Want to speak Game of Thronish?

OK, so this is pretty cool.  It appears that there still is a strand of Viking language being spoken in Sweden called "Elfdalian", and if that isn't cool enough they are now opening a preschool in which it will be spoken in Alvdalen in the northern part of the country.  I never knew that this language existed.  I guess only 60 children still speak it  but soon there will be others.

The town, with only 2,500 inhabitants, is the birthplace of Sofia - the young bride of Prince Carl Filip of Sweden.  (She is due any day with their first baby.)  Below is a video with snippet of an old man, and then an old woman, speaking "Elfdalian".  I recognize some of the words, the flow of the words is similar to Swedish, but I cannot understand what they are saying, just the general gist.  Well, having studied ethnology and linguistics I find it interesting.

Here's what they said in the press information taken from The Local:
"It is important to preserve it [in Älvdalen] because this is the only place where it is actually spoken. For linguists it's very fascinating. It has a mixture of very archaic features and very innovative features (...) and we can see some aspects which have been preserved in Elfdalian which have died out in all other Scandinavian languages."

 

"We can go back 2000 years in time," he added." - Yair Sapir, Associate Professor of Swedish Language at Lund University in Sweden.  That is cool!