Editing Scanian dialect (section)

== History ==
Swedish and Danish are considered to have once been part of the same dialect, [[Old Norse#Old East Norse|Old East Norse]], up until the 12th century. However, some scholars speculate that there might have been certain dialect differences within the [[North Germanic languages|Nordic language]] area as early as the [[Proto-Norse|Proto-Nordic]] period.<ref name="Ottosson">Ottosson, Kjartan (2003). "Old Nordic:  A definition and delimitation of the period". In ''The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages''. Volume 1. Eds. Oskar Bandle et al., p. 798.</ref> The term Swedish is not mentioned specifically in any source until the first half of the 14th century,<ref name="Ottosson" /> and no standard spoken language had developed in either Sweden or Denmark before 1500, although some scholars argue that there may have been tendencies towards a more formal "courteous" language among the aristocracy.<ref>Bandle, Oscar. "Diachrony and synchrony in Nordic language history". In ''The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages''. Volume 1. Eds. Oskar Bandle et al., p. 30.</ref>

[[File:Scania Churchlaw.jpg|right|thumb|200px| [[Anders Sunesøn]]'s 13th century version of the [[Scanian Law]] and Church Law, containing a comment in the margin called the "Skaaningestrof": "''Hauí that skanunga ærliki mææn toco vithar oræt aldrigh æn''." (Let it be known that Scanians are honorable men who have never tolerated injustice.)]]

Scanian appeared in writing before 1200,<ref>Nielsen, Herluf (2003). "The development of Latin Script IV: In Denmark". ''The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages''. Volume 1. Eds. Oskar Bandle et al., p. 851: The Scanian Law was written before 1200.</ref> at a time when Swedish and Danish had yet to be codified, and the long struggle between Sweden and Denmark over the right to claim the Old Scanian manuscripts as an early form of either of the two national state languages has led to some odd twists and turns. Two Scanian fragments dated to around 1325 were initially claimed to be (younger) Old Swedish, but further research in modern times has claimed that the language was not Swedish, but Scanian. During the 20th century the fragments were thus relabeled early Old Danish by Scandinavian linguists, and as explained by Danish linguist Britta Olrik Frederiksen, the fragments are now thought to "represent as such a newly claimed territory for the history of the Danish language".<ref name="Frederiksen">Frederiksen, Britta Olrik (2003). "The history of Old Nordic manuscripts IV: Old Danish". The history of Old Nordic Manuscripts VI: Old Danish, In ''The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages. Volume 1'', Eds. Oskar Bandle et al., p. 823.</ref> Like the Scanian Law, one of the fragments, a six-leaf fragment (catalogued as SKB A 120), is written in the runic alphabet. The place of writing, according to Frederiksen, has been tentatively identified as the [[Cistercian]] monastery at [[Herrevad Abbey]] in Scania. The fragment contains a translation of Mary's lament at the cross. The other fragment (catalogued as SKB *A 115) is a bifolium with just over a hundred metrical lines of [[knittelvers]], a translation from Latin of the apocryphal gospel [[Evangelium Nicodemi]] about Christ's descent into hell and resurrection.<ref name="Frederiksen" />

In modern Scandinavian linguistic research, the assertion that Old Scanian was a Swedish dialect before the Swedish acquisition of most of old Skåneland is now seldom argued by linguistic scholars, although the comparative and historical research efforts continue.<ref>Oskar Bandle, Kurt Braunmüller, Ernst Hakon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann, and Ulf Teleman, eds. (2002–2003) ''The Nordic Languages: An international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages''. In cooperation with Gun Widmark and Lennart Elmevik. Description of the content is available at [https://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=14038 The Linguist List] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050413102919/http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=14038 |date=2005-04-13 }}.</ref>

