Regional Swedish dialects contain a number of Low German loanwords that are not found in Standard Swedish. It is the aim of this dissertation to identify such words, to describe them with special reference to their semantic properties, and to investigate their history in the Swedish language.

The investigation is based on data collected from dialect dictionaries and etymological studies. A thorough sifting of the material from an etymological point of view resulted in the establishment of a corpus of 350 words. These words are presented in alphabetical order, in the form of entries giving detailed information on dialectal evidence as well as providing examples from earlier periods in the history of Swedish, the other Scandinavian languages, and Middle and Early Modern Low German.

The corpus is studied from two aspects. Firstly, the semantic range of the dialectal loanwords is compared with the Low German loanword inventory in the standard language. Not surprisingly, it appears that there are marked differences in that the dialect material indicates another semantic range. The number of emotive words is striking, as is also the number of words relating to everyday life. Secondly, a search is made for the individual words in dictionaries of early Swedish written language. It then appears that most of the loanwords included in the corpus were used in the written language in earlier periods, in some cases as early as the Middle Ages, and have become dialectal only in fairly recent times. This seems to indicate that, in addition to spatial diffusion, there has been a movement from standard language to regional dialect.