Rhythm in Estonian Swedish

Estonian Swedish, an endangered variety of Swedish once widely spoken in the coastal areas and islands of Estonia, retains several archaic features of Swedish, and shows apparent linguistic influences from Estonian. The present paper offers the first systematic investigation of Estonian Swedish rhythm, which has been impressionistically characterised as having a relatively even distribution of stresses and more frequent primary stress than e.g. Central Swedish [1]. Because of its contact with Estonian we hypothesise that Estonian Swedish is likely to be rhythmically intermediate between Central Swedish and Estonian.