<!---Moving the following note from footnotes into the text--For an overview of the dialects of the Nordic region, see [http://uit.no/scandiasyn?Language=en Scandinavian Dialect Syntax], a project umbrella where nine Scandinavian research groups collaborate to systematically map and study the syntactic variation across the Scandinavian dialect continuum. Reminder: Patrik Bye's "Evolutionary typology and Scandinavian pitch accent." University of Tromsø/CASTL: http://www.hum.uit.no/a/bye/Papers/pitch-accent-kluw.pdf--->
One of the artifacts sometimes referred to as support for the view of Scanian as separate from both the Swedish and Danish language is a letter from the 16th century, where the Danish Bible translators were advised not to employ Scanian translators since their language was not "proper Danish".<ref>Johs Brøndum-Nielsen (1914). "Sproglig Forfatterbestemmelse" (a Professor of Nordic Philology, Copenhagen).</ref>

=== Language politics ===
As pointed out by the Norwegian scholar Lars S. Vikør, professor, Nordic and Linguistics Studies, [[University of Oslo]], in the 2001 book ''Language and Nationalism'', the "animosity between the two countries [Sweden and Denmark], and the relative closeness of their standard languages (dialectal differences within each of the two countries were greater than [between] the two standards), made it imperative to stress the difference between them in the standardization process". According to Vikør, the "Swedish treatment of the Scanians perhaps shows [that] the most important element of the [linguistic nationalism] ideology is the desire to stress the difference from another linguistic entity that in some way may be considered threatening or challenging one's own autonomy."<ref>Barbour, Stephen and Cathie Carmichael ed. (2001). ''Language and Nationalism in Europe''. Oxford University Press, 2001. {{ISBN|0-19-823671-9}}, p. 109-110.</ref>

In Scania, the Swedish government officially limited the use of Scanian in 1683 by nullifying the self-rule granted in the [[Treaty of Roskilde]] and the Malmö Recess of 1662, where Scania had been granted the right to a certain degree of autonomy including preservation of its old laws<ref>Ditlev Tamm, Helle Vogt, 2016, [https://books.google.com/books?id=qpleCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA49 The Danish Medieval Laws: The Laws of Scania, Zealand and Jutland], p. 49-50. {{ISBN|9781317294825}}.</ref> and customs.<ref>David Kirby, 2014, [https://books.google.com/books?id=U4yrAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA282 Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World 1492–1772], p. 282-[https://books.google.com/books?id=U4yrAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA283 283]. {{ISBN|9781317902157}}.</ref> Scania became fully integrated into the Swedish Kingdom in 1719, and the assimilation has accelerated during the 20th century, with the dominance of [[Standard Swedish]]-language radio and television, urbanization, and movement of people to and from the other regions of Sweden.

[[Bornholm]] was once part of Skåneland but rebelled and returned to Denmark in 1659. The Scanian dialect of Bornholm remained in use as a functioning transitional stage, but Standard [[Danish (language)|Danish]] soon became dominant in official contexts, and the dialect is thought to be disappearing.<ref>[http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/dlh/dialekt/24.html Statsbiblioteket, Denmark] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060629003415/http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/dlh/dialekt/24.html |date=2006-06-29 }}, L. Wimmer & V. Thomsen et al. (1991). ''Danske talesprog, Dialekter, Regionalsprog, Sociolekter.'' For the development of Modern Danish, see also: Hans Basbøll's "Prosody, productivity and word structure: the stød pattern of Modern Danish" and John D. Sundquist's "The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and Early Modern Danish embedded-clause word order" in ''Nordic Journal of Linguistics'' (26, 2003).</ref>

