North Germanic Dialects

Abstract The traditional North Germanic dialects are spoken in the geographical area of Scandinavia, located in the northernmost part of Europe and the North Atlantic area. Linguistically, they form a dialect continuum with similar linguistic characteristics beyond national borders. Typologically, the North Germanic dialects are usually divided into a group of mainland varieties (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, including Finland Swedish) and insular varieties (Icelandic and Faroese) and, again, in various subcategories. In the early 21st century, people outside of Scandinavia often regard the area as rather uniform, not at least politically and culturally. Contrarily, its language varieties coexist with both mutually intelligible and unintelligible varieties, as they originate from different language families: Indo-European language, including the North Germanic languages, Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish), Uralic languages (the Sámi languages in northern Scandinavia), and Inuit languages (Greenlandic). In Scandinavia, or Norden as the Scandinavians usually call the area, the North Germanic varieties are usually referred to as Nordic (nordisk), including both mainland and insular varieties. The term is also included in Old Nordic, the common Scandinavian language used in the entire area from around 200 ce and until the geographical determined distinctions between the states’ languages increased around the Early Middle Ages, 1200–1350 ce. From then on, the first signs of a geographical distribution of phonological, morpho-phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical differences and similarities could be attested in the first written sources. Thus, the North Germanic varieties often have complex developmental histories that may explain the geographical distribution of linguistic features in the area. For example, the geographical distribution of the marking of definiteness in the mainland North Germanic varieties is divided into a coherent area of varieties where definiteness is marked by a suffix (Swedish mannen ‘the man’) and an area in which definiteness is marked by a free lexeme, like in the West Germanic varieties (West and Southern Jutlandic æ mand ‘the man’). The term dialect refers to a geographical variety of a language that contains linguistic features differing from the national standard variety regarding pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon. For North Germanic dialects, the definition is further limited to the sovereign countries in which they are spoken. This means that the definition—and the classification of the dialects—are nationally, rather than linguistically, motivated. For example, Scanian is defined as a South Swedish dialect, and Bornholmian, as a Danish dialect; however, they share linguistic similarities in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon that might suggest a different classification. Dialect geography, likely the oldest branch of dialectology, attempts to visualize these similarities and differences using geolinguistic maps that illustrate the remarkable genealogical and typological connectedness in Scandinavia.

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