The linguistic definition of a Swedish
traditional dialect, in the literature merely called 'dialect', is a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by Standard Swedish and that can trace a separate development back to
Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic
case inflections. These dialects can be nearly incomprehensible to most Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual
parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as (lit. "parish speech"). They are generally separated into the six traditional dialect groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary. The color represents the core area and the samples are from
Svenska Dagbladet's dialect project. :
South Swedish dialects (dark blue); (Skåne, Perstorps socken, N. Åsbo härad). :
Götaland dialects (red); (Västergötland, Korsberga socken, Vartofta härad, Skaraborgs län). :
Svealand dialects (dark green); (Uppland, Håtuna socken, Håbo härad). :
Norrland dialects (light blue); (Västerbotten, Skellefte socken, Löparnäs). :
Finland Swedish and
Estonian Swedish (orange); (Finland, Österbotten, Sideby socken). :
Gotland dialects (light green); (Gotland, När Socken, Gotlands södra härad). The areas with mixed colors as stripes are transitional areas. The parts in yellow with coloured dots represent various distinct dialect areas which are not easily defined as belonging to any of the six major groups above. (related to Norrland dialects), Dalarna, Älvdalens socken (related to Svealand dialects) and Värmland, Nordmarks härad, Töcksmarks socken (related to Götaland dialects). The dialects of this category have in common that they all show more or less strong Norwegian influences, especially the dialects in Härjedalen, Northwestern Jämtland and Northwestern Dalarna. Dialects often show similarities along traditional travelling routes such as the great rivers in Northern Sweden, which start in the mountains at the Norwegian border and then follow a South-Easterly path towards the
Bothnian Sea. The grey areas do not have any independently developed Swedish dialect, as other languages vastly predominate. Here is a summary of some of the most important differences between the major groups. Note that this table does not hold for the distinct (dotted) or transitional (striped) areas. Götaland dialects are mostly used in
Västergötland,
Dalsland, northern
Halland, northern
Småland and
Östergötland although they are also heard in
Bohuslän,
Värmland (a special case, in many ways), and
Öland. Examples of Götaland dialect features are
vowel reduction, vowel shortening in front of endings and loss of
-r in suffixes (as in ( = horses)). A characteristic of Svealand dialects is the
coalescence of the
alveolar trill with following
dental and
alveolar consonants — also over word-boundaries — that transforms them into
retroflex consonants that in some cases reduces the distinction between words (as for instance — , i.e. "habit" — "warn"). This feature is also found in
East Norwegian,
North Swedish and in some dialects of
Scottish Gaelic. • + → • + → • + → • + → • + → or in some dialects [ɽ] ==Classification==