Two diminutives in Viöl Danish

Abstract This paper analyses the diminutive system of Viöl Danish, a now extinct Scandinavian dialect once spoken in the former Duchy of Schleswig (Northern Germany). We argue that the dialect had two productive diminutive constructions: a suffixal diminutive in - kǝn and a ‘gender-shift’ diminutive involving only a change in grammatical gender. While the two constructions shared the core meaning ‘small’, they had different semantic extensions and connotations. The Viöl Danish system appears to be unique among Scandinavian varieties, but has close parallels in continental West Germanic and other languages. We suggest that while the system arose partly through contact with Low German, it had developed its own dynamics in Viöl Danish as recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.