Historically, the Danish language had a much larger extension in South Slesvig than today. South Jutlandic was spoken down to the
Danevirke wall south of Schleswig town, close to the Viking town of
Hedeby, and to
Eckernförde on the east coast. South of this was a sparsely inhabited area which after the
Viking Age became populated with
Saxon settlers whose language is now better known as
Low German. The western islands and the west coast were settled by
Frisians. A little further inland Frisians and Danes were mixed. With the
reformation in the 16th century the national language was installed in church instead of Latin. In Slesvig this meant not the language of the peasantry, but that of the dukes and gentry, being first Low German and later High German. German was the language of administration in all of Slesvig. In Northern Slesvig, however, priests were educated at the chapter of
Haderslev and Danish was spoken in church. The church language border was very similar to the present-day Danish-German border which was created by
plebiscite in 1920. During the 17th and the 18th centuries, the population in the area south of the
Schlei (Sli) inlet switched to Low German, few details being known about their former South Jutlandic dialect. The people of
Angeln (Danish
Angel), the countryside between Flensburg and the Schlei where the
Angles who settled England also originally came from, kept to their South Jutlandic dialect for a longer time, but often had some knowledge of
Low German as well. The Angel dialect became extinct around 1900. A few records of it exist and show that it was similar to the South Jutlandic of the
Sønderborg area in North Slesvig, across the
Flensborg Fjord. The Low German dialect of Angel still has a great deal of Danish words and grammatical influence, which makes it difficult to understand for other Low German speakers. During the 19th century the South Jutlandic dialect had a status inferior to Low German, and parents started to encourage their children to speak Low German, so they would be better prepared for school, where education was in High German. Some scholars assume that centuries with German spoken in church made people identify with the German nationality, even if they still spoke a Danish vernacular at home. The Danish government, for political reasons, wished to halt this
language shift from Danish to German. After the
First War of Schleswig, in 1851, the government issued the Slesvig Language Rescripts, ordering the school language to be Danish in areas where the peasantry spoke Danish and even in an area stretching further south, into the Low German speaking area. Church language would alternate between Danish and German. Standard Danish had never been widely used in South Slesvig even where the populace spoke a Danish dialect. The dominant official language was German, and the measures of the government had quite the adverse effect, reinforcing anti-Danish sentiment. A pattern emerged, with the poorest in rural areas sticking to South Jutlandic, the wealthier peasants speaking Low German as the
lingua franca and the educated townsmen speaking High German. A variety of South Jutlandic was spoken until the 1940s in an area west of the town of Schleswig, 40 km south of the present border. Called
Fjoldedansk after the village
Fjolde (German: Viöl) or
sydslesvigsk (southern Schleswigian), the dialect had many archaic features otherwise lost in Danish, such as verbs fully inflected in person and number. The village was isolated between surrounding moorland, creating a
language island, similar to the case of the
Saterland Frisian language. == Place names ==