It is a distinct language that has survived against the odds for centuries in a tiny pocket of central Sweden, where just 2,500 people speak it today. And yet, despite bearing little resemblance to Swedish, Elfdalian is considered to be only a dialect of the country’s dominant language.
Now researchers say they have uncovered groundbreaking information about the roots of Elfdalian that they hope could bolster its standing and help it acquire official recognition as a minority language.
Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries.
They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.
Yair Sapir, the co-author of a new book on Elfdalian grammar, the first to be published in English, said: “There is research that compares the distance between Elfdalian vocabulary and it shows the distance is as large [between Swedish and Elfdalian] as between Swedish and Icelandic. So there is higher mutual intelligibility between speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than between Swedish and Elfdalian.”
Until around 1400, as a trade and transit area, the region was influenced linguistically and culturally from Norway and other parts of Sweden. But when the Kalmar Union was established and trade patterns dramatically changed, innovations in the language suddenly stopped.
It was not until about 1900, with the arrival of schools, industrialisation and urbanisation, bringing with it a strong Swedish influence, that the language started to change again. This, in effect, said Sapir, made it “a medieval language that survived up to modern times”.
Before then there were multiple highly specific dialects that varied between villages and sometimes even within villages. “People did not move so much, there was not so much mobility and the units were quite self-reliant. They didn’t need to have so much contact with the outside world.”
While runes had became obsolete in most of Sweden as early as the 14th century, there is evidence of runes being used in Älvdalen as late as 1909, making it the last place in the world where they were used.
The legacy of Sweden’s empire, which during the 17th and 18th centuries ruled over much of the Baltics, is visible in attitudes to Swedish minority languages and dialects today, he said, citing the principles of nationalism and Göticism, which connected the idea of being a strong nation state with a strong uniform language.
Bible translations show, he added, that in the 17th-century Swedish empire there was more tolerance towards non-Nordic languages than towards Nordic languages within the empire. While the Bible was translated to Finnish and Estonian, copies in Danish in their former Danish territories were confiscated. Translating the Bible into Elfdalian and other dialects would have been out of the question.
As a result of such attitudes, there has historically been shame around speaking the language, but in recent years there has been a sense of pride. Efforts by speakers to preserve and revitalise the language have resulted in more people learning the language, standardisation, more teaching in schools, research and Elfdalian children’s literature.
About half of the former parish of Älvdalen’s approximately 5,000 residents speak the language and many others have knowledge of it, meaning it is often heard in the local supermarket, he added.
“The linguistic landscape has also changed in the last 20 years or so, you see many more signs in Elfdalian in Älvdalen. You can also see that the feelings of shame have been replaced with feelings of pride.”
But as the influence of Swedish on the language grows even stronger, weakening the structure of the language and replacing Elfdalian words, greater protection is needed. “Sometimes it’s difficult to know if a word is Swedish or Elfdalian because they are related to each other.”
Bringing back some of the linguistic features of the pre-1900 version, known as Late Classical Elfdalian, is helping native speakers to reclaim the language and allow new speakers in, argue Sapir and his co-author Olof Lundgren in their book A Grammar of Elfdalian. But it would benefit even more from official recognition as a language, they write.
“If Elfdalian is recognised as a minority or regional language in Sweden, the number of speakers is likely to increase, and likewise the general level of Elfdalian language skills.”
