Medieval Legal Manuscripts as Scanian linguistic evidence
Abstract
After almost four centuries of Swedish assimilation policies, the former Danish province of Scania is losing the grip on its linguistic peculiarities, defined as East Danish, in an almost total absence of tools for the study of this linguistic variety. Such absence is even more regrettable, as the Scanian language was the first language of Scandinavia to be standardised and recorded in legal texts such as the Law of Scania and the Church Law of Scania.
For the history of the Scanian language, younger manuscripts of these legal texts may give some information on how the language evolved (and preserved some peculiarities) up to the Swedish invasion, when a violent assimilation process was enforced. This result can be obtained examining the changes both in spelling and in wording that occurred to make the ancient text intelligible through time.
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References
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