The great majority of the Danish emigrants who arrived in the United States during the period of mass emigration prior to 1914 had their roots in the Danish countryside. Consequently, their original language was a local, rural Danish dialect. As very few Danes brought with them any knowledge of English, they arrived in the United States with a Danish dialect as their only language.
In contrast, for example, to immigrants from Norway and Sweden, the Danes settled all over the American continent, and only a minority settled in urban or rural areas dominated by their own countrymen. Unnoticed by participants in the heated debate about the future of the Danish language in the U.S., the many scattered and isolated Danes lost their Danish language through a remarkably fast process of assimilation.
The few Danes who settled among their countrymen had access to Dan
ish churches and institutions. It was via such institutions that they became involved in the dispute over the Danish language, or rather, they became
the objects of this dispute. For obvious reasons, the authors of the current article were forced to limit their study of American-Danish to the study of the language patterns of those Danes who settled in Danish enclaves and their descendants.
When speakers of local Danish dialects from many different areas in Denmark settled together, differences in the dialects spoken, for example, in western Jutland and on the island of Bornholm, often made communica
tion difficult. A natural first consequence of this was the gradual demise of the most distinctive individual features of the various dialects. This led to an American-Danish variant of the Danish language not too different from
“standard” Danish. Later on, dialectal differences motivated the gradual inclusion of elements of American English, resulting finally in the almost total abandonment of Danish.
The tendency to purge spoken Danish of the more divergent dialectal features also had to do with the ridicule to which those who spoke the more pronounced dialects were subjected. They were said to “talk plat Dane.”
The adjective “plat,” meaning dialectal, is a derogatory word in both stan
dard Danish and in Danish dialects. The following comment on the posi
tion of Danish dialects in Minnesota prior to World War I was made in 1966 by a minister born in 1886 in Bpstrup on the Danish island of Lange
land who emigrated to the U.S. in 1911.
The Danes in the area felt that it was rustic to speak the dialect, so they tried to get away from it, and instead they spoke a mixed language, and most continued to do this, so in the end they spoke neither Danish nor English, and that’s the way they still speak (trans
lated from the Danish).
Only rarely did a larger group of Danes who spoke the same local Danish dialect settle together in the United States. When such settlements were isolated from other Danish settlements, the original dialect had a chance of surviving beyond the Danish born generation. Two neighboring townships in South Dakota, Badger in Kingsbury County and Norden in Hamlin County managed to fulfill this criterion.
Two young families from Thy in northern Jutland settled in Badger in 1877, and over the next few decades they attracted some hundred settlers from Thy. In this community, the dialect of Thy remained the natural means of communication within the townships for two generations, and it is still used by a few members of the second American-born generation. Few new settlers from Thy have arrived in the 20th century, and the Thy dialect of this South Dakota community has remained that of the 19th century, preserving dialectal features which have disappeared in Thy. In 1976, a settler who had arrived in Badger in 1916 gave the following account in
Map of Badger Township. (From Standard Atlas of Kingsbury County, South Dakota, includ
ing a Plat Book of the Villages, Cities and Townships of the County. Geo. A. Ogle & Co., Chicago, 1909.
Danish with a strong Thy dialect with a bit of American English thrown in:
Informant'. Ja, del var meget rigtig gammel thybomål.
Interviewer. Skete det ikke der kom danskere fra andre dele af Danmark? (Didn’t you sometimes get settlers from other parts of Denmark?)
Informant-. Der var måske to-tre familier fra andre pladser, men ellers var det mestly, ellers var det most, mest oppe fra Thy af.
Interviewer-. Kunne I forstå dem der kom fra andre pladser? (Could you understand those who came from other places?)
Informant: Åh ja, jo, det var jo itte dengang. Det eneste der kneb var jo at forstå - det var dem københavnere. De var itte lette at forstå.
The informant’s use of “thybomål” in referring to the Thy dialect repre
sents the normal usage of the Danish language. However, some of our informants who spoke a dialect used “thybo” to denote the dialect. In standard Danish “thybo” means “a person from Thy.” The use of the term
A sod house in Nebraska, c. 1880.
to denote the dialect, rather than the person, is rather widespread among Danish-Americans and corresponds to the term “fynbo” to describe the dialect of the island of Fyn and “Dane” to mean Danish.1 The informant in the following text (recorded in 1973) was a carpenter from Assens, Fyn.
Born in 1881 he emigrated in 1906, and in our interview used the term
“fynbo” to describe his own and his wife’s dialect:
Interviewer. Talte I så dansk sammen? (Did you speak Danish together?) Informant'. Ja. Ja.
Interviewer. Og det blev I ved med i alle årene? (And you continued to do that throughout the years?)
Informant'. Ah ja - ja - men det - det er a little bit - you know - fynbo, you know, vi taler en little bit difference, you know - ude fra landet, you know. Men we get along all right.
The use of Danish dialects in Danish-American communities was always a question of communication, never one of ideology. One informant, who was born in 1890 on the Danish island of Mors and emigrated in 1910, told us that he still knew the old dialect from Mors. When we encouraged him to speak the dialect he was unresponsive:
Hvad forskel gør det? (What difference does it make?).
The same unsentimental attitude to Danish dialects is apparent in the
following comment made by the above-mentioned informant from Badger, South Dakota:
Men det barnemad der, det har ingen betydning mere. For mig anyway. (That kid’s stuff doesn’t mean anything anymore. At least not for me.)