=== Historic shifts ===
The gradual transition to Swedish has resulted in the introduction of many new Swedish characteristics into Scanian since the 18th century, especially when it comes to vocabulary and grammar. In spite of the shift, Scanian dialects have maintained a non-Swedish prosody, as well as details of grammar and vocabulary that in some aspects differ from [[Standard Swedish]]. The prosody, pronunciation of vowels and consonants in such qualities as length, stress and intonation has more in common with Danish, German and Dutch (and occasionally English) than with Swedish.<ref>Gårding, Eva et al. (1973). "Talar skåningarna svenska", (Do Scanians speak Swedish), p 107, 112. In ''Svenskans beskrivning.'' Ed. Christer Platzack. Lund: Institutionen för nordiska språk. p. 107, 112). (In Swedish). See also Yip, Moira J. (1980). "Why Scanian is not a case for multi-valued features". ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 11.2: 432–6: "[T]his temporal pattern is not typical of Southern (Scanian) Swedish. Gårding et al. (1974) have shown that Scanian Swedish does not have long consonants following short stressed vowels. There, the duration of the singleton following a short stressed vowel is only 13% longer than when following a long stressed vowel. Thus, Scanian Swedish behaves like the other Germanic languages that have vowel quantity, e.g. German, Dutch and Danish."</ref>

However, as pointed out by the researchers involved in the project ''Comparative Semantics for Nordic Languages'',<ref>For current research in comparative semantics, see the special issue of ''Nordic Journal of Linguistics'' (2004), 27, devoted to the research project Comparative Semantics for Nordic Languages (NORDSEM), which was funded by the Joint Committee of the Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities in 1998–2001 and involved researchers at the Copenhagen Business School, Göteborg University and the University of Oslo.</ref> it is difficult to quantify and analyze the fine degrees of semantic differences that exist between the Scandinavian languages in general, even between the national languages Danish, Swedish and Norwegian: "[S]ome of the Nordic languages [..] are historically, lexically and structurally very similar. [...] Are there systematic semantic differences between these languages? If so, are the formal semantic analytic tools that have been developed mainly for English and German sufficiently fine-grained to account for the differences among the Scandinavian languages?"<ref>Elisabet Engdahl and Robin Cooper (2004). "Introduction." ''Nordic Journal of Linguistics'' (2004), 27.</ref>

Research that provides a cross-border overview of the spectrum of modern dialects in the Nordic region has recently been initiated through the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax Project, based at the University of Tromsø, in Norway, in which nine Scandinavian research groups collaborate for the systematic mapping and studying of the syntactic variation across the Scandinavian dialect continuum.<ref>[http://uit.no/scandiasyn?Language=en Scandinavian Dialect Syntax] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060426051030/http://uit.no/scandiasyn?Language=en |date=2006-04-26 }}. Official site. Retrieved 27 January 2007.</ref>

=== Historic preservation ===
Scanian once had many unique words which do not exist in either Swedish or Danish. In attempts to preserve the unique aspects of Scanian,{{failed verification|reason=The cited page does not mention Scanian or Scania specifically.|date=October 2020}} the words have been recorded and documented by the Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research in Sweden.<ref>[http://www.sofi.se/ Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070527075556/http://www.sofi.se/ |date=2007-05-27 }}. Official site. Retrieved 27 January 2007.</ref> Preservation is also accomplished by comparative studies such as the Scanian-Swedish-Danish dictionary project, commissioned by the Scanian Academy. This project is led by Helmer Lång and involves a group of scholars from different fields, including Birger Bergh, linguistics, Inger Elkjær and Inge Lise Pedersen, researcher of Danish dialects. 

Several Scanian dictionaries have been published over the years, including one by Sten Bertil Vide, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the names of plants in [[South Swedish dialects]].<ref>Vide, S.-B. (1966). ''Sydsvenska växtnamn''. Published by Department of Dialectology and Onomastics in Lund.</ref> This publication and a variety of other Scanian dictionaries are available through the Department of Dialectology and Onomastics in Lund.<ref>[http://www.dal.lu.se/dal/utgivn.htm Department of Dialectology and Onomastics, Lund] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060626232323/http://www.dal.lu.se/dal/utgivn.htm |date=2006-06-26 }}. Official site. Retrieved 27 January 2007.</ref>