Övdalian

Archaisms

• Lack of syllable lengthening.
• Retention of voiced fricatives /ð/, /ɣ/ and /β/.
• Retention of nominative, accusative and dative cases.
• Retention of Proto-Germanic, Proto-Norse and Old Norse nasal vowels.
• Retention of Proto-Germanic voiced labio-velar approximant /w/: wattn ('water'), will ('wants'), wet ('knows'): compare English water, will, and wit and Standard Swedish vatten, vill and vet.
• Retention of consonant clusters ld, nd, mb, rg, gd and ng (with audible [ɡ]), as in ungg ('young'), kweld ('evening'), warg ('wolf') and lamb ('lamb') from Old Norse ungʀ, kveld, vargʀ (both with /w/ represented by 'v') and lamb.

Innovations and unique developments

• More frequent assimilation of pre-Norse mp, nt, and nk to pp, tt, and kk, as in West Scandinavian dialects.
• Shift of a to o before Pre-Norse nk (but not kk).
• Shift of Old Norse ei, ey, and au to ie, ä, and o.
• Diphthongization of Old Norse long high vowels í, ý, ú to closing diphthongs ai, åy, au, and of long rounded mid vowels ó, œ to opening diphthongs uo, yö.
• Vowel harmony (present also in other dialects of Central Scandinavia).
• Loss of h: compare Övdalian aus with Swedish hus (or English house) and Övdalian imil with Swedish himmel.

Preservation and standardization

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

Råðdjärum, The Övdalian Language Committee was established in August 2004 within Ulum Dalska, its first task being to create a new standard orthography for Övdalian. 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 Övdalian, all school children in Älvdalen who finish the ninth grade and can prove that they can speak Övdalian receive a 6,000 Swedish krona stipend.^[16]

An online version of Lars Steensland's 2010 Övdalian dictionary was published in September 2015.^[17]

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 Övdalian.^[18][19]

Consonants

• The voiceless plosives /p/, /t/, and /k/ are aspirated word-initially unless following /s/.^[20]
• [d] and [ð], and [ɡ] and [ɣ] are allophones of /d/ and /ɡ/ respectively in complementary distribution; the fricative allophones surface after vowels when short, and the plosive allophones surface elsewhere.^[21] [ð] can surface word-initially in some pronouns and adverbs by sandhi.
• [l] and [ɽ] are allophones of /l/ in complementary distribution; the former surfaces when long, when adjacent to /t/ or /d/ and, for many speakers, before /n/, and the latter allophone surfaces elsewhere.^[22]
• [v] and [w] are allophones of /v/ in complementary distribution; the former surfaces after a tautomorphemic vowel, and the latter surfaces before a tautomorphemic vowel.^[23] It is also sometimes realised as [b] before /d/. The fricative allophone was historically realised as [β].
• Sounds /t͡s̺ d͡z̺ s̺/ are released as apico-alveolar.

Vowels

• Sounds /o oː/ are heard as /u uː/ in some parts of Övdaln.

• Sounds /ɛ̃ ɛ̃ː/ are heard primarily in Övdaln, whereas /æ̃ æ̃ː/ are heard in other parts nearby.
• Sounds /ɔ̃ ɔ̃ː/ are heard as /õ õː/ or /ũ ũː/ in some parts of Övdaln.

The close vowel sounds /i iː/ or /ĩ ĩː/ are not present in Övdalian.^[24]

Diphthongs

• Sounds /uo uoː/ can be realized in some village dialects as [ʏæ ʏæː].
• /ɔy/ is realized in some village dialects [ɔj].
• /juo/ is realized in some dialects as [jʏæ].

• Sounds /ũo ũoː/ can be realized in some village dialects as [ʏæ̃ ʏæ̃ː].
• /jũo/ is realized in some dialects as [jʏæ̃].

Nasal vowel sounds

Övdalian 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.

• Late Proto-Germanic loss of *n before *h, which 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-Germanic *sehwaną), tųo "two (accusative)" (Proto-Germanic *twanz) and the prefix ųo- "un-" (Proto-Germanic *un-).
• Central Scandinavian loss of word-final -n if it had been preserved in Old Norse generally; The change affected neither Standard Swedish, nor final geminate -nn. The shift 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 with /w/-sound)
• Spontaneous (non-etymological) nasality: rįesa "to travel" (from Low German: rēsen), kęse "cheese" (Old Norse: kæsir, from Latin: caseus).
• Before nasal consonants. This case of nasalisation is allophonic and is not indicated in the orthography.

Nasal vowels are quite rare in Nordic languages, and Övdalian and a few other neighbouring Dalecarlian dialects^[25] 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 hąt and gås with Övdalian hand and gą̊s.

Råðdjärum's orthography

In March 2005, a uniform standard orthography for Övdalian was presented by Råðdjärum (lit. "Let us confer"), The Övdalian Language Council, and accepted by Ulum Dalska (lit. "Let us speak Dalecarlian"), The Organization for the Preservation of Övdalian.^[27] 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^[28]

Other than the 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.

Morphology

Övdalian 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 Övdalian 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, which is used especially after prepositions and also certain verbs (such as jåpa, "help").^[29] The distinction between nominative and accusative has been lost in indefinite nouns,^{[clarification needed]} and the inherited genitive been replaced by new forms created by attaching -es to the dative (see Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2005), a trend that was well underway even in Classic Elfdalian.

Syntax

Unlike other Swedish vernaculars, the syntax of Övdalian was investigated in the early 20th century (Levander 1909). Although Övdalian 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^[30] 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, but there is variation between generations (Garbacz 2006, 2010).
• Multiple subjects 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^{[clarification needed]} you very good speak-Övdalian"

"You are actually very good at speaking Övdalian"

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. Some of the properties are archaic features that existed in Old Swedish, but others are innovations, but none of them has been studied in any detail.