19 ms·

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

191 points by hashmush 5y ago

LAC-Tech 5y ago
“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.” 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. This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.
- Grakel 5y ago
  Consolidating what we do (language, money, etc.) while honoring and keeping local culture alive is a huge issue everywhere, as the globe continues to shrink via technology and diplomacy. It's a root factor in practically every issue and will continue to be. Not sure what the answer is that results in more than crappy themed restaurants.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    I still don't understand why losing another language is a bad thing. I realize that another language creates another way of thinking, culture, and way to express oneself which leads to a good variation instead of having a unified "one world view." I really am not coming off as someone ignorant thinking "the whole world should speak english!" What I'm getting at is, if it's a very insignificant language like that and nobody bothers learning it anymore, what is the point aside from looking for something to do? It's a dying language. Much like a dying culture of an extinct people. Reviving it and forcing people to retain it will not be doing anyone favors either. I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
    - rogerclark 5y ago
      Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
      - bpiche 5y ago
        The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion. At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
        huachimingo 5y ago
        Some languages open your understanding of the other ones from the same family tree. Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.
    - magicsmoke 5y ago
      Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      If another random species of lemur died off and we never sequenced its genome, you might not care. But many scientists would. That arrowhead you discount as useless is another data point to an anthropologist. One man’s trash is unfortunately another man’s dissertation and a window into the past. Edit: an apostrophe
- ericmay 5y ago
  It’s so sad too. I think nation states have destroyed a lot of local cultures. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    I sometimes wonder what percentage of people can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke. With China and India it must be hundreds of millions.
    - don-code 5y ago
      My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language. I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?
    - friendcrunch 5y ago
      Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
- Duralias 5y ago
  And several times in Sweden with Sami, Finish, this and probably more.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Gothic at some point. And I wonder if the Göta and Svea even spoke the same languages before merging.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Preserving an old language is great. Preserving it by having young people who's first language is this obscure language probably is doing a disservice to those young people and the older people probably knew that.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Kids can learn two first languages just fine
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      Some kids can. Some kids definitely learn only one language really well and struggle with a second indefinitely. I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out. Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.
contingencies 5y ago
Any language that begins with Elf- and features forests is clearly doing their marketing right. "Give me the five second pitch!" "Sympathy for cutesie elf people living in a forest in Sweden". Internet win.
- stapled_socks 5y ago
  The name in English seems a bit gimmicky. "Älv" in the context means "river" and not "elf". I guess someone choose to use this play on words in the translation to pique interest and garner sympathy.
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Before 1902 the name of the parish was written Elfdalen so I'm not sure it's just a translation thing. Edit: Ok, never mind. It's definitely a translation thing: "The English name of the vernacular was introduced in Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2005)." Very recent too.
  - hashmush 5y ago
    More likely that they wanted the names to sound similar rather than being equivalent, and it's not that often one translates place names.
- kbelder 5y ago
  "I will diminish, and go into the west..." We lost Quenya, except for some obscure academic and literary works, now we look like we'll lose Elfdalia.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    Quenya is still alive if you want it to be. Maybe less so than Sindarin though.
- herodoturtle 5y ago
  > "Give me the five second pitch!" a stallion battalion defending the medallion war crying in Elfdalian a charging foe rapscallion
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
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 'w' (spoken like English instead of the 'v' sound like in other Germanic languages).
- bpiche 5y ago
  Yes. Another invaluable data set for comparative and historical linguistics.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Yep you have to wonder how many other odd dialects and small population languages have been lost in that last couple centuries that would blow holes in our theories of classification.
romwell 5y ago
