In this talk we present the first Danish dialect dictionary: Christian Molbech’s Dansk Dialect-Lexikon (1833-41; MDL), as an example of a particular way of describing and conceptualizing lexical variation, typical of the first half of the 19th century.

MDL is an idioticon, i.e. it includes only the words that are particular to the dialects, not those shared with the (written) standard. This approach was part of the growing, nation- building interest in the countryside and the “original people” (cf. similar trends in Danish art history and literature). This is stated in the introduction to MDL but also in Molbech’s small, programmatic publication from 1811, which encouraged priests in the whole country to collect words of the “mother tongue” in the different “landscapes” (provinces), among the “peasants”. Molbech’s endeavor was furthermore fueled by an ambition to show that Danish language had its own history and origin, as opposed to the idea of Danish
as a later derivative of Old Icelandic, professed by Rasmus Rask, founding figure of historical linguistics and Molbech’s contemporary.

It is generally assumed that the quality of MDL is somewhat poor: Molbech’s linguistic knowledge (pronunciation, morphology, etymology) was undoubtedly inadequate, and the selection of words fluctuating, due to the indirect, second-hand collection of data spanning more than 20 years. However, this is rarely further specified. In this talk, we give a more systematic look at the words in MDL, their geographical distribution as well as possible patterns in lexical content. We compare the words from the Danish Isles in MDL with the lemmas in the comprehensive, scientific description of the insular dialects in Ømålsordbogen (Dictionary of the Danish Insular Dialects, 1992-). We also compare the words in the final, edited MDL with the original sources in order to assess the selection made by Molbech.