund.
Sounds
Scanian realizes the phoneme /r/ as a uvular
trill, [] in clear articulation, but in everyday speech
more commonly as a voiceless, [] or voiced uvular
fricative, [], depending on phonetic context. This is in
contrast
to
the alveolar articulations
and retroflex assimilations in most Swedish dialects
north of Smland. The realizations of the highly
variable and uniquely Swedish fricative// also tend
to be more velar and less labialized than in other

dialects. Though the phonemesof Scanian correspond

to those of Standard Swedish and most other Swedish
dialects, long vowels have developed into diphthongs
which are unique to the region. In the southern parts
of
Skne
many
diphthongs
also
have
a pharyngeal quality, similar to Danish vowels.
Vocabulary
Scanian used to have many words which differed from
standard
Swedish.
In
1995 Sknska
Akademien released Sknsk-svensk-dansk ordbok, a
dictionary with 2,711 Scanian words and expressions.
It should be mentioned however that not all of these
words are in wide use today. While the general
vocabulary in modern Scanian does not differ
considerably from Standard Swedish, a few
specifically Scanian words still exist which are known
in all of Scania, occurring frequently among a majority
of the speakers. These are some examples

alika,
"jackdaw"
(Standard
Swedish: kaja,
Danish: allike)
elling, "duckling" (Standard Swedish: andunge,
Danish: lling)
hutta,
"throw"
(Standard
Swedish: kasta,
Danish: kaste)

hoe,
"head"
(Standard
Swedish: huvud,
Danish: hoved)
glytt, "very young boy" (no direct equivalent)
glyttig, "silly" (Standard Swedish: tramsig)
fjne, "idiot".
fubbick, "idiot".
grunna
(p),
think
about
(Standard
Swedish: fundera, Danish: overveje)
hiad,
"(very)
hungry
for"
(Standard
Swedish: (mycket) sugen p, (poetic) Danish: hige
efter)
hials, "impatient" (Standard Swedish: otlig,
Danish: utlmodig)
i snder, "broken" (Standard Swedish: snder or i
tu, Danish i stykker, itu or snderreven)
mattbankare or mattebankare, "carpet whipper"
(Standard
Swedish: mattpiskare,
Danish:tppebanker)
mrr, "mare" (Standard Swedish: sto or more
unusual mrr, Danish: mare)
mg, "dirt; excrements" (Standard Swedish: smuts,
Danish: mg)
mlla, "mill" (Standard Swedish: (vder-)kvarn,
Danish: mlle)

This word is used in many geographical names

Examples
Mllevngen, a neighbourhood in Malm
Svanemllen, a station in Copenhagen
Mllebacken (Scanian
dialect)
and Mllebakken (Danish) are names for
countless number of hills, "Mill Hill" in English.
pantoffel, "potato" (Standard Swedish: potatis,
Danish: kartoffel)
pg, "boy" (Standard Swedish: pojke, archaic
Danish: poge / pog, standard Danish: dreng)
rlig, "disgusting", "ugly", "frightening" (Standard
Swedish cklig, ful, skrmmande/otck, former
Swedish rdelig, dialect Danish: rrlig)
rullebr,
"wheelbarrow"
(Standard
Swedish: skottkrra, Danish: rullebr, trillebr)
romma,
"hit"
(Standard
Swedish: trffa,
Danish: ramme)
tradig,
"boring"
(Standard
Swedish: trkig,
Danish: trls/kedelig)
tcke, "cock, rooster" (Standard Swedish: tupp,
Danish: hane)
spann,
"bucket"
(Standard
Swedish: hink,
Danish: spand)
skobann or skoband,
"shoelace"
(Standard
Swedish: skosnre, Danish: snrebnd)

syllten, "hungry" (Standard Swedish: hungrig,

Former Swedish svulten, Danish: sulten)
ts, "girl" (Standard Swedish: flicka or ts (archaic),
Danish: pige or ts)
vann,
"water"
(Standard
Swedish: vatten,
Danish: vand)
vindmlla,
"wind
turbine"
(Standard
Swedish: vindkraftverk, Danish: vindmlle)
vng,
"meadow"
(Standard
Swedish: ng,
Danish: eng or (poetic) vang) (as in Mllevngen,
Malm, "Mill Meadow")