A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dying forest language

If all there was to language death was the speakers deciding to no longer speak their language, then there would be nothing much people could do about it. But many languages have been forcibly suppressed for generations. Public schooling, nationalism, and the decline of regional languages all coincided for a reason.<p>For instance, in France, 39% of the population spoke Occitan in 1860. In 1993 the Occitan-speaking population was 7%, and that number is surely fewer now. This was the result of a concerted effort to create a French nation, enforced through the public education system by abusing schoolchildren until they hated their native tongue.[0]<p>Language is a crucial aspect of identity (but by no means the only one), and 19th century nationalists understood this. The first generation become ashamed to speak their language, the second generation never learn it, and the third become full-fledged assimilated members of the nation. If there is a different group of people in your country who resemble you but have a different identity, destroy their language and their religion, and now you are the same.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vergonha" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vergonha</a>

I think it is absolutely vital that we preserve minority languages.<p>We engage, enhance and preserve our culture through language: spoken and written. Each language is shaped via its environment and is different as a result from all others.<p>English is often called French (lingua Franca - the language of the Franks). It is routinely used as an intermediary language because it is very simply structured and can take quite a lot of abuse and still remain intelligible.<p><pre><code> * No diacritics (accents etc) * Vowels can be mispronounced but the meaning remains * Word order can be fluid: Nominally: subject object verb but not enforced and can be broken for effect * Borrow words are actively encouraged * English *can* sound beautiful, if you put your back into it </code></pre> Well that&#x27;s nice but English isn&#x27;t the way that (think of a non English speaking poet) thinks or speaks.<p>Let&#x27;s go Scottish (no, not Pictish) and consider Mr Burns: and we should start here - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk&#x2F;poem&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk&#x2F;poem&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, </code></pre> Now that is the way to make English sound a bit sexy. It&#x27;s not really English and nor is it full on Gallic.<p>&quot;Oh what a panic is in your heart&quot; is genius.<p>This is so obviously a bloke who is looking at a mouse. So few words and yet so much meaning - that&#x27;s genius.

Across the world, the trend seems to be for people to speak a local language, and a lingua franca. The former carries their cultural heritage and identity, the latter opens economic opportunities.<p>For a lot of people, investing in their local language is a luxury, if it comes at the expense of deeper engagement with the lingua franca. We see this decision being made across the world, as the population urbanizes and leaves their local culture behind. Few can afford not to.<p>In this case, it sounds like Elfdalian is up against both Swedish and English.<p>If people are capable of and willing to learn <i>three</i> or more languages to native fluency, then that is of course their prerogative. But at some point, I believe it becomes unethical to promote investment in a hyper-local language if the effect is to detract from the economic opportunities of lingua francas.

Interesting that the language has preserved proto-Germanic eth (ð) and other voiced fricatives. Similar to English (or Icelandic). And also like English has kept the &#x27;w&#x27; (spoken like English instead of the &#x27;v&#x27; sound like in other Germanic languages).

It&#x27;s easy to not realize that many European langauges used to be much more diverse. Every area or even town in &quot;Italy&quot; spoke slightly different language. In some cases there really were language gradients, the further away two towns were, the less intelligible their language. Languages were a continuum.<p>The national project required standardizing one language calling it &quot;Italian&quot;. It&#x27;s part of making one &quot;Italian&quot; people too. There are good reasons that decisions of where language boundaries are -- and what language is spoken how -- become so &quot;political&quot;.

Some of the comments against preserving languages sadden me, but I have to accept it--that there are big matters of meaning that we are going to disagree on.<p>I stand firmly with preserving language, and with that culture. I hope to do my part by learning more of my family&#x27;s culture, and learning the language and culture of someone else (maybe more). From some of the other comments I get a sense of a line of thought where the primary goal is the well-being of the lot of individuals in the world. And its hard to argue against that. Yet, I want there to exist a diversity of peoples, and those things that come with it.

People are free to do with their free time what they like, but I think the language preservationists need to make it simple to learn their language. That means documenting everything as much as possible and making it easy to find.<p>When I search Elfdalian, there&#x27;s the facebook group for learning the language, but that&#x27;s hardly the platform to teach a language. Imo, it would help much more to copy the structure of existing courses, write a wikibook, or make a homepage to aggregate all the links in one place.<p>Were I to want to explore the language, I would need to know the alphabet and its sounds, common phrases, the grammar, have flip cards (anki is great for that), have ways to passively consume the language meaning music, videos, articles, subtitles for popular films, etc., ways to practice it with others (forums, subreddit, frequent, physical or virtual meetups, and so on), and, most importantly, it should be available without being physically present.<p>If you don&#x27;t make it easy to learn, consume, and practice, then make it at least easy to archive.