The small town in question is Älvdalen, which gives the name to the language (Älvdal-ian). I wonder why it's not spelled that way in English; or, for that matter, why it's not called övdalsk (after Övdaln, which is what the locality is called in that language).
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Because Elfdalian sounds way more sexy than Övdalsk.
  - vesinisa 5y ago
    Indeed, it makes it sound like some elf language while it's actually just "river valley" language (älv=river, dal(en)=valley).
    - jeofken 5y ago
      “Älv” can mean either river or elf, I think depending on tone? En älva = one “elf” (Not like elves in Anglo fantasy novels) When conjoining the a can be removed depending on dialect, thus älvdalen could mean elf valley. I don’t know the true history of the word though!
      - gerikson 5y ago
        No, they are distinct words. En älv - a river. En älva - an elf or fairy. Älvens strand - the side of the river. Älvans öron - the ears of the elf. Älvdalen - the valley of the river Älvans dal - the valley of the elf. Although they do seem to have similar Latin-Germanic roots, if one can decipher the ancient etymological book here: http://runeberg.org/svetym/1298.html http://runeberg.org/svetym/1298.html
        jeofken 5y ago
        I disagree that “älvdalen” could not mean valley of the älvor.
chairhairair 5y ago
Duolingo has courses on Navajo, Gaelic, and even Klingon and High Valerian. Maybe they would be interested in helping this language as well?
Aachen 5y ago
What's a forest language? The article doesn't seem to explain it and when looking it up, I only find more stories about Elfdalian.
- undersuit 5y ago
  I think it's because the language is literally tied to a distant village in a forest.
gerdesj 5y ago
I think it is absolutely vital that we preserve minority languages. 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. 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. * 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 Well that's nice but English isn't the way that (think of a non English speaking poet) thinks or speaks. Let's go Scottish (no, not Pictish) and consider Mr Burns: and we should start here - https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/ https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/ Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Now that is the way to make English sound a bit sexy. It's not really English and nor is it full on Gallic. "Oh what a panic is in your heart" is genius. This is so obviously a bloke who is looking at a mouse. So few words and yet so much meaning - that's genius.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  Why is it vital? What does it add to life, the universe, or anything? Almost no-one in the world has any significance. Of the 7 billion people alive today, 6,990,000 of them will be utterly forgotten in 200 years time. It will be as if they didn't exist. Why is one extremely niche language so important compared to those 6,990,000 actual, real life, people? It happened, it had no impact on human history, it was forgotten. End of story, stop making a big deal about it. History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    My impression of this comment is that it is overgeneralizing, reductive, and pretty nihilist. That being said I do agree that minority languages, like our lives, are ultimately, in the fate of the great cosmic void, meaningless. But no, minority languages aren’t completely useless. Every language is a window into the structure of human language, which is something we are still trying to understand. Some people might tell you that sort of linguistics is also useless, but that’s a different conversation. I would compare it to the sad loss of knowledge that results from another animal species going extinct. There are secrets in its genome that we will now never discover.
bashmelek 5y ago
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. I stand firmly with preserving language, and with that culture. I hope to do my part by learning more of my family'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.
- tasogare 5y ago
  Those comments probably come from people shouting about "diversity" all day long but who are uneasy at the slightest actual bit of diversity like language or opinion. In my country it's the republic (so the left) that planned and implemented destruction of local languages, which lived for over a millennium without issue under the French crown.
squarefoot 5y ago
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?
mannerheim 5y ago
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. 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] 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
- cat_plus_plus 5y ago
  But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? People are begging to come to wealthy countries. In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion. Take Sillicon Valley is a positive example of good integration.
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    Sure, there is nothing wrong with people immigrating somewhere and assimilating to the local culture. But one needs to draw a distinction between that and a nationalist government privileging the national language over regional languages. This is not so common today, although we live with the consequences of past nationalist movements which have sent many minority languages on an inexorable route to oblivion. And then there's China...
    - hzay 5y ago
      > This is not so common today... It's happening in india today. It's very sad.
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
