The History behind de / dem (Swedish with English subtitles) 

Thank you for your kind words! More videos are coming :)

Same here from England.

Saludos desde Brasil :)

Same for a germany guy learning the nordic languages :)

You should watch some Ingmar Bergman movies probably the most enjoyable thing swedish you can watch. the whole reason i’m learning swedish is to watch Bergman movies with no subtitles haha

Thank you for your kind words! I am working on more videos, but a very high workload has so far kept me from finishing them.

Interesting to know! That's usually how it goes with language change: new features emerge, educated speakers try to fight them, they stick around anyway, and finally they end up being the standard, and the old form is forgotten.

No! Sometimes we educated speakers win! If you look at style guides from the early 20th century, they tell people not to use "Chinee" as a back-formed singular of "Chinese", and our prescription won out!

This seems to be a common Scandinavian development. Most varieties-dialectal as well as standard-seem to have either kept the original diphthong (e.g. _dai_) or changed the vowel to /i/ (as in _di_).

I'm working on it! :)

+Academia Cervena Make a video explaining how you can get a total syntax error in certain grammatical situations, like when saying 'a scared lion'. =)

English even went a step further by you "swallowing" thee and thou too.

Takk så veldig mye! Jeg trur du har heilt rett i det du sier og hvis jeg ikke tar feil er den utviklinga allerede skjedd i et stort antall målføre i Norge. Som du nevner har østlandsk _dem/dom_ i både subjekt og objekt, og på Vestlandet heter det vel også _di/dei_ i begge falla. Kanskje er det heller Oslodialekten som er unntaket? :)

Du kan godt skrive på svensk ;) Ja, du har nok helt rett. Jeg har lest litt mer om dette og funnet ut at mange faktisk bruker den samme formen i både subjekt og objekt i Oslo også. Jeg tror mange bruker dem/døm, men flere bruker også "de" som både subjekt og objekt. For øvrig er også skillet mellom hun-henne og han-ham i ferd med å forsvinne, eller har allerede forsvunnet fullstendig i de fleste dialekter. Jeg undrer om dette kan ha en sammenheng med de refleksive pronomenene. De refleksive pronomenene til "jeg", "du", "vi" og "dere" har nemlig samme form som objektformene "meg", "deg", "oss" og "dere". "han", "hun" og "de" har derimot det refleksive pronomenet "seg", men objektformene "ham", "henne" og "dem".

I've learnt just a bit of Swedish (not even A1 I'd say). I am surprised how much of what is written here I could understand 😁 Scandinavian languages are so much fun!

@@aliceberethart 'Dom' sounds like uneducated hillbillies or bratty teenagers trying to sound cool.

Jag har faktiskt tänkt tanken själv! Jag får ta det någon gång mellan alla andra filmer när jag känner för att sticka ut hakan lite :)

Om den ursäkten var giltig hade jag förväntat mig upplopp och kravaller vid landets alla slutstationer. Näe henhatet är bara barnslig ovilja inför något nytt, oavsett hur användbart.

@@joelmattsson9353 Uraäkta at jag svarar på en 2 år gammal kommentar, men mitt problem med "hen" är inte funktionen (den är ganska smidig, och många andra språk har den). Däremot så har den ingen objektsform (han --> honom, hon --> henne, hen --> ..."henum"?) och dessutom så är det nästan omöjligt att få in den i vissa (åtminstone i min Värmländska) dialekt på ett naturligt sätt, där: Han & honom = 'an & hönöm/hömmôn. Hon & henne = ho' & hänn'. Problemet blir att alltså att "Hen" (med kort E) låter som "henne"! Och man riskerar att röra ihop det med "Di" (som vi oftast använder, även om vissa kör med ett distinkt "de", med lång E (oftast bara vid övertydlighet/betoning)), särskilt efter ord som "gjorde" (uttalas [juːʊrd]) eftersom "Gjorde de?" [juːʊrd dɪ] och "Gjorde hen?" [[juːʊrd hɪ] då skulle bli nästan ourskiljbara.

