The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called dialect, is a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by Standard Swedish and that can trace a separate development all the way back to Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections. These dialects can be nearly incomprehensible to most Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål. They are generally separated into the six traditional dialect groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary. The color represents the core area and the samples are from Svenska Dagbladet's dialect project. The areas with mixed colors as stripes are transitional areas. The parts in yellow with coloured dots represent various distinct dialect areas which are not easily defined as belonging to any of the six major groups above. The areas west of the core for Norrland dialects, west of Svealand dialects and north of Götaland dialects are related to each of these, respectively, indicated by the colour of the dots. Samples from these areas: , and . The dialects of this category have in common that they all show more or less strong Norwegian influences, especially the dialects in Härjedalen, Northwestern Jämtland and Northwestern Dalarna. Dialects often show similarities along traditional travelling routes such as the great rivers in Northern Sweden, which start in the mountains at the Norwegian border and then follow a South-Easterly path towards the Bothnian Sea. The grey area does not have any independently developed Swedish dialect. Here is a summary of some of the most important differences between the major groups. Note that this table does not hold for the distinct or transitional areas. Götaland dialects are mostly used in Västergötland, Dalsland, northern Halland, northern Småland and Östergötland although they are also heard in Bohuslän and Värmland and Öland. Examples of Götaland dialect features are vowel reduction, vowel shortening in front of endings and loss of -r in suffixes. In addition, connect adjacent areas, mainly Dalsland, northern Småland and Östergötland southwest. Värmland can also be counted here, although its dialects in many ways is a special case. A characteristic of Svealand dialects is the coalescence of the alveolar trill with following dental and alveolar consonants — also over word-boundaries — that transforms them into retroflex consonants that in some cases reduces the distinction between words. This feature is also found in East Norwegian, North Swedish and in some dialects of Scottish Gaelic.
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Classification
The following dialect groups are sometimes classified as "Swedish" in the broadest sense :
