Jutlandic
A very unique family of Danish dialects
Introduction
Danish is already relatively strange compared to the other Scandinavian languages; its throaty pronunciation, soft “d,” and 22 different vowel sounds (at least!) really make it stick out among Swedish or Norwegian.
However, when I say Danish, I am referring to rigsdansk, “Standard Danish,” the kind you would hear on the news or while taking lessons. There are in fact countless varieties of Danish you can hear throughout the country.
Danish dialects can be split up into three major groups:
- Ømål: these are the insular dialects of Danish that are spoken in the eastern part of Denmark.
- Bornholmsk: the dialect spoken on the rather distant Danish island of Bornholm. Yes, she gets her own dialect — a very interesting one in fact, but that’s a story for another article.
- Jysk: these are the Jutlandic dialects that are spoken throughout the Jutland (Jylland) peninsula in the western part of the country.
Jutlandic, or jysk as it’s called, can further be split up into North and South Jutlandic, with West and East Jutlandic falling under the northern dialect.
Keep in mind that the dialect borders aren’t so cut-and-dry. Nowadays we see languages separated by political borders — they speak German in Germany, they speak French in France, etc. When it comes to dialects, we should think of lines between them as very blurred, with gradual change from one dialect to the other if we were moving throughout the country.
In this article, I will only cover the most interesting parts about what makes these dialects unique as there is a lot to go over. You would need whole books on this subject to go over everything, and the vast majority of it would be interesting only to language nerds. Like me.
Let’s get started!
The Word for “I”
This is Jutlandic’s signature pronoun. The first person pronoun in Jutlandic is “a” (pronounced “ah”).
Here are a few examples:
English: I said to him
Jutlandic: A saaj te ham (pretty close to English, huh!)
Standard Danish: Jeg sagde til ham
English: I don’t know.
Jutlandic: A ve’r e e’t.
Standard Danish: Jeg ved det ikke.
English: I was young and reckless at that time.
Jutlandic: A wa ong å ubesinde den gong.
Standard Danish: Jeg var ung og ubesindig dengang.
Grammatical Genders
Some Danes might tell you Jutlandic has no genders. This is not true. In fact, depending on which dialect we’re talking about, Jutlandic could have even more genders than the standard language!
Standard Danish has two genders: common and neuter; the same is true for Swedish and Norwegian Bokmål. However, there is quite a variety of ways gender is used all across Jutland.
The bulk of the western Jutlandic dialects has two genders as well, but in a rather different way:
- Countable nouns (things that you can have multiple of) take the common gender. Even if the noun in Standard Danish is neuter, like et hus (“a house”), that will now be in the common gender in Western Jutlandic, therefore en hus.
- Uncountable nouns will take the neuter gender. These are nouns that you couldn’t put an “a/an” in front of, nor have a plural form — e.g., milk, sand, water, snow, etc.
Things are done differently in the far north of Jutland. That group of dialects managed to retain the original three genders from its mother language, Old Norse.
For example, kat (cat) and mand (man) in Jutlandic are still masculine, kvinde (woman) and fart (journey) are still feminine, and the word barn (child) is still neuter. The genders of all these words are the same as they were in their previous evolutions from Old Norse.
And finally, most dialects in southern and eastern Jutland have the normal common/neuter gender system you could find in Standard Danish.
Definite Articles
As far as I can tell, this is something unique to West Jutlandic that I haven’t seen in any other dialect of any other language in Scandinavia. Just to emphasize how unique this feature is to those who aren’t familiar with Scandinavian languages, let’s go over the standard use of definite articles.
Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian always use postclitic articles. That means that the word for “the” is attached at the end of a noun instead of being detached and at the front like in English and German.
Manden
The man
Kvinden
The woman
Barnet
The child
The word “the” is only used as a detached article when a noun takes an adjective:
Den store mand
The big man
Det lille barn
The little child
And it’s also acceptable to use a detached article if the noun precedes a relative clause:
Den kvinde, der slog op med mig.