Preserve as in archive is a critically important task, and with recursive problems of today's archived books/audio/video being accessible with next century'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 "Fully homomorphic encryption" 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.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Wherever one stands regarding the question, it's easy to see that preserving disappearing languages as spoken languages is futile. Young people are naturally not interested in speaking dying languages, it's the old folks who want to preserve them. Yes, they can teach the language in kindergartens and schools, but often they can't even find proper native speakers as teachers anymore when there simply aren't many left. It's a form of necromancy, languages evolve and die naturally, long term we can't do anything to prevent their deaths. We need to preserve history like you say. But even historic records can be and have been re-written. Imo we should be most concerned with the cultures and attitudes that shape our current languages.
- b3orn 5y ago
  > And even among themselves, speakers will struggle to express new concepts like "Fully homomorphic encryption" for which native words were never invented. Then they can just do what english speakers did and incorporate some greek words into their language as there doesn't seem to be be any good native words for it in english either.
jrochkind1 5y ago
It's easy to not realize that many European langauges used to be much more diverse. Every area or even town in "Italy" 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. The national project required standardizing one language calling it "Italian". It's part of making one "Italian" people too. There are good reasons that decisions of where language boundaries are -- and what language is spoken how -- become so "political".
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Doesn't Italy still have a region that only speaks Austrian German?
  - G3rn0ti 5y ago
    Yes, South Tyrol.
raverbashing 5y ago
> Elfdalian sounds nothing like the country’s national language, Swedish Well that's provably false. Different yes, "nothing like" is an hyperbole. > But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language. Okay... > 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. Well, congratulations, you played yourself! It is obvious that it is not that different, linguists can talk all day about what makes a language vs. a dialect, but it is obvious here that it's much closer to a dialect than a new language. Same with all the "multiple different latin derived-languages" at some point, if your neighbour speaks something different than you who cares? Are you going to be so petty that you won't understand him? So maybe it's not a whole new language, it's just you that talks in a slight different way? Too much nationalism sucks, and too much regionalism can be petty in the extreme.
- tored 5y ago
  Would you consider Danish and Swedish separate languages or are they dialects?
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    This is one of the lowest mutual intelligibility pairs if you don't count Icelandic/Faroese, so different languages. Very similar, of course, but different (especially since Danish had more outside influence) - one source https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentages-of-correct-answers-in-the-intelligibility-test-broken-down-for-group-of_tbl2_228758544 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentages-of-correct-a... Now is Elfdalic more or less similar than Danish to Swedish? Based on the article video it seems there's some marked difference but probably more understandable than Danish.
    - tored 5y ago
      As a Swede I understand Danish better than Elfdalic. Elfdalic sounds closer to Icelandic and Faroese. Elfdalic also has other characters in their alfabet. I guess that has to do with that Elfdalic has been somewhat frozen in time, they speak closer to what we spoke in the region during the early middle ages. It is true that how languages sound does not equate to closeness of relationship, Swedish and Norwegian are much closer in sound than Swedish and Danish, but Swedish and Danish both belong to the family of East Nordic languages and Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese to West Nordic. Here is Tennysons poem Ring out Wild Bells in Elfdalic https://youtu.be/-3Q9kLgsHIs https://youtu.be/-3Q9kLgsHIs Swedish https://youtu.be/TID9osnlsiY https://youtu.be/TID9osnlsiY I'm not a linguist so I don't have the expertise to say if Elfdalic should be classified as a separate language or not, scientifically it may very well be a dialect, but if some one spoke to me like in the video I wouldn't recognize it as Swedish or any of the common dialects Swedish.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
There is a cost associated with misunderstanding. If everybody spoke the same language wouldn't the world be a better place? I think everybody agrees on that. But nobody can agree which language should be the chosen one.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > I think everybody agrees on that. I think everybody agrees that you don't mean everybody but most, many, or possibly only the people I associate with. It takes only one counter example to disprove a statement of universality and I'm fairly sure I am not the only one to disagree with you.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    So can you provide that counter example? It is hard if not impossible to agree with you if you don't say what it is you disagree with exactly. I agree that surely there can be many people who disagree with my statements. But that is trivial and not very interesting. The question is why or how they disagree with it.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  This is very much American idea of "diversity". Drink Starbucks, watch corpo rainbows all day long and sing hallelujah. But remember you have to speak our language and have our way of life, that's the diversity after all!
