Swedish dialects

Swedish dialects can be categorized into Traditional Dialects (with no Standard Swedish influence) and Modern Dialects (with various degrees of Standard Swedish influence).

Traditional dialects

Map showing the Swedish dialects traditionally spoken. (Note that even the northernmost part of Sweden is Swedish speaking today and that the dialects in Estonia are almost extinct.)

The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called dialect, is a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by the standard language and that can trace a separate development all the way back to Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections. These dialects can be near-incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål (lit. "parish speech"). They are generally separated into six major groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary (the color represents the core area and the samples are from Svenska Dagbladet's dialect project):

Sydsvenska mål (dark blue); Sample (Skåne, Perstorps socken, N. Åsbo härad).

Götamål (red); Sample (Västergötland, Korsberga socken, Vartofta härad, Skaraborgs län).

Sveamål (dark green); Sample (Uppland, Håtuna socken, Håbo härad).

Norrländska mål (light blue); Sample (Västerbotten, Skellefte socken, Löparnäs).

Östsvenska mål (orange); Sample (Finland, Österbotten, Sideby socken).

Gotländska mål (light green); Sample (Gotland, Lau Socken, Gotlands södra härad).

The areas with mixed colors as stripes are transitional areas (övergångsområden, following the terminology of Gertrud Pettersson's Svenska under sjuhundra år). The parts in yellow with coloured dots represent various distinct (särpräglade, following the terminology of Gertrud Pettersson's Svenska under sjuhundra år) dialect areas which are not easily defined belonging to any of the six major groups above. The areas west of the core for Norrländska mål, west of Sveamål and north of Göta are related to each of these, respectively, indicated by the colour of the dots. Samples from respectively area: Jämtland, Föllinge socken (related to Norrländska mål), Dalarna, Älvdalens socken (related to Sveamål) and Värmland, Nordmarks härad, Töcksmarks socken (related to Götamål). The dialects of this category have in common that they all show more or less strong Norwegian influences, especially the dialects in Härjedalen, Northwestern Jämtland and Northwestern Dalarna. Dialects are often showing similarities along traditional traveling routes such as the great rivers in Northern Sweden, which start in the mountains at the Norwegian border and then follow a South-Easterly path towards the Bothnian Sea. The grey area does not have any independently developed Swedish dialect.

Below we have a summary (from Svenska språket under sjuhundra år, Gertrud Pettersson) of some of the most important differences between the major groups.

Feature	Sydsvenska mål	Götamål	Sveamål	Norrländska mål	Östsvenska mål	Gotländska mål
Diphthongs	Secondary in most of the area	No	No	Primary and secondary in north	Primary	Primary and secondary
Long a > å	Yes (secondary diphthong)	Yes	Yes	Yes in south	Yes	No
p, t, k > b, d, g	In most of the area	No	No	No	No	No
Intervocalic g > j or w	In most of the area	No	No	No	No	No
Ending vowel -a	Remains	Weakened in parts of the area	Remains	Vowel balance	Vowel balance	Weakened in most of the area
Dropping of -r in plur.	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Allophone of r	Back	Front	Front	Front	Front	Front
Postpos. poss. pron.	No	Only family words	Only family words	Yes	Yes	Only family words
Softening initial g, k, sk	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Dropping of -n	No	Yes	Only in a small part of the area	Yes	No	Yes
Dropping of -t	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
"Thick" l, also of rd	No	Yes	Yes	Yes in south	Only in the west	No
Supradentals	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Only in the west	No
Dropping of -de in pret.	In parts of the area	In parts of the area	Yes	Yes	Yes	Only -e is dropped
Prolong. vowel in short stemmed words, also in front of p, t, k, s	Yes	Yes	No	Some of the system of short stemmed words preserved	Some of the system of short stemmed words preserved	No
Stem vowel i, y > e, ö, also in long stemmed words and in front of i, u	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No
Vowel balance	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No

Note that this table does not hold for the distinct (dotted) or transitional (striped) areas.

See also

• Norwegian dialects
• Danish dialects
• North Germanic languages
• Scanian dialects

References

• Pettersson, Gertrud (1996) Svenska språket under sjuhundra år ISBN 91-44-48221-3

External links

• More samples, from many dialects not listed in this article. (Swedish site)