Re: USAGE: Shavian: was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies

Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>:

> (OTOH, it seems to me based on Benct's and Andreas's comments that
> perhaps the Scandinavian langs are just a series of dialects with four
> points (Swedish, Danish, New Norwegian, Bokmål-Norwegian) at which
> there is a standard. Perhaps a Scandinavian is reading this, and can
> say whether the differences between dialects of one lang. or another
> are comparable to the differences within? I hear Danish is particu'ly
> hard for some Swedes to understand: But maybe there's some northern
> rural Swedish dialect that southern Swedes find hard to understand,
> too?)
FWIW, I'm from middle Sweden, and both the far north and the far south of Sweden
sports dialects that I find more difficuly to understand than standard Norwegian
(Bokmål and Nynorsk[=New Norwegian] are separate *written* standards; neither
corresponds directly to the spoken standard as used by TV preseters etc).

Scanian is now considered a Swedish dialect; a few centuries ago it was
considered Danish. Why the change? - Sweden conquered the place. Dialects up
north in Sweden and Norway tend to be more like one another across the border
than like their respective standard languages (not to speak of southern Swedish
dialects!), leading John Cowan to quip that "Swedo-Norwegian is essentially a
dialect continuum, divided vertically in writing but horizontally in speech."

Gotländska (Gotlander? Gutnian? is there an English name) is traditionally
considered a Swedish dialect, but the genuine dialect, as spoken by older
people in the countryside, is essentially opaque to me. As I've said before, if
we go by hard dialect boundaries, there's four Scandinavian languages;
Icelandic, Faeroese, Continental, and Gotländska.

                                              Andreas