Elfdalian

Classification

Elfdalian belongs to the Northern branch/Upper Siljan branch of the Dalecarlian dialects or vernaculars, which in their turn evolved from Old Norse, from which Dalecarlian vernaculars might have split as early as in the eighth or ninth century, i.e., approximately when the North Germanic languages split into Western and Eastern branches.

Characteristics

Archaisms:

Lack of vowel lengthening in open syllables.

The medial voiced fricatives /ð/ and /ɣ/ are retained.

The dative case is retained.

Old Norse nasal vowels are retained.

Innovations and unique developments:

More frequent assimilation of pre-Norse mp, nt and nk to pp, tt and kk, as in West Norse dialects.

a > o before Pre-Norse nk (but not kk).

Old Norse ei, ey and au develop into ie, ä and o respectively.

Diphthongization of Old Norse long high vowels í, ý, ú to closing diphthongs ai, åy, au, and of the long rounded mid vowels ó, œ to opening diphthongs uo, yö.

Vowel harmony (present also in other dialects of central Scandinavia).

Phonology

Elfdalian is comparable to Swedish and Norwegian in number and quality of vowels, but also has nasal vowels. It has retained the Old Norse dental fricative in the middle and end of words. Alveolo-palatal affricate consonants occur in all Uvåsiljan (Swedish Ovansiljan, north of Siljan) dialects. Like many variants of Norwegian and Swedish, all Dalecarlian dialects except Orsamål assimilate /rt, rd, rs, rn, rl/ into retroflex consonants. Stress is generally on the first syllable of a word.

Nasal vowels

Nasal vowels are a unique feature of Elfdalian, having been lost from all other descendants of Old Norse at some point of their history. They have several origins, belonging to different layers of history, but most involve loss of a nasal consonant, with lengthening and nasalisation of a preceding vowel.

Late Proto-Germanic loss of *n before *h. The *h was lost in early Norse, but the nasalisation remained: gą̊tt "doorway" (Proto-Germanic *ganhtiz).

Old Norse loss of nasal consonants before *s: gą̊ss "goose" (Proto-Germanic *gans-), įster "lard" (Middle Low German: inster).

Old Norse loss of *n before *l and *r: ųor "our" (Proto-Norse *unzraz).

Old Norse loss of word-final *n but only monosyllables: ą̊ "on" (Proto-Germanic *an), sją̊ "to see" (Proto-Norse *sehwą), tųo "two (accusative)" (Proto-Germanic *twanz) and the prefix ųo- "un-" (Proto-Germanic *un-).

Central Scandinavian loss of word-final -n (in cases that it had been preserved in Old Norse generally). The change affected neither Standard Swedish nor did final geminate -nn. It occurred in primarily the definite noun suffix of feminine nouns but also ą̊ "she" and a few other words.

Secondary post-Norse loss of n before s: rįesa "to wash" (Old Norse: hreinsa), wįster} "left" (Old Norse vinstri).

Spontaneous (nonetymological) nasality: rįesa "to travel" (from Low German: rēsen), kęse "cheese" (Old Norse kæsir, from Latin: caseus).

Before nasal consonants. Then, nasalisation is allophonic and is not indicated in the orthography.

Grammar

In common with some other Dalecarlian vernaculars spoken north of the Lake Siljan, Elfdalian retains numerous old grammatical and phonological features that have not changed considerably since Old Norse, and it is considered to be the most conservative and best preserved vernacular within the Dalecarlian branch. Having developed in relative isolation since the Middle Ages, quite a few linguistic innovations are also present in the language.

Morphology

Elfdalian has a morphological structure inherited from its Old Norse ancestor. Verbs are conjugated according to gender and number and nouns have four cases, similar to modern Icelandic and German. Like the other North Germanic languages, nouns have definite and indefinite forms rather than a separate definite article (as in English). The length of the root syllable plays a major role in the Elfdalian declensional and conjugational system. The declension of warg, "wolf" (long-syllabic, strong masculine noun) was as follows in what is sometimes called "Classic Elfdalian" (as described by Levander 1909):

Many speakers retain the distinct dative case, used especially after prepositions and also certain verbs (such as jåpa, "help"). The distinction between nominative and accusative has been lost in full nouns, and the inherited genitive been replaced by new forms created by attaching -es to the dative (see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2005).

Syntax

Unlike other Swedish vernaculars, the syntax of Elfdalian was investigated in the early 20th century (Levander 1909). Although Elfdalian syntax has attracted increased attention, a majority of its syntactic elements are still unresearched. In May–June 2007, a group of linguists from the pan-Scandinavian NORMS network conducted fieldwork in Älvdalen especially aimed at investigating the syntactic properties of the language.

