South Jutlandic - History

History

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 18th century 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, 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, showing 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 language rescripts ordering that the school language should be Danish in those 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, the poorest in rural areas sticking to South Jutlandic, the wealthier peasants speaking Low German as the lingua franca, and educated townsmen speaking High German.

An interesting variety of South Jutlandic was spoken until the 1940s in an area west of Schleswig town, 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.