Other sources confirm the NE articles on the matter. Olle Engstrand (a professor of phonetics at Stockholm University), "Fonetikens grunder" ("The basics of phonetics"), 2004, page 120 (my translation):

All languages have more or less significant regional variations in pronunciation. In Swedish there are differences in the spoken varieties of the standard language ("Scanian", "Gutnish" or "Dalecarlian") as well as variations specific to certain cities ["stadsmål"] like "Stockholmska" or "Göteborska". By "dialect" Swedish dialectologists are refering to those local dialects ["bygdemål", "landsmål"] that have a straight lineage that can be traced back to Old Norse, a history shared with all other Scandinavian dialects - these form a continuum while the distinct "national languages" like Swedish, Danish and Norweigan are relativly recent constructions.

This is confirmed by Claes-Christian Elert (professor of phonetics at Umeå University 1969-1988) in "Allmän och svensk fonetik" ("General and Swedish phonetics") on pages 34-35. Here are some selected passages (again my translation):

For a long time there has existed speech varieties within the Swedish language area which are used only in certain communities and which have only been slightly influenced by the spoken varieties of central Sweden or by the written language. These are the genuine dialects [the bold font is in the book].

[...]

The variety of language that a visitor to a community encounters most of the time is not the genuine dialect but a reginal speech variety [again Elert's bolding]. Sometimes the standard language is spoken with regional influences. Contrary to the genuine dialects, the regional varieties are almost identical to the central standard language ["det centrala riksspråket"] in terms of inflection and syntax. Vocabulary is usually also more or less identical, though some local deviations do exist. It is above all the pronunciation of vowels and consonants as well as prosody of the regional variations that deviate from the standard language. Generally these are similar to the genuine dialects within the same region. The regional standard varieties do not differ as much from one community to another as the genuine dialects.

If you interpret these quotes very generously (that is, not according to what the writers intended), you might be able to support SIL's claims, though not the figures. The claims that Scanian as a regional variety is a seperate language is supported only by Lång and a handful of Scanian regionalists who use completely bogus arguments  and often claim the name should be skåneländska (roughly "Terra Scanian"). That it would be a dialect of only Danish is also extremely speculative, and it should at the very least be classified as simply "East Scandinavian". For all practical purposes it is most likely a lot more easily understood by Swedes than Danes.

 14:39, May 5, 2005 (UTC)