Please click here to leave an anniversary message (in any language you choose). You do not need to be a member of Lowlands-L to do so. In fact, we would be more than thrilled to receive messages from anyone. Click here to read what others have written so far.
What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Jutish
The
Danish Royal Yacht visiting Synneborre
(Danish Sønderborg, German Sonderburg) in
Denmark’s Southern Jutland,
where Denmark
meets
Germany and Scandinavia overlaps
with the Lowlands
Language information:
Jutish is used in Jutland (Jylland), Denmark’s territory on the European mainland. Jutish belongs to the North Germanic (Scandinavian)
branch and has since mixing of Danes and Jutes, which took part around the
time of large-scale Jutish emigration to Britain, become closely related to
or part of Danish.
However, Jutish
has many non-Scandinavian features
today which links it to the Lowlands languages, some of them probably due to
longstanding contacts with the Saxon language, from Old Saxon times to more
recent contacts with the northermost Low Saxon dialects, of which the ones
on today’s Danish soil appear to be extinct. Southwestern Jutish also used to have contacts
with the northernmost North Frisian dialects of which the ones on today’s Danish soil are now extinct. Southern Jutish has been particularly strongly
influenced by the Low Saxon dialects of Schleswig, also by High German which
is still influencing the language these
days.
Along with Danish, Southern Jutish is used also by the Danish minority of Germany’s Schleswig region, known in Denmark as “Southern Schleswig.” It has variously influenced the Low Saxon dialects of that region.
Like Danish (proper)
dialects,
most
Jutish dialects have two genders: “general” and “neuter.” However, a few have only one—or so some claim. We need to bear in mind that this is a question of morphologically expressed gender, that the simplification is merely a surface feature that masks underlying
gender, certainly where animate and inanimate objects are involved, differences
surfacing in personal pronouns (e.g., English “he,” “she,” “it,” and Danish han, hun, den/det respectively).
A striking West-Germanic-like
feature of Western and Southern Jutish is the consistently preposed definite
article
(æ, å and e in most dialects) instead of the typically North Germanic suffixed definite
article (-en and -et in most Scandinavian dialects, plus feminine -a in Swedish
and certain Norwegian dialects), and the use of a single gender (versus two genders
in Standard Danish). The overall sound
of Southern
Jutish
spoken by old-timer native speakers reminds the listener of the sound of Low
Saxon.
Southern, specifically
Southeastern, Jutish used to extend farther south into what is now the northernmost
German state of Schleswig-Holstein. According to Gerhard Willers (private communication),
Jutish used to be spoken as far south as in the town of Viöl, about 10 km northeast
of Husum.
Most of what is now Schleswig-Holstein, which geographically is a part of the
Jutland Peninsula, used to be
under
Danish
rule
for
extended
periods,
which made it not uncomon for speakers of
Low
Saxon
and
North Frisian to know Jutish and Island Danish as well.
Frontpage
Southwestern Jutish also used to have contacts
with the northernmost North Frisian dialects of which the ones on today’s Danish soil are now extinct. Southern Jutish has been particularly strongly
influenced by the Low Saxon dialects of Schleswig, also by High German which
is still influencing the language these
days.
Along with Danish, Southern Jutish is used also by the Danish minority of Germany’s Schleswig region, known in Denmark as “Southern Schleswig.” It has variously influenced the Low Saxon dialects of that region.