Southern Schleswig Danish

Southern Schleswig Danish
RegionSouthern Schleswig
EthnicityDanish minority in Southern Schleswig
Early forms
Danish alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3
IETFda-u-sd-desh

Southern Schleswig Danish (Danish: Sydslesvigdansk, German: Südschleswigdänisch) is a variety of the Danish language spoken in Southern Schleswig in Northern Germany. It is a variety of Standard Danish (rigsmål, rigsdansk) influenced by the surrounding German language in relation to prosody, syntax and morphology, used by the Danish minority in Southern Schleswig.

Originally Southern Jutlandic was spoken in most parts of the area (in the variants of Angel Danish and Mellemslesvigsk). On the western coast, North Frisian was also spoken. After the language shift in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, most of the Danish and North Frisian dialects were replaced by Low and Standard German.

Accordingly, there is a Northern Schleswig variety of German language in Northern Schleswig. A similar phenomenon is Gøtudanskt on the Faroe Islands.

  1. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Southern Schleswig Danish". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.