Bornholmsk

Bornholmsk, a dialect of Danish, is spoken on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. It was originally part of the East Danish dialect continuum, which includes the dialects of southern Sweden, but became isolated in the Danish dialect landscape after 1658, when Sweden annexed Skåne, Halland and Blekinge.

The language is more generally spoken than written, despite the existence of several Bornholmsk-Danish dictionaries and a regular Bornholmsk article in the local newspaper. Even words that don't exist in Standard Danish are spelled according to the standard orthography.

Dialects

The small island has only about 45,000 inhabitants, yet the language is divided into five main dialects, not even counting Danish. As an example, "eye" would be spelled "iva" in some regions, but elsewhere it would be "øja", which is quite close to the Danish word "øje".

The northern part of the island would have more influence by Swedish than the rest of the island, due to the relatively large number of Swedish immigrants on those shores closest to Sweden. The differences are actually large enough so that the north-Bornholm dialect is called "Allinge-svensk (Danish)" (Âlinga-svænsk (Bornh.), Allinge-Swedish (engl.)).

Danish or Swedish?

Like in the case of the closely related Scanian dialect spoken in Southern Sweden, the question whether the dialect is Danish or Swedish cannot be separated from the political and ideological burden attached to language as an ethnical marker. Therefore, Danes from other parts of the country may accuse people from Bornholm for speaking Swedish as a kind of insult (using abusive nicknames like "reservesvensker", "substitute Swede").

From a linguistical point of view, the Scandinavian languages form a continuum, and the dialects of Skåne and Bornholm are a natural bridge between "sjællandsk" (the dialect of Zealand) and "götamål" (the dialect of Götaland). One may define "Danish" and Swedish" in two different ways:
# historically: Danish is the part of the dialect continuum that has certain sound changes in common like the weakening of plosives (see below) or certain innovations in the vocabulary.
# pragmatically: Danish is the part of the dialect continuum that has Standard Danish as its written standard.According to both criteria, Bornholmsk is indeed a Danish dialect (whereas Scanian would be Swedish according to the second one).

All this being said, Bornholmsk has indeed many phonetical features in common with Swedish (most of them archaisms, though, which are irrelevant for the classification of the dialect). Yet, in most cases where the vocabularies of Swedish and Danish differ, Bornholmsk stands with Danish.

Phonology

ound system

An official standardised orthography of Bornholmsk does not exist since Standard Danish is taught in schools and is the language of all public communication. However, dialect texts use a simplified phonetical alphabet (invented by K.J. Lyngby in the 19th century and also employed in Espersen's dictionary of Bornholmsk):

Notes

References

# John Dyneley Prince, "The Danish Dialect of Bornholm", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 63, No. 2 (1924), pp. 190-207.
# J.C.S. Espersen, "Bornholmsk Ordbog", 1905.
# Niels Åge Nielsen, "Dansk dialektantologi", 1978, vol. 2, pp. 15-18.