UN body designates Swedish dialect a “threatened language”

The Scanian (‘Skånska’) dialect of southern Sweden has landed on Unesco’s list of threatened languages, much to the exasperation of Swedish linguists.

“There are neither linguistic nor practical reasons why Scanian should be counted as a language,” Carl-Einar Lundbladh, head of the Dialect and Place-Names Archive (Dialekt- och ortnamnsarkivet, DAL) in Lund, told the Expressen newspaper.

But members of the Scania Future Foundation (Stiftelsen Skånsk Framtid), are thrilled with the Unesco designation, which adds support for their contention that the the Scanian dialect is a language, and an endangered one at that.