border used to be very common, with South Jutlandic being the first language of both Danish-minded and German-minded people. Sometimes, the purest South Jutlandic may be found among older people who identify as German. Since they have not attended Danish schools, their speech is not influenced by Standard Danish. 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. History Historically, the Danish language had a much larger extension in South Slesvig than today. South Jutlandic was spoken down to the Danevirke wall south of Schleswig town, close to the Viking town of Hedeby, and to Eckernförde on the east coast. 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 western islands and the west coast were settled by Frisians. A little further inland Frisians and Danes were mixed. With the reformation in the 16th century the national language was installed in church instead of Latin. In Slesvig this meant not the language of the peasantry, but that of the dukes and gentry, being first Low German and later High German. German was the language of administration in all of Slesvig. In Northern Slesvig, however, priests were educated at the chapter of Haderslev and Danish was spoken in church. The church language border was very similar to the present-day Danish-German border which was created by plebiscite in 1920. During the 17th and the 18th centuries, the population in the area south of the Schlei (Sli) inlet switched to Low German, few details being known about their former South Jutlandic dialect. 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. The Angel dialect became extinct around 1900. 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 Low German dialect of Angel still has a great deal of Danish words and grammatical influence, which makes it difficult to understand for other Low German speakers. During the