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    In many cases you have to speak "our language" if you want "us" to understand you. But that shouldn't mean that you "have to have our way of life", whatever that means. Diversity is good I believe, as long as we can understand each other.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
Elfdalian. Isn't that a language they spoke in the Middle-Earth?
- jobigoud 5y ago
  Well it's closely related to Old Norse and J.R.R Tolkien was a linguist and used Old Norse as an inspiration. So they might be from the same family.
timonoko 5y ago
Beware governmental efforts to "enliven" 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 "hobby" and they were "busy" 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.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  > 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. This is a complete non-sequitur. You generally expect any neighboring countries to have ethnic minorities, especially in bordering territories, such as the Murmansk/St Petersburg regions and Finland. Are you implying that somehow this community of Russian people in Finland exists exclusively because they somehow "scammed" their way into the country by pretending to know a language? I find it fairly hard to believe that Nokia would hire "swarthy Cossacks with no language skills" and frankly your tone is pretty offensive towards what seems to be benign immigration.
  - ArnoVW 5y ago
    Perhaps you are already aware, but if not: one of the tricks in the Russian playbook is to build an ethnic group within their neighbours, as a way of annexing parts. Krimea for example was 'liberated' in 2014 from the yoke of Ukrainian oppression by Russian-ethnic groups, and 'spontaneously attached itself to Russia'. The 'rebels' all had uniforms, no insignias but SIGINT has analysed the names of the people talking over the radio and many were Russian army officers. Imagine Mexico organizing radio talkshows and political groups for Mexicans to liberate themselves from the Gringo oppression. They demand that the official language be Mexican. That Mexican history be thought in school. More and more the mexicans in California are unhappy. Until one day there is a 'rebellion'. And the Mexican state 'generously comes to the aid of their poor opressed brethern' Seen in that light, does the POV of GP make more sense?
jl6 5y ago
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. 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. In this case, it sounds like Elfdalian is up against both Swedish and English. If people are capable of and willing to learn three 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.
- phaemon 5y ago
  That isn't what "lingua franca" means, which is a poor start to your "it's better to only know one language" argument.
  - jl6 5y ago
    “a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.” What do you think it means?
    - phaemon 5y ago
      It means a secondary language, not a primary one.
      - dash2 5y ago
        Merriam-Webster disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca
        kzrdude 5y ago
        Wikipedia explains the "auxiliary language" meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
aristofun 5y ago
I never really get why you need to preserve naturally dying language no matter what. 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? Don't we people have higher priority issues right now?
- tored 5y ago
  Language is a connection to your ancestors, it is a time machine to their world, to speak and think like they did, and without the toil of your ancestors you wouldn’t be here, and by preserving it and passing it on to future generation we all still exist even after we die.
  - aristofun 5y ago
    If im already speaking another language i already lost this type of connection, then why it matters?
Popegaf 5y ago
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. When I search Elfdalian, there's the facebook group for learning the language, but that'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. 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. If you don't make it easy to learn, consume, and practice, then make it at least easy to archive.
- boublepop 5y ago
  Your implied standpoint is that it’s only worth preserving if you can engage with it. Imagine having the same attitude towards endangered animals “why should we preserve the giant turtles when I can’t even find a shop that will sell me one?” The language is intimately tied to the people and the culture. It’s not like they want to push random people around the world to learn it just for a laugh.
  - Popegaf 5y ago
    You're making assumptions about my implications and comparing two completely different things. A well archived language can be reborn again - a dead species can't (yet). Furthermore, where are you taking that I'm advocating forcefully spreading a language? I'm stating a two very simple facts: 1. If you want a language to stay alive, you need speakers. 2. If you want a language to outlive speakers, you need to archive it well. Since we live in a world of choice, you'll have to do something in order to let people choose to become a speaker of that language.
ochrist 5y ago
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: https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialektkort/#map=2 https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialektkort/#map=2 (in Danish)

