Recension av A Grammar of Övdalian av Yair Sapir och Olof Lundgren

Abstract

This review critically examines A Grammar of Elfdalian (Sapir & Lundgren 2024), the first comprehensive grammatical description of Elfdalian in English. While the volume is ambitious in scope, covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and historical background, it raises significant methodological and theoretical concerns. While the work’s potential value is acknowledged, its empirical basis is unclear due to a lack of explicit source references, un-glossed examples, and an indistinct separation between attested and reconstructed data. The authors’ decision to describe “Late Classical Elfdalian” (LCE), a partly reconstructed variety, results in a blurred distinction between a scientific grammar of a historical language stage and a prescriptive grammar of a revitalised language form. The review further discusses the book’s selective treatment of linguistic variation and especially its insufficient engagement with previous research on the subject. Although the morphological description is detailed and informative, the syntactic analysis is comparatively superficial and methodologically inconsistent. The review concludes that A Grammar of Elfdalian represents an important but flawed contribution: it provides extensive data and raises visibility for Övdalian studies internationally, yet its lack of transparency, inconsistent methodology, and limited scholarly contextualisation prevent it from functioning as a reliable scientific reference grammar.