ÃÂvdalian or Elfdalian ( or , ; or ) is a North Germanic language spoken by around 3,000 people who live or have grown up in the locality of ÃÂlvdalen ('), in the southeast of ÃÂlvdalen Municipality in northern Dalarna, Sweden.
Like all other modern North Germanic languages, ÃÂvdalian developed from Old Norse, a North Germanic language spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age until about 1350. ÃÂvdalian developed in relative isolation since the Middle Ages and is considered to have remained closer to Old Norse than the other Dalecarlian dialects.
Traditionally regarded as a Swedish dialect, but by several criteria closer to West Scandinavian dialects, ÃÂvdalian is a separate language by the standard of mutual intelligibility. There is low mutual intelligibility between Swedish and ÃÂvdalian, but, since education and public administration in ÃÂlvdalen are conducted in Swedish, native speakers are bilingual and speak Swedish at a native level. People who speak Swedish as their sole native language, neither speaking nor understanding ÃÂvdalian, are also common in the area.
ÃÂvdalian 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. ÃÂvdalian (and other Dalecarlian language varieties) is traditionally placed among the East Scandinavian languages, together with Swedish and Danish, based on a number of features that ÃÂvdalian has in common with them. According to Lars Levander, some of the West Scandinavian features that simultaneously do occur in ÃÂvdalian are archaic traits that once were common in many Scandinavian dialects and have been preserved in the most conservative tongues east and west of Kölen. However, this is rebutted by Kroonen.
As of 2009, ÃÂvdalian had around 2,000 speakers and was 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 the issue in 2007, but has not yet done so. The Council of Europe has urged the Swedish government to reconsider the status of ÃÂvdalian on a total of five occasions. The Committee of Experts now encourages the Swedish authorities to investigate the status of ÃÂvdalian through an independent scientific study. In 2020, the Committee of Experts concluded that ÃÂvdalian fulfils the criteria of a Part II language, and asked the Swedish authorities to include reporting on ÃÂvdalian in its next periodical report as the language covered by Part II of the Charter, which the Swedish Ministry of Culture has not done in its 8th periodical report to the Council of Europe.
', The Organization for the Preservation of ÃÂvdalian, was established in 1984 with the aim of preserving and documenting the ÃÂvdalian language. In 2005, ' launched a process aimed at bringing about an official recognition of ÃÂvdalian as a language by the Swedish authorities.
', The ÃÂvdalian Language Committee was established in August 2004 within ', its first task being to create a new standard orthography for ÃÂvdalian. In March 2005, the new orthography created by ' was accepted by the ' at their annual meeting. ' consists of five permanent members: linguist ÃÂsten Dahl, dialectologist Gunnar Nyström, teacher Inga-Britt Petersson, linguist and coordinator of the committee Yair Sapir, and linguist Lars Steensland.
As an initiative from ' to encourage children to speak ÃÂvdalian, all school children in ÃÂlvdalen who finish the ninth grade and can prove that they can speak ÃÂvdalian receive a 6,000 Swedish krona stipend.
An online version of Lars Steensland's 2010 ÃÂvdalian dictionary was published in September 2015.
In March 2016, Swedish Radio reported that the ÃÂlvdalen City Council had decided that, starting in autumn 2016, the local kindergarten would operate solely through the medium of ÃÂvdalian.
ÃÂvdalian is comparable to Swedish and Norwegian in the number and the quality of vowels but also has nasal vowels. It has retained the Old Norse dental, velar and labial voiced fricatives. Alveolo-palatal affricate consonants occur in all (Swedish ', north of Siljan) dialects. The realization of is , an apical alveolar trill. Unlike many variants of Norwegian and Swedish, ÃÂvdalian does not assimilate into retroflex consonants. The stress is generally on the first syllable of a word.
Unlike Central Swedish, there is no noticeable difference in quality between the long and the short realisations of the vowels.
ÃÂvdalian has nasal versions of most vowels. They have several origins, belonging to different layers of history, but most involve the loss of a nasal consonant, with lengthening and nasalisation of a preceding vowel.
Nasal vowels are quite rare in Nordic languages, and ÃÂvdalian and a few other neighbouring Dalecarlian dialects are the only ones that preserve nasal vowels from Proto-Norse; all other Nordic dialects with nasal vowels have developed them later as a result of the loss of a nasal consonant: compare Kalix dialect hÃÂ t and gÃÂ¥s with ÃÂvdalian and and gÃÂ ÃÂs.
