Word order in Övdalian

The topic of this dissertation is an analysis of aspects of Traditional Övdalian syntax from a comparative Scandinavian perspective. Övdalian is a North Germanic variety spoken in the province of Dalecaria in Western Sweden. This variety differs conspicuously from its closest standard relatives, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, being mutually incomprehensible with them. The standard description of Övdalian is the dissertation of Lars Levander, written in 1909, where some syntactic features of Övdalian of a century ago are mentioned.

This book focuses on aspects of the syntax of Övdalian as it is spoken today. It gives an overview of recent research and offers the most detailed description currently available of modern Övdalian syntax and its development during the last hundred years. It especially focuses on the variation and change in the position of the verb in embedded clauses and on its purported relationship to Stylistic Fronting, which is fronting of light syntactic constituents in embedded clauses. This book contributes to our understanding of the syntactic system of a Scandinavian variety that strongly diverges from the other Scandinavian varieties and makes a contribution to the field of comparative Scandinavian syntax in general.