Bornholmsk Dialect - Danish or Swedish?

Danish or Swedish?

Like in the case of the closely related Scanian dialect spoken in Southern Sweden, the question whether the dialect is Danish or Swedish cannot be separated from the political and ideological burden attached to language as an ethnical marker. Therefore, Danes from other parts of the country may accuse people from Bornholm for speaking Swedish as a kind of insult (using derogatory nicknames like reservesvensker, "substitute Swede").

From a linguistical point of view, the Scandinavian languages form a continuum, and the dialects of Skåne and Bornholm are a natural bridge between "sjællandsk" (the dialect of Zealand) and "götamål" (the dialect of Götaland). One may define "Danish" and Swedish" in two different ways:

1. historically: Danish is the part of the dialect continuum that has certain sound changes in common like the weakening of plosives (see below) or certain innovations in the vocabulary.
2. pragmatically: Danish is the part of the dialect continuum that has Standard Danish as its written standard (Dachsprache).

According to both criteria, Bornholmsk is indeed a Danish dialect (whereas Scanian would be Swedish according to the second one).

Bornholmsk has indeed many phonetical features in common with Swedish (most of them archaisms, though, which are irrelevant for the classification of the dialect). Yet, in most cases where the vocabularies of Swedish and Danish differ, Bornholmsk stands with Danish.