191 points by hashmush 5y ago

“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.” 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. This same story has played out in so many different places around the world.

Grakel 5y ago
Consolidating what we do (language, money, etc.) while honoring and keeping local culture alive is a huge issue everywhere, as the globe continues to shrink via technology and diplomacy. It's a root factor in practically every issue and will continue to be. Not sure what the answer is that results in more than crappy themed restaurants.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I still don't understand why losing another language is a bad thing. I realize that another language creates another way of thinking, culture, and way to express oneself which leads to a good variation instead of having a unified "one world view." I really am not coming off as someone ignorant thinking "the whole world should speak english!" What I'm getting at is, if it's a very insignificant language like that and nobody bothers learning it anymore, what is the point aside from looking for something to do? It's a dying language. Much like a dying culture of an extinct people. Reviving it and forcing people to retain it will not be doing anyone favors either. I think having culturally distinct languages is fine on a macro level, but at the scale of this minor language, it's really as useful as arrowhead you find in the ground here in the States. At one time this was useful, but now is no longer that time.
  - rogerclark 5y ago
    Why not? As far as "looking for something to do", preserving a dying language seems a lot more interesting than a lot of other things people do with their spare time.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      The incuriousness in this thread is atypical of the board in my opinion. At one point I used to think that language diversity was actually a net bad thing for humanity, because it decreases our ability to communicate and so on. These days language technology and machine translation are solving that communication issue and we may choose to preserve dying languages for the sake of understanding how language itself works, how humans migrated in the past, and so on.
      - huachimingo 5y ago
        Some languages open your understanding of the other ones from the same family tree. Learn one, and you are partially learning the other.
  - magicsmoke 5y ago
    Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    If another random species of lemur died off and we never sequenced its genome, you might not care. But many scientists would. That arrowhead you discount as useless is another data point to an anthropologist. One man’s trash is unfortunately another man’s dissertation and a window into the past. Edit: an apostrophe
ericmay 5y ago
It’s so sad too. I think nation states have destroyed a lot of local cultures. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder what percentage of people can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke. With China and India it must be hundreds of millions.
  - don-code 5y ago
    My grandmother speaks fluent English, but also fluent Italian. Problem is, it's what I'll call "pre-radio Italian" - where there was no single Italian language, but rather a great many dialects that sort-of sounded the same, until radio and (later) television came and unified them all into one language. I bring this up because she often references words that only loosely resemble the modern forms. A good example is a number of her childhood figures who she affectionately calls "azi" - this is actually a version of the modern Italian "zio" (uncle). It gets much worse with foods, which really no amount of Googling can ever resolve a recipe, or even a description.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  I'm not sure what's sad about it. What good is a language if no one speaks it? In the ideal world, wouldn't everyone speak the same language?
  - friendcrunch 5y ago
    Language encodes within it's systems, a built-up treasure trove of human meaning. A universal language looses a humongous amount of meaning. Its usefulness is in merely communicating functionality. In short, such a "universal" will fragment for the need to enrich this substandard language. Remember, human language needs to be rich.
Duralias 5y ago
And several times in Sweden with Sami, Finish, this and probably more.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Gothic at some point. And I wonder if the Göta and Svea even spoke the same languages before merging.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Preserving an old language is great. Preserving it by having young people who's first language is this obscure language probably is doing a disservice to those young people and the older people probably knew that.
- redisman 5y ago
  Kids can learn two first languages just fine
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Some kids can. Some kids definitely learn only one language really well and struggle with a second indefinitely. I'm sure there's some cut-off and a way to do it right and so-forth. But are the surviving native speak of an obscure language in some rural village going to suss that out. Plus a lot of kids who a language just when they're young go to forget. I remember, growing up, a friend who could understand but not speak Urdu. He wasn't going to perpetuate the language.

contingencies 5y ago

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

stapled_socks 5y ago
The name in English seems a bit gimmicky. "Älv" in the context means "river" and not "elf". I guess someone choose to use this play on words in the translation to pique interest and garner sympathy.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Before 1902 the name of the parish was written Elfdalen so I'm not sure it's just a translation thing. Edit: Ok, never mind. It's definitely a translation thing: "The English name of the vernacular was introduced in Dahl & Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2005)." Very recent too.
- hashmush 5y ago
  More likely that they wanted the names to sound similar rather than being equivalent, and it's not that often one translates place names.
kbelder 5y ago
"I will diminish, and go into the west..." We lost Quenya, except for some obscure academic and literary works, now we look like we'll lose Elfdalia.
- bpiche 5y ago
  Quenya is still alive if you want it to be. Maybe less so than Sindarin though.
herodoturtle 5y ago
> "Give me the five second pitch!" a stallion battalion defending the medallion war crying in Elfdalian a charging foe rapscallion

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

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 'w' (spoken like English instead of the 'v' sound like in other Germanic languages).

bpiche 5y ago
Yes. Another invaluable data set for comparative and historical linguistics.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Yep you have to wonder how many other odd dialects and small population languages have been lost in that last couple centuries that would blow holes in our theories of classification.

