<div dir="ltr"><br>2016-03-05 19:44 GMT+01:00 Michael Everson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:everson@evertype.com" target="_blank">everson@evertype.com</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span></span>
Elfdalian is not merely a dialect, but rather is as distinct from
Swedish as Bokmål is (indeed, as distinct from Swedish as Iceland is); <br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Bokmål is one of the <i>written </i>standards
of Norwegian (we don't speak standarized like in Germany and Sweden, we only use it in written form).
If you ask a Norwegian person if they speak Nynorsk or Bokmål they will
find the question kind of funny as we normally consider it like we
speak the same language; Norwegian, but people use different written standards of Norwegian; Bokmål and Nynorsk. Normally the
west-coast of Norway is consiered "nynorsk"-area, but in the cities and
some other places they choose to rather use Bokmål. This is because of
rural-urban conflicts that gave roots to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language_conflict">Norwegian language conflict</a>.
Each municipality in Norway can choose themselves what written form
they want to use. Like my own city Kristiansand uses Bokmål, even though
the dialect maybe have more similarities with Nynorsk. The dialect is
also influenced by Danish, which is what Bokmål is constructed from,
people sometimes think about south-norwegians as speaking like "Danish
Norwegian". I think the Norwegian dialect borders are a little bit more
complex than the nynorsk/bokmål division.<br><br></div>I think we should either say "... as distinct from <i>standard </i>Swedish as Bokmål" or "... as distinct from Swedish as <i>Norwegian</i>".
However. as far as I know nobody ever did a test about the distanse of
Norwegian and Elfdalian/Övdalian from Swedish. According to
Östen Dahl (Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics, Stockholm
University) who measured the distance from different dialects and
languages from Swedish with the help of Swadesh’ glossary, the lexical
distance between Swedish and Elfdalian is as big as the distance between
Swedish and Icelandic. Maybe it is enough to refer to his work?</div>