As in most Germanic languages, main stress is normally on the first syllable in words of native origin, but many loanwords have non-initial stress. The initial stress moves to the last syllable in phrase-final position in certain pronouns, prepositions and adverbs (noger "someone", yvyr "over", itjä "not", older "never") and in personal names and some kinship terms in vocative function. Non-initial compound elements have secondary stress, but if they are polsysyllabic and their lexically stressed syllable is short, the secondary stress falls on the next syllable after the lexically stressed one (e.g. ÃÂsÃÂ¥mÃÂ¥r "summer", but ÃÂsiensÃÂ¥ÃÂmÃÂ¥r "late summer").
Like most other North Germanic language varieties spoken in Sweden and Norway, ÃÂvdalian has a tone contrast between two lexically determined accents that are associated with the primary-stressed syllable in a word and originally correspond to monosyllabic and polysyllabic words in Old Norse, respectively. The realisation of the contrast is similar to that found in Central Swedish, in that accent 1 has one peak in focus position, while accent 2 has two peaks in focus position and the second peak is normally realised on the post-stress syllable. Unlike Central Swedish, however, accent 2 can occur in monosyllabic words - the words in question were originally disyllabic but have undergone apocope. Compounds typically have accent 2 (e.g. <sup>2</sup>iennbru "iron bridge"), but, as in most Norwegian and some Swedish dialects, some of them have accent 1 instead, such as those with a first element ending in a vowel (<sup>1</sup>blÃÂ¥bruok "blue trousers"), a first element that is itself polysyllabic (<sup>1</sup>okkymattj "ice hockey match"), past participles of phrasal verbs with a monosyllabic first element (<sup>1</sup>autkastað "thrown out") and those with an infixed -s- (<sup>1</sup>landsweg "country road").
In ÃÂlvdalen, Germanic runes survived in use longer than anywhere else. The last record of the ÃÂvdalian Runes is from the early 20th century; they are a variant of the Dalecarlian runes. ÃÂlvdalen can be said to have had its own alphabet during the 17th and 18th century.
Due to the great phonetic differences between Swedish and ÃÂvdalian, the use of Swedish orthography for ÃÂvdalian has been unpredictable and varied, such as the one applied in the Prytz's play from 1622, which contains long passages in ÃÂvdalian, or in the ÃÂvdalian material published in the periodical Skansvakten.
A first attempt to create a separate ÃÂvdalian orthography was made in 1982 by Lars Steensland. Bengt ÃÂ kerberg elaborated it, and it was applied in some books and used in language courses and is based on Loka dialect and is highly phonetic. It has many diacritics (Sapir 2006).
In March 2005, a uniform standard orthography for ÃÂvdalian was presented by (lit. "Let us confer"), The ÃÂvdalian Language Council, and accepted by ' (lit. "Let us speak Dalecarlian"), The Organization for the Preservation of ÃÂvdalian. The new orthography has already been applied by Björn Rehnström in his book ' 'Three Bears from ÃÂlvdalen' published in 2007. RÃ¥ðdjärum's orthography was also used in Bo Westling's translation of 's The Little Prince, '.
The Elfdalian alphabet consists of the following letters
Other than the letters occurring in the Swedish alphabet, Elfdalian has letters with ogonek, denoting nasal vowels: ÃÂà, ÃÂÃÂ, îï, à ²à ³, Yèyè and ÃÂÃÂàÃÂ. Additionally, it uses the letter eth (, ) for the voiced dental fricative.
ÃÂvdalian has a morphological structure inherited from its Old Norse ancestor. Verbs are conjugated according to person and number and nouns have four cases, like Modern Icelandic and German. The Old Norse three-gender system has been retained. 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 ÃÂvdalian declensional and conjugational system. The declension of , "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, which is used especially after prepositions and also certain verbs (such as , "help"). The distinction between nominative and accusative has been lost in indefinite nouns, and the inherited genitive been replaced by new forms created by attaching to the dative (see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2005), a trend that was well underway even in Classic Elfdalian.
Unlike other Swedish vernaculars, the syntax of ÃÂvdalian was investigated in the early 20th century (Levander 1909). Although ÃÂvdalian syntax has attracted increased attention, a majority of its syntactic elements are still unresearched. In MayâÂÂJune 2007, a group of linguists from the pan-Scandinavian NORMS network conducted fieldwork in ÃÂlvdalen especially aimed at investigating the syntactic properties of the language.
Presented with the help of generative syntax, the following features have been identified:
That 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. Although some of the properties are archaic features that existed in Old Swedish, others are innovations; none of them has been studied in any detail.
In 2015, a new genus Elfdaliana of deep-sea nudibranch molluscs was named after the ÃÂvdalian language in reference to evolutionary basal characters of the new genus never before reported for the family, just as ÃÂvdalian preserves ancestral features of Old Norse.