Varsågod!

I usually speak a fairly levelled eastern Central Swedish dialect (from the region around lake Mälaren). The feature of s turning into what sounds like a sh is a general feature of most Swedish dialects (exeptions are South and Finland Swedish)-it happens when there's an r preceding it! (Compare f.ex. with the pronunciation of 'rs' in a name like Skarsgård) A video about Swedish dialects is something I'd really love to do. Hopefully I'll be able to find the time to make it at some point.

@@AcademiaCervena it's been 87 years

@@AcademiaCervena I am also from the same (big) region but I can clearly pick up differences between your idiolect and mine. For instance, they way you pronounce "börjar" at 0:51 and again at 2:08. My ö:s are more rounded, and some other vowels as well (i, y, u). I wonder if anyone has done a study of dialectal variations within Eastern Central Swedish? A lot of people in the Stockholm region have the idea that they don't have a dialect, which is of course nonsense.

Alltså inte "di" utan utalar de som det stavas.

Yes :) Also, English already did something similar, replacing its original subject form 'ye' with the object form 'you' !

No, in English low class people also speak in this uncouth way. It would be like people saying -Them are some tasty cookies. Or Them are stupid hillbillies.- It sounds just as lowclass in English as it does in Swedish.

Yes, I am :)

@@AcademiaCervena wow! I'm jealous of people who grow up speaking a language other than English. Haha I just think it adds something interesting to people and I love languages. I am definitely going to keep watching your videos. (:

Nej, motivationerne bag sprogforandringer er så sandelig ofte ikke helt lette at gennemskue :)

Får jag fråga varifrån du kommer?

Yeah, kind of. But in Sweden the only debate is about keeping them apart in the written language. Nobody hardly even thinks about the fact that they were once supposed to be pronounced differently.

What do people want to do? Spell them both as "dom"?

When people don't distinguish them in writing, is generally the go-to option, and is fairly common in informal contexts. I couldn't tell you how many would support an actual "official" change to it though-my impression is that most people are fine with the current (weird) status quo. But in the future, I'm certain that is inevitably what we'll end up with, and maybe that's just as well.

The current situation seems very hard to maintain. People who don't say "whom" usually can't even comprehend what the theoretical difference between that and "who" is. Similarly, in the few examples where English does not make a subject/object distinction in pronouns (namely "you" and "it"), I find that people are baffled by such a distinction being made in other languages (e.g. if you try to explain that they can't just say "du" for "dig"), despite the fact that they spontaneously manage to correctly distinguish "we" from "us", etc. On the other hand, I guess that that "de" and "dem" may be propped up in Sweden by the high rates of English proficiency amongst the population: if you are routinely distinguishing between the very closely cognate "they" and "them", "de" and "dem" can't become some arcane archaic rule that no one remembers. I suppose that changing to "dom" would also create a sharp divide between texts from Sweden and those in the Swedish of Finland. That might be unacceptable for people who wish to maintain the unity of the language.

Another thing that could be discussed is the reason for the innovation. It seems to me that the original pronunciation of "de" is identical to the usual pronunciation of "det". A shift to a "di", or even better a "dåmm" pronunciation, serves the purpose of removing ambiguity. Oh, and there is the issue of the article "de" (plural of "den/det") as opposed to the pronoun "de". Is its evolution similar?

In writing yes, in speech no. Unless you're learning Finland Swedish.

if I'm not wrong some Norwegians don't distinguish "oss" and "vi" either.

how come? I thought you guys say "de" and "dem" normally

Ja, det är en rimlig tanke. På 70-talet hade de stavningarna vind i ryggen, men de lyckades inte slå igenom helt, och sedan vände det tillbaka.

Here in a quite large part of Värmland we say "de" with 'e' and dôm instead of "dom". It's not even close to being extinct.