With all that hype about AIs and the like, did anyone think about creating one whose only purpose is to keep old languages alive by learning them then keeping them untouched, except for integrating new discoveries, so that they would be preserved even in the case the last human speaking them dies or becomes too old to teach?

<i>“My parents spoke Elfdalian with each other, and with my grandma and my aunts and uncles and everyone around,” Schütt said. “But when they turned to me, they spoke Swedish.”<p>Schütt said her parents spoke Swedish with her because that’s what was spoken in schools. Students were even discouraged to speak Elfdalian in the classroom. Now, there’s only about 2,500 speakers left.</i><p>This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.

The small town in question is Älvdalen, which gives the name to the language (Älvdal-ian).<p>I wonder why it&#x27;s not spelled that way in English; or, for that matter, why it&#x27;s not called övdalsk (after Övdaln, which is what the locality is called in that language).

Any language that begins with <i>Elf-</i> and features forests is clearly doing their marketing right. &quot;Give me the five second pitch!&quot; &quot;Sympathy for cutesie elf people living in a forest in Sweden&quot;. Internet win.

I never really get why you need to preserve naturally dying language no matter what.<p>Can anyone explain in simple words — if something abstract is dying naturally (not by force or someones bad intentions etc.), why we need to waste resorces and energy to saving it?<p>Don&#x27;t we people have higher priority issues right now?

What&#x27;s a forest language? The article doesn&#x27;t seem to explain it and when looking it up, I only find more stories about Elfdalian.

Preserve as in archive is a critically important task, and with recursive problems of today&#x27;s archived books&#x2F;audio&#x2F;video being accessible with next century&#x27;s tech. Preserve as in routine use is a terrible idea. If this article was written in Elfdalian, none of us would understand it. And even among themselves, speakers will struggle to express new concepts like &quot;Fully homomorphic encryption&quot; for which native words were never invented. There is a lot of elegance in MS-DOS software and some even write new code as a hobby. But if you distribute your code on floppies nowadays, you will not get anywhere useful.

&gt; Elfdalian sounds nothing like the country’s national language, Swedish<p>Well that&#x27;s provably false. Different yes, &quot;nothing like&quot; is an hyperbole.<p>&gt; But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language.<p>Okay...<p>&gt; Speaking in Elfdalian, Swedish MP Peter Helander recently asked Parliament why that’s the case. But before Culture Minister Amanda Lind could answer the question, the parliamentary speaker interrupted them both to say that only Swedish may be spoken in the chamber.<p>Well, congratulations, you played yourself!<p>It is obvious that it is not <i>that</i> different, linguists can talk all day about what makes a language vs. a dialect, but it is obvious here that it&#x27;s much closer to a dialect than a new language.<p>Same with all the &quot;multiple different latin derived-languages&quot; at some point, if your neighbour speaks something different than you who cares? Are you going to be so petty that you won&#x27;t understand him? So maybe it&#x27;s not a whole new language, it&#x27;s just you that talks in a slight different way?<p>Too much nationalism sucks, and too much regionalism can be petty in the extreme.

Duolingo has courses on Navajo, Gaelic, and even Klingon and High Valerian. Maybe they would be interested in helping this language as well?

Whenever I read of this particular language I think of all the other small dialects that could be considered separate languages but are not. E.g. in the much smaller country of Denmark there are a lot of dialects that are not mutually intelligible. A person from the very north of Jutland would probably have a hard time understanding someone from the remote island of Bornholm. There are dialects with two and three genders without considering these to be separate languages: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dialekt.ku.dk&#x2F;dialektkort&#x2F;#map=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dialekt.ku.dk&#x2F;dialektkort&#x2F;#map=2</a> (in Danish)

Beware governmental efforts to &quot;enliven&quot; dying cultures: In Soviet Russia they tried to promote minority languages with rubles and quickly those organizations were occupied with creeps had nothing to do with minorities. When asked, this minority culture was their &quot;hobby&quot; and they were &quot;busy&quot; studying the language. This was starkly revealed, when in 1990 Finland invited certain Finnic minorities to move in. They were hired by Nokia for example and it was scary to watch, most of those Ivans had nothing to with Finland, they were swarthy Cossacks with no language skills. And now Finland has 30 000 Russian minority, who consider themselves Russians with their own schools and churches and shit.

There is a cost associated with misunderstanding.<p>If everybody spoke the same language wouldn&#x27;t the world be a better place?<p>I think everybody agrees on that. But nobody can agree which language should be the chosen one.

Elfdalian. Isn&#x27;t that a language they spoke in the Middle-Earth?