romwell 5y ago

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

Clewza313 5y ago
Because Elfdalian sounds way more sexy than Övdalsk.
- vesinisa 5y ago
  Indeed, it makes it sound like some elf language while it's actually just "river valley" language (älv=river, dal(en)=valley).
  - jeofken 5y ago
    “Älv” can mean either river or elf, I think depending on tone? En älva = one “elf” (Not like elves in Anglo fantasy novels) When conjoining the a can be removed depending on dialect, thus älvdalen could mean elf valley. I don’t know the true history of the word though!
    - gerikson 5y ago
      No, they are distinct words. En älv - a river. En älva - an elf or fairy. Älvens strand - the side of the river. Älvans öron - the ears of the elf. Älvdalen - the valley of the river Älvans dal - the valley of the elf. Although they do seem to have similar Latin-Germanic roots, if one can decipher the ancient etymological book here: http://runeberg.org/svetym/1298.html http://runeberg.org/svetym/1298.html
      - jeofken 5y ago
        I disagree that “älvdalen” could not mean valley of the älvor.

chairhairair 5y ago

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

Aachen 5y ago

What's a forest language? The article doesn't seem to explain it and when looking it up, I only find more stories about Elfdalian.

undersuit 5y ago
I think it's because the language is literally tied to a distant village in a forest.

gerdesj 5y ago

I think it is absolutely vital that we preserve minority languages. 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. 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. * 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 Well that's nice but English isn't the way that (think of a non English speaking poet) thinks or speaks. Let's go Scottish (no, not Pictish) and consider Mr Burns: and we should start here - https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/ https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/ Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Now that is the way to make English sound a bit sexy. It's not really English and nor is it full on Gallic. "Oh what a panic is in your heart" is genius. This is so obviously a bloke who is looking at a mouse. So few words and yet so much meaning - that's genius.

mattmanser 5y ago
Why is it vital? What does it add to life, the universe, or anything? Almost no-one in the world has any significance. Of the 7 billion people alive today, 6,990,000 of them will be utterly forgotten in 200 years time. It will be as if they didn't exist. Why is one extremely niche language so important compared to those 6,990,000 actual, real life, people? It happened, it had no impact on human history, it was forgotten. End of story, stop making a big deal about it. History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.
- bpiche 5y ago
  My impression of this comment is that it is overgeneralizing, reductive, and pretty nihilist. That being said I do agree that minority languages, like our lives, are ultimately, in the fate of the great cosmic void, meaningless. But no, minority languages aren’t completely useless. Every language is a window into the structure of human language, which is something we are still trying to understand. Some people might tell you that sort of linguistics is also useless, but that’s a different conversation. I would compare it to the sad loss of knowledge that results from another animal species going extinct. There are secrets in its genome that we will now never discover.

bashmelek 5y ago

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. I stand firmly with preserving language, and with that culture. I hope to do my part by learning more of my family'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.

tasogare 5y ago
Those comments probably come from people shouting about "diversity" all day long but who are uneasy at the slightest actual bit of diversity like language or opinion. In my country it's the republic (so the left) that planned and implemented destruction of local languages, which lived for over a millennium without issue under the French crown.

squarefoot 5y ago

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?

mannerheim 5y ago

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. 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] 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha

cat_plus_plus 5y ago
But that's not how assimilation happens these days right? People are begging to come to wealthy countries. In this scenario everyone speaking English or whatever is the dominant language in two generation is a good thing for economic equality and cultural cohesion. Take Sillicon Valley is a positive example of good integration.
- mannerheim 5y ago
  Sure, there is nothing wrong with people immigrating somewhere and assimilating to the local culture. But one needs to draw a distinction between that and a nationalist government privileging the national language over regional languages. This is not so common today, although we live with the consequences of past nationalist movements which have sent many minority languages on an inexorable route to oblivion. And then there's China...
  - hzay 5y ago
    > This is not so common today... It's happening in india today. It's very sad.

