The Luleå dialects (, natively ''bondska'') are a group of closely related North Swedish

dialect A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...

s spoken in

Norrbotten Norrbotten (), sometimes called North Bothnia, is a Swedish province (''landskap'') in northernmost Sweden. It borders south to Västerbotten, west to Swedish Lapland, and east to Finland. Administration The traditional provinces of Swede ...

in the area of

Luleå Luleå ( , , locally ; ; ) is a Cities in Sweden, city on the coast of northern Sweden, and the County Administrative Boards of Sweden, capital of Norrbotten County, the northernmost county in Sweden. Luleå has 48,728 inhabitants in its urban ...

and along the

Lule River Lule River (, , ''Luleälven'') is a major river in Sweden, rising in northern Sweden and flowing southeast for before reaching the Gulf of Bothnia at Luleå. It is the second largest river by watershed area and length in Norrbotten County (afte ...

valley. They are characterised by numerous archaic linguistic features as well as several newer borrowings, such as French loanwords likely picked up in the 18th century. Among the

distinctive feature In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonology, phonological structure that distinguishes one Phone (phonetics), sound from another within a language. For example, the feature

Voice (phonetics), voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound productio ...

''distinguishes ...

s of the dialects are the use of preserved archaic

diphthongs A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

and the so-called "thick L", a

retroflex flap The voiced retroflex flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a letter ''r'' with tail, and the equivalent X-SAMPA ...

which is commonly represented as a capital "L" when writing the dialect. For example, Standard Swedish ''hus'' ("house") is ''heos'' in this dialect, ''bord'' ("table") is ''båoL'', and ''is'' ("ice") is ''öys''. The more archaic forms of the dialect are no longer widely spoken today.

See also

Further reading