Bornholmsk dialect

Bornholmsk is a Danish dialect spoken on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. 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 are never used in Standard Danish are spelled according to the standard orthography.

The dialect is endangered, as the inhabitants of Bornholm have been shifting to standard Danish over the past century. "Bevar Bornholmsk" is an organization whose purpose is to preserve Bornholmsk. Its main organization is KulturBornholm, the editor of books with CDs with the text in Bornholmsk.

The small island has only about 40,000 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 ("Allinge-Swedish") in Danish – Âlinga-svænsk in Bornholmsk.

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 ethnic marker. Therefore, Danes from other parts of the country may accuse people from Bornholm for speaking Swedish as a kind of insult (using derogatory nicknames like reservesvensker, "substitute Swede").

From a linguistic 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:

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Wikipedia