Talk:Old Gutnish

5000 speakers

5.000 speakers? Where can I find these and converse with them?

I would like this also, suspecting the language has been extinct for more than a century. Maybe someone should call Ethnologue and ask them where to find those 5,000 speakers. --Fred-Chess 17:40, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Modern Gutnish"

Please stop trying to keep an article at Gutnish language, complete with a quite misleading infobox. Even SIL has withdrawn its support of this as a separate language in the 15th edition of the Ethnologue. It is considered a dialect of Swedish according to NE, just like Scanian. An article title like "Gutnish language" seems to be either POV or original research. Since the article contains no references of any kind, please provide sources to support the statement or elaborate on the matter here before reverting again.

Peter ^Isotalo 21:43, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I created an article at Gutnish language (again), before I realized that there was a discussion page and an article had been there before. Still, I am not altogether convinced that Gutnish is simply a Swedish dialect. I am quite good at Swedish and have been to Gotland myself, and what I gathered there is:

• In Gotland everyone knows standard Swedish, as it is required by law, but some still speak Gutnish. It is distinct from the Gotlandic dialect of Swedish.
• I listened to the radio in Gutnish, and it was very different from any Swedish I've ever heard; It also seemed to be much closer to Icelandic than Swedish is (I'm Icelandic, so I should know), meaning that they must have preserved more of Old Norse than mainland Swedes.

I must ask you: Have you actually studied (or even heard) Gutnish? -- Krun 16:24, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

I've never even been in Sweden but I once had a someone from Gotland in my class. Even though he didn't speak any Gutnish he said that it is really a distinct language from Swedish. According to him, there are still some people in the countryside who speak it but most others speak a Swedish dialect influenced by Gutnish. --Chlämens 23:34, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Guys, please read my post. I've provided Swedish language referencess that consider it merely a dialect of Swedish, SIL has actually withdrawn its eariler support of it as a separate language and I can find no references that support your claims. Either provide sources to support the concept of a modern, living Gutnish language that isn't considered a dialect of Swedish or leave it as a redirect. Hearsay from non-speakers, extrapolations and guessing isn't verifiable.

And I have to correct a few claims:

• Standard Swedish is not required by law. Technically, it doesn't even have legal official status. It's only de-facto official and the use of dialects is generally encouraged by local government. Standard Swedish because it's a common national standard, not because people are being forced to learn it.
• What is refered to as "Gotlandic" and "Gutnish" are one and the same. In Swedish the equivalent terms are gotländska and gutniska and both refer to the dialect of Swedish that is technically a descendant of Old Gutnish. There is no such thing as a dialect of Gotland that is historically separate from Old Gutnish. This is really no different from Scanian, which historically is a form of Eastern Danish, but is today considered a form of Southern Swedish.
• Any similarity between Gutnish/Gotlandic and Icelandic are most likely coincidences. First off, it's East Scandinavian, unlike Icelandic, which is West Scandinavian. Furthermore, the diphthongs of Gutnish developed from long vowels similar to those found in Danish and Swedish and are not remnants of the Old Norse diphthongs like those in Icelandic, Faroese and certain dialects of Norwegian. With the exception of some dialects spoken on Fårö, the verb conjugations have collapsed in a fashion similar to the other Mainland Scandinavian languages and the grammar is not as complicated as that of Icelandic.

Finally, I'll link you to SweDia, a dialect project that has collected numerous samples of Swedish dialects from 100 different locations in Sweden and Finland. Please note that älvdalsmål is included among these, even if it's considered a separate language by most Swedish linguists today. Here's the link to the page on dialects spoken in Gotland. Just click the towns and the various links to get to the sound samples. Now please keep in mind that even though I speak Central Swedish and have been raised in Stockholm with only a minimum of socializing with Gotlanders, I have no problem at all understanding all but a select few, obscure local colloquialisms in any of the recordings. Otherwise it's just as similar to Stockholm Swedish as regional variants of American English.

Peter ^Isotalo 21:03, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

"Furthermore, the diphthongs of Gutnish developed from long vowels similar to those found in Danish and Swedish and are not remnants of the Old Norse diphthongs like those in Icelandic, Faroese and certain dialects of Norwegian." (Peter Isotalo)

This is simply wrong, Peter. It is correct though that all long vowels - except Old Gutnish long a - have become diphtongs, but it is not correct that the Old Gutnish diphtongs have vanished or got "spoiled". In fact, Gutnish is the scandinavian dialect which has the best preserved old diphtongs. Modern Gutnish, like Old Gutnish, has the diphtongs ai, au and oy. Icelandic has in fact a collapsed system where ei (Modern Gutnish ai) and ey (Modern Gutnish oy) are pronunced the same, though kept apart in the orthography. Note also that Icealandic and Faroese have secondary diphtongs as well, so the diphtong system of Modern Gutnish is quite similar to that of those languages. (Both preserved and newly developed diphtongs). I should add that a few years ago, the culture group Propago created an orthography for Gutnish, where e.g. secondary diphtongs were written with acute diacritics, just like in Icelandic ahnd Faroese. Thus, e.g., one would write hús 'house' rather than *häus etc. Here is a sample of the Propago written normal http://www.nynorsk.no/minoritet/gutamaal.html (The author Anna-Carin Gahm is one of the members of Propago and I have had some contact with her a couple of years ago.)