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

Preserve as in archive is a critically important task, and with recursive problems of today's archived books/audio/video being accessible with next century'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 "Fully homomorphic encryption" 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.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Wherever one stands regarding the question, it's easy to see that preserving disappearing languages as spoken languages is futile. Young people are naturally not interested in speaking dying languages, it's the old folks who want to preserve them. Yes, they can teach the language in kindergartens and schools, but often they can't even find proper native speakers as teachers anymore when there simply aren't many left. It's a form of necromancy, languages evolve and die naturally, long term we can't do anything to prevent their deaths. We need to preserve history like you say. But even historic records can be and have been re-written. Imo we should be most concerned with the cultures and attitudes that shape our current languages.
b3orn 5y ago
> And even among themselves, speakers will struggle to express new concepts like "Fully homomorphic encryption" for which native words were never invented. Then they can just do what english speakers did and incorporate some greek words into their language as there doesn't seem to be be any good native words for it in english either.

jrochkind1 5y ago

It's easy to not realize that many European langauges used to be much more diverse. Every area or even town in "Italy" 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. The national project required standardizing one language calling it "Italian". It's part of making one "Italian" people too. There are good reasons that decisions of where language boundaries are -- and what language is spoken how -- become so "political".

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Doesn't Italy still have a region that only speaks Austrian German?
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  Yes, South Tyrol.

raverbashing 5y ago

> Elfdalian sounds nothing like the country’s national language, Swedish Well that's provably false. Different yes, "nothing like" is an hyperbole. > But the national government of Sweden is a different story. They currently consider Elfdalian a dialect of Swedish, not its own language. Okay... > 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. Well, congratulations, you played yourself! It is obvious that it is not that different, linguists can talk all day about what makes a language vs. a dialect, but it is obvious here that it's much closer to a dialect than a new language. Same with all the "multiple different latin derived-languages" at some point, if your neighbour speaks something different than you who cares? Are you going to be so petty that you won't understand him? So maybe it's not a whole new language, it's just you that talks in a slight different way? Too much nationalism sucks, and too much regionalism can be petty in the extreme.

tored 5y ago
Would you consider Danish and Swedish separate languages or are they dialects?
- raverbashing 5y ago
  This is one of the lowest mutual intelligibility pairs if you don't count Icelandic/Faroese, so different languages. Very similar, of course, but different (especially since Danish had more outside influence) - one source https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentages-of-correct-answers-in-the-intelligibility-test-broken-down-for-group-of_tbl2_228758544 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Percentages-of-correct-a... Now is Elfdalic more or less similar than Danish to Swedish? Based on the article video it seems there's some marked difference but probably more understandable than Danish.
  - tored 5y ago
    As a Swede I understand Danish better than Elfdalic. Elfdalic sounds closer to Icelandic and Faroese. Elfdalic also has other characters in their alfabet. I guess that has to do with that Elfdalic has been somewhat frozen in time, they speak closer to what we spoke in the region during the early middle ages. It is true that how languages sound does not equate to closeness of relationship, Swedish and Norwegian are much closer in sound than Swedish and Danish, but Swedish and Danish both belong to the family of East Nordic languages and Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese to West Nordic. Here is Tennysons poem Ring out Wild Bells in Elfdalic https://youtu.be/-3Q9kLgsHIs https://youtu.be/-3Q9kLgsHIs Swedish https://youtu.be/TID9osnlsiY https://youtu.be/TID9osnlsiY I'm not a linguist so I don't have the expertise to say if Elfdalic should be classified as a separate language or not, scientifically it may very well be a dialect, but if some one spoke to me like in the video I wouldn't recognize it as Swedish or any of the common dialects Swedish.

galaxyLogic 5y ago

There is a cost associated with misunderstanding. If everybody spoke the same language wouldn't the world be a better place? I think everybody agrees on that. But nobody can agree which language should be the chosen one.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
> I think everybody agrees on that. I think everybody agrees that you don't mean everybody but most, many, or possibly only the people I associate with. It takes only one counter example to disprove a statement of universality and I'm fairly sure I am not the only one to disagree with you.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  So can you provide that counter example? It is hard if not impossible to agree with you if you don't say what it is you disagree with exactly. I agree that surely there can be many people who disagree with my statements. But that is trivial and not very interesting. The question is why or how they disagree with it.
Dma54rhs 5y ago
This is very much American idea of "diversity". Drink Starbucks, watch corpo rainbows all day long and sing hallelujah. But remember you have to speak our language and have our way of life, that's the diversity after all!
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  In many cases you have to speak "our language" if you want "us" to understand you. But that shouldn't mean that you "have to have our way of life", whatever that means. Diversity is good I believe, as long as we can understand each other.

