Many older people will still speak a distinct South Jutlandic dialect, both in towns and rural areas.

A renewed popular interest in preserving the South Jutlandic dialect has been seen in recent years.

Family ties and informal local contact across the border used to be very common, with South Jutlandic being the first language of both Danish-minded and German-minded people.

With urbanisation in the recent decades, the crisscross of dialects and national sentiment has faded, with High German becoming the first choice everywhere, but some South Jutlandic words are often retained in the vocabulary.

South of this was a sparsely inhabited area which after the Viking Age became populated with Saxon settlers whose language is now better known as Low German.

The people of Angeln (Danish Angel), the countryside between Flensburg and the Schlei where the Angles who settled England also originally came from, kept to their South Jutlandic dialect for a longer time, but often had some knowledge of Low German as well.

A few records of it exist and show that it was similar to the South Jutlandic of the Sønderborg area in North Slesvig, across the Flensborg Fjord.

The dominant official language was German, and the measures of the government had quite the adverse effect, reinforcing anti-Danish sentiment.

Called Fjoldedansk after the village Fjolde (German: Viöl) or sydslesvigsk (southern Schleswigian), the dialect had many archaic features otherwise lost in Danish, such as verbs fully inflected in person and number.

Place names in South Slesvig are of almost exclusively Danish origin, except in North Frisia and the southernmost area.

Such arbitrary translations were often made by the central Prussian government after the whole of Slesvig was ceded to Prussia after the war of 1864.