Editing Scanian dialect (section)

=== 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>