The woman who dumped me
Unless you mean to use the pronoun as a demonstrative, you would never, ever say den mand for “the man” or det barn for “the child.” At least, not in Standard Danish. In West Jutlandic, that’s the only way to do it:
Æ mand
The man
Æ kwin
The woman
Æ bar
The child
Notice that the definite article appears genderless. Even though there still are genders in all Jutlandic dialects, the definite articles den and det have coincidentally developed into the same sounding word: æ.
Also keep in mind that this detached article is only for West and South Jutlandic; North and East Jutlandic have the postclitic articles like in the standard language.
To be honest, I find the detached articles very confusing in a Danish context as my brain is wired to expect the definite article at the end of the noun. I’m still not used to this!
The “W” Lives!
To explain this, we need to go back +1,000 years.
A not very well-known fact about Old Norse is that it consisted of two major dialects: Old West Norse and Old East Norse. If you ever studied Old Norse, chances are that you were studying Old West Norse, whose descendants today are Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian.
Old East Norse, a far less attested dialect, is the father of Swedish and Danish. A very fascinating feature of Old East Norse is that it retained the “w” sound from its mother language Proto-Norse, while Old West Norse had that changed to a “v.”
So the Old Norse word for “way” or “road,” vegr, would have been pronounced in Old East Norse as wegr.
That “w” sound still stuck around even when Old East Norse started turning into Old Danish and Old Swedish but eventually turned to v’s in their respective standard languages, following suit with the rest of Scandinavia.
What’s fascinating about Jutlandic is that it retained that “w” sound from Old East Norse. There are even some dialects that exclusively use “w” sounds where we would expect a “v.”
Now, just to be clear: Standard Danish does certainly and quite often use a “w” sound in standard language — e.g., torv, erhverv, sove, etc. However, Jutlandic takes it to another level.
In most Jutlandic dialects, there are certain rules about when a “w” or “v” sound is used, but in North Jutlandic, it’s w’s across the board.
English: The weather was violent by the road.
Northwest Jutlandic: Æ werli wa woldsom we æ wæj.
North Jutlandic: Werli’e wa woldsomt we wæjen.
Standard Danish: Vejret var voldsomt ved vejen.
Below is a video of singer Thomas Jensen, better known as “Fisker Thomas,” singing Jeppe Aakjær’s Skuld Gammel Venskab Rejn Forgo, an adaptation of Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne. A great example of w’s being used in Jutlandic!
Despite Aakjær writing in what looks like typical West Jutlandic, the Skagen-native Fisker Thomas seems to be using North Jutlandic pronunciation.
The giveaway there is that he is pronouncing every “v” as a “w” — wenskab, wi, wend. In West Jutlandic, all of those words would have been pronounced with a “v” because that consonant precedes a front vowel (“i” and “e”) in each instance.
Conclusion
Jutlandic is a very unique dialect compared to others in Scandinavia, with a lot of diversity even within its own dialect family. And it’s not just Denmark; every country has this rich and diverse linguistic culture someone passionate could easily get lost in.
With all of these dialects tucked away in the heathlands and forests of Jutland, it always made me wonder what else could be out there in the world.
Resources
Disclaimer: All of these resources are in Danish. If you are looking for any information in particular, please let me know.
Jysk Ordbog: Online Jutlandic Dictionary.
Dialektkort: An awesome interactive map from the University of Copenhagen of the Danish dialects.
“De Jyske Dialekter” af Niels Åge Nielsen: A book about the various Jutlandic dialects.
“Sallingmålet: Lydlære, grammatik, faste udtryk”: this book goes deep into the pronunciation of West Jutlandic, particularly its sub-dialect called Sallingmål.
“E Bindstouw” af St. St. Blicher: perhaps the most famous Jutlandic work by a very celebrated Danish writer. He was born in Vium (just south of Viborg), which is pretty much right in between East and West Jutlandic, but his dialect has strong western traits.
“Te Mar’ken i Holsbrow’” af Marinus Poulsen: this is a “bilingual” work written side-by-side in West Jutlandic and Standard Danish.
“Fræ Mi Bet’te Ti’ å Ong-Daw’” af Thorolf Kristensen: an autobiographical work written in Midwest Jutlandic.