galaxyLogic 5y ago

Elfdalian. Isn't that a language they spoke in the Middle-Earth?

jobigoud 5y ago
Well it's closely related to Old Norse and J.R.R Tolkien was a linguist and used Old Norse as an inspiration. So they might be from the same family.

timonoko 5y ago

Beware governmental efforts to "enliven" 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 "hobby" and they were "busy" 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.

antisthenes 5y ago
> 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. This is a complete non-sequitur. You generally expect any neighboring countries to have ethnic minorities, especially in bordering territories, such as the Murmansk/St Petersburg regions and Finland. Are you implying that somehow this community of Russian people in Finland exists exclusively because they somehow "scammed" their way into the country by pretending to know a language? I find it fairly hard to believe that Nokia would hire "swarthy Cossacks with no language skills" and frankly your tone is pretty offensive towards what seems to be benign immigration.
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  Perhaps you are already aware, but if not: one of the tricks in the Russian playbook is to build an ethnic group within their neighbours, as a way of annexing parts. Krimea for example was 'liberated' in 2014 from the yoke of Ukrainian oppression by Russian-ethnic groups, and 'spontaneously attached itself to Russia'. The 'rebels' all had uniforms, no insignias but SIGINT has analysed the names of the people talking over the radio and many were Russian army officers. Imagine Mexico organizing radio talkshows and political groups for Mexicans to liberate themselves from the Gringo oppression. They demand that the official language be Mexican. That Mexican history be thought in school. More and more the mexicans in California are unhappy. Until one day there is a 'rebellion'. And the Mexican state 'generously comes to the aid of their poor opressed brethern' Seen in that light, does the POV of GP make more sense?

jl6 5y ago

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. 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. In this case, it sounds like Elfdalian is up against both Swedish and English. If people are capable of and willing to learn three 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.

phaemon 5y ago
That isn't what "lingua franca" means, which is a poor start to your "it's better to only know one language" argument.
- jl6 5y ago
  “a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.” What do you think it means?
  - phaemon 5y ago
    It means a secondary language, not a primary one.
    - dash2 5y ago
      Merriam-Webster disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lingua%20franca
      - kzrdude 5y ago
        Wikipedia explains the "auxiliary language" meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

aristofun 5y ago

I never really get why you need to preserve naturally dying language no matter what. 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? Don't we people have higher priority issues right now?

tored 5y ago
Language is a connection to your ancestors, it is a time machine to their world, to speak and think like they did, and without the toil of your ancestors you wouldn’t be here, and by preserving it and passing it on to future generation we all still exist even after we die.
- aristofun 5y ago
  If im already speaking another language i already lost this type of connection, then why it matters?

Popegaf 5y ago

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. When I search Elfdalian, there's the facebook group for learning the language, but that'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. 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. If you don't make it easy to learn, consume, and practice, then make it at least easy to archive.

boublepop 5y ago
Your implied standpoint is that it’s only worth preserving if you can engage with it. Imagine having the same attitude towards endangered animals “why should we preserve the giant turtles when I can’t even find a shop that will sell me one?” The language is intimately tied to the people and the culture. It’s not like they want to push random people around the world to learn it just for a laugh.
- Popegaf 5y ago
  You're making assumptions about my implications and comparing two completely different things. A well archived language can be reborn again - a dead species can't (yet). Furthermore, where are you taking that I'm advocating forcefully spreading a language? I'm stating a two very simple facts: 1. If you want a language to stay alive, you need speakers. 2. If you want a language to outlive speakers, you need to archive it well. Since we live in a world of choice, you'll have to do something in order to let people choose to become a speaker of that language.

ochrist 5y ago

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: https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialektkort/#map=2 https://dialekt.ku.dk/dialektkort/#map=2 (in Danish)