Insular Danish (Danish: ''Ømål'') are the traditional

Danish dialects The Danish language has a number of regional and local dialect varieties. These can be divided into the traditional dialects, which differ from modern Standard Danish in both phonology and grammar, and the Danish accents, which are local varieties ...

spoken on the

islands This is a list of the lists of islands in the world grouped by country, by continent, by body of water, and by other classifications. For rank-order lists, see the #Other lists of islands, other lists of islands below. Lists of islands by count ...

Zealand Zealand ( ) is the largest and most populous islands of Denmark, island in Denmark proper (thus excluding Greenland and Disko Island, which are larger in size) at 7,031 km2 (2715 sq. mi.). Zealand had a population of 2,319,705 on 1 Januar ...

, Langeland,

Funen Funen (, ), is the third-largest List of islands of Denmark, island of Denmark, after Zealand and North Jutlandic Island, Vendsyssel-Thy, with an area of . It is the List of islands by area, 165th-largest island in the world. It is located in th ...

Falster Falster () is an island in south-eastern Denmark with an area of and 43,398 inhabitants as of 1 January 2010.

Lolland Lolland (; formerly spelled ''Laaland'', literally "low land") is the List of islands of Denmark#List of 100 largest Danish islands, fourth largest island of Denmark, with an area of . Located in the Kattegat, Belts and Sund area, it is part of Re ...

, and

Møn Møn () is an island in south-eastern Denmark. Until 1 January 2007, it was a municipality in its own right but it is now part of the municipality of Vordingborg Municipality, Vordingborg, after merging with the former municipalities of Langeb ...

. They are recorded in the Dictionary of Danish Insular Dialects (''Ømålsordbogen'') which has been collected since the 1920s, and published in biannual volumes since 1992. There are significant differences between the different insular varieties, but they also share a number of features. A major difference between Modern Danish and the traditional insular dialects is that some of them lack the

stød Stød (, also occasionally spelled stod in English) is a suprasegmental unit of Danish phonology (represented in non-standard IPA as ), which in its most common form is a kind of creaky voice (laryngealization), but it may also be realized as a gl ...

but kept the tonal accent. Also, they kept three noun genders.

Genders

Insular Danish kept three

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

s, but most other Danish varieties reduced the gender system to two. By 1900,

insular dialects had been reduced to two genders under the influence from the standard language, but other varieties like

dialect had not.

Personal pronouns

The old Insular or Funen dialect could also use personal pronouns in certain cases, particularly to refer to animals. A classic example in traditional Funen dialect is the sentence (literally, ''The cat, he is having kittens''). The cat is masculine in gender and so referred to as ("he") even if it is a female cat.

References

Danish dialects {{Germanic-lang-stub