Author: Jens Persson, jepe2503 at hotmail dot com . (14 Dec 2005)

"Finally, I'll link you to SweDia, a dialect project that has collected numerous samples of Swedish dialects from 100 different locations in Sweden and Finland. Please note that älvdalsmål is included among these, even if it's considered a separate language by most Swedish linguists today. Here's the link to the page on dialects spoken in Gotland. Just click the towns and the various links to get to the sound samples. Now please keep in mind that even though I speak Central Swedish and have been raised in Stockholm with only a minimum of socializing with Gotlanders, I have no problem at all understanding all but a select few, obscure local colloquialisms in any of the recordings. Otherwise it's just as similar to Stockholm Swedish as regional variants of American English." (Peter Isotalo)

The SweDia project is somewhat flawed when it comes to actually present what the local dialects sound like. I have been in contact with some of them and the impression I get is that they have conformed the way they speak to the interviewer speaking Standard Swedish. It is a well-known phenomenon that one only speaks dialect when one has someone to interact with who also speaks the dialect. The SweDia project has indeed been critized quite alot by people who actually speak genuine dialects. It is also flawed by the fact that the big cities aren't represented. My personal feeling is that the SweDia project isn't very scientific. Why not take a look at some comments on SweDia in the Guestbook: http://swedia.ling.umu.se/guestbook/index.html . Here's a better representation of the genuine dialects of Sweden: http://www.svd.se/dynamiskt/Kultur/did_4351328.asp . (It is though obvious that there is a conforming to the interviewer's speech here as well. This seems to be especially true for the sample from Lau, Gotland, where one even hears the interviewed quoting someone who obviously spoke a purer form of Gutnish.)

Keeping what is aid above in mind and the fact that there's no recording from Lau or När, it is not strange that practically nothing of the genuine Gutnish dialect is represented on SweDia. Trust me, there are many who speak Gutnish in Gotland. It's just that it is best preserved where the number of stockholmers is fewest. (Guess why Gutnish is practically extincted in the northwestern parts of the islands and replaced by Stockholmish... No wonder that Peter Isotalo feels like he's at home when visiting Gotland. It's like saying that the aboriginal languages of Australia sounds very similar to English after having only visited the parts of Australia where English is completely dominating. Why not try visiting parts of Australia where aboriginals dominate, like in the northwest?)

Author: Jens Persson, jepe2503 at hotmail dot com . (6 Jan 2006)

Just for the record, I can't accurately judge the validity of Jens' complaints about Swedia, but I can assert that Swedias interviewers don't simply speak Standard Swedish with their informants; it's clearly audible in many of the samples where you can hear the interviewer. Generally, I'm very skeptical to the idea that such a major linguistic project wouldn't know the first thing about collecting dialect samples. Especially not since Swedish dialectology has traditions that go back more than a century. The link he provided to "better representations" are actually just older samples from older speakers, most of them born around the late 19th and early 20th century.

As for the "aboriginal" comments I can only say: this isn't the first time Jens claims that he knows where and how the genuine rural dialects are spoken while insisting that established linguists fumble in the dark due to their Stockholm-inspired ignorance and that their linguistic data is flawed. I feel he should do more to actually prove these claims.

Peter ^Isotalo 08:15, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I know that they have made serious mistakes in the treatment of the collected material (concrete example: In the samples from Jämtland, they translate the dialect's ma pron. =we as man pron. =one), which makes it likely that the project isn't very scientific. I still claim that the SweDia project doesn't show the most genuine dialectal features, but at the same time, that's not really the main idea of the project. The main idea is to show how people typically speak, and I think that SweDia is more or less accurate on this. The Wikipedia article on Gutniska has not much to do with the SweDia samples from Gotland, that's for sure. The same with the article on Jamtlandic which doesn't have much to do with the correpsonding SweDia samples. The articles aim at the old, consistent and systematic features of the genuine dialects, not on how people today speak in the correpsonding areas. I think that this is my main objection to your comments.

Jens Persson (213.67.64.22 21:50, 17 July 2006 (UTC))

categorize

Change cat to Swedish dialects: AFIK, Gutnisk is not a current language spoken in Sweden. (it is either an extinct language or a dialect). // Fred-Chess 16:40, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I assume you mean swedish dialects of Scandinavian here, since it would be wrong to call Gutnish a dialect of Swedish. Similarly, the Faroese ones are danish dialects of Scandinavian (Faroese islands belong to Denmark), not dialects of Danish.

Jens Persson (130.242.128.85 19:17, 10 February 2006 (UTC))