Tag: elfdalian

A Swedish parliamentary representative is calling for action to preserve an extremely vulnerable language spoken in Sweden’s forested countryside: Elfdalian (älvdalska in Swedish and övdalsk in the language itself). Currently, the Swedish government only recognizes Elfdalian as a dialect of Swedish, despite the two languages sharing very little mutual intelligibility. Peter Helander, who hails from the region where Elfdalian...

All of the Nordic languages; Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are descended from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. These languages have all evolved in different ways over the past 1000 years, so they are very different from each other. Deep in central Sweden, there is another, lesser known Nordic language that is at risk of going...