Presented with the help of generative syntax, the following features have been identified:

Only first and second person plural pronouns (Rosenkvist 2006, 2010) can be dropped grammatically.

First person plural pronouns may be dropped only if they appear directly in front of the finite verb. Verb raising occurs, although there is variation between generations (Garbacz 2006, 2010)

Multiple subjects which seem to occur in clauses with the adverbial sakta, "actually", or the verb lär "is possible" (Levander 1909:109).

Du ir sakt du uvendes duktin dalsk. literally: "You are ADVL you very good speak-Övdalian" "You are actually very good at speaking Övdalian"

This has recently been studied more closely from a generative perspective by Rosenkvist (2007).

Other syntactic properties are negative concord, stylistic inversion, long distance reflexives, verb controlled datives, agent-verb word order in coordinated clauses with deleted subjects, etc. Some of these properties are archaic features that existed in Old Swedish, whereas others are innovations, but none of them have been studied in any detail.

Writing systems

In Älvdalen, Germanic runes survived in use longer than anywhere else. The last record of the Elfdalian Runes is from 1900; these runes are a variant of the Dalecarlian runes. Älvdalen can be said to have had its own alphabet during the 17th and 18th century.

Due to the great phonetic differences between Swedish and Elfdalian, the use of Swedish orthography for Elfdalian has been unpredictable and varied, e.g. as applied in the Prytz's play from 1622, which contains long passages in Elfdalian, or in the Elfdalian material published in the periodical Skansvakten.

A first attempt to create a separate Elfdalian orthography was made in 1999 by Bengt Åkerberg. Åkerberg's orthography was applied in some books and used in language courses. This orthography is based on Loka dialect and is highly phonetic, involving a great deal of diacritics (Sapir 2006).

Råðdjärum's orthography

In March 2005, a uniform standard orthography for Elfdalian was presented by Råðdjärum (lit. "Let us confer"), The Elfdalian Language Council, and accepted by Ulum Dalska (lit. "Let us speak Dalecarlian"), The Organization for the Preservation of Elfdalian. The new orthography has already been applied by Björn Rehnström in his book Trair byönner frą̊ Övdalim 'Three Bears from Älvdalen' published in 2007. Råðdjärum's orthography was also used in Bo Westling's translation of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Lisslprinsn.

Elfdalian alphabet

The Elfdalian alphabet consists of the following letters:

Aa Ąą Bb Cc Dd Đð Ee Ęę Ff Gg Hh Ii Įį Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Ųų Vv Ww Xx Yy Y̨y̨ Zz Åå Ą̊ą̊ Ää Öö

Besides letters occurring in the Swedish alphabet, Elfdalian has letters with ogonek, denoting nasal vowels: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨ and Ą̊ą̊. Additionally, it uses the letter eth (Ð, ð) for the voiced dental fricative.

Language status

As of 2009, Elfdalian had around 2000 speakers and is in danger of language death. However, it is possible that it will receive an official status as a minority language in Sweden, which would entail numerous protections and encourage its use in schools and by writers and artists. The Swedish Parliament was due to address this issue in 2007, but apparently has not yet done so. The Council of Europe has urged the Swedish government to reconsider the status of Elfdalian on four different occasions, most recently in October 2011. The Committee of Experts now encourages the Swedish authorities to investigate the status of Elfdalian through an independent scientific study.

Preservation and standardization

Ulum Dalska, The Organization for the Preservation of Elfdalian, was established in 1984 with the aim of preserving and documenting the Elfdalian language. In 2005, Ulum Dalska launched a process aimed at bringing about an official recognition of Elfdalian as a language by the Swedish authorities.

Råðdjärum, The Elfdalian Language Committee was established in August 2004 within Ulum Dalska, its first task being to create a new standard orthography for Elfdalian. In March 2005, the new orthography created by Råðdjärum was accepted by the Ulum Dalska at their annual meeting. Råðdjärum consists of five permanent members: linguist Östen Dahl, dialectologist Gunnar Nyström, teacher Inga-Britt Petersson, linguist and coordinator of the committee Dr. Yair Sapir, and linguist Lars Steensland.

As an initiative from Ulum Dalska to encourage children to speak Elfdalian, all school children in Älvdalen who finish the ninth grade and can prove that they can speak Elfdalian receive a 6,000 SEK stipend.

In March 2016, Swedish Radio reported that the Älvdalen City Council had decided that, starting in autumn 2016, the local kindergarten would operate solely through the medium of Elfdalian.

New organisms named after Elfdalian

A new genus Elfdaliana of deep-sea nudibranch molluscs has been named recently after the Elfdalian language in reference to evolutionary basal characters of the new genus never before reported for this family just as Elfdalian preserves ancestral features of Old Norse.