That is indeed true!

The most famous example can be found at the bottom of this page: https://www.alphadictionary.com/fun/tongue-twisters/swedish_...

å: stream

ö: island

i: in

ä: not correct, but used to represent dialectical pronunciation of "är", i.e. "is"

That seems to be (an expansion of) a little bit from a poem, Dumt fôlk by Gustaf Fröding: https://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Dumt_f%C3%B4lk.

But that only has "...e å, å i åa ä e ö" -- not the bit about "å i öa ä e å" from that tongue-twisters page, which seems to be a later addition. Ungrammatical, too: I'm sure even värmlänningar would say "på öa", not "i öa".

(Oh, and "e" is of course a contraction of the indeterminate article "en", a/an.)

Further: e: dialectal version of "det", i.e. "it" öa, åa: adding an a on the end of a noun is a dialectal way of expressing "the 'ö'" and "the 'å'", respectively.

But the 'e' doesn't precede any of the forms 'åa' or 'öa', but only the indeterminate 'å' and 'ö'. The 'e' is definitely 'en', not 'det'.

Wouldn't "e" just be a contraction of "en" in this sentence? Is it "det" in the dialect?

No, you're right, it's "en": "...en å, och i ån är en ö". "Det" would be totally ungrammatical, dialect or no dialect.

The sentence:

> I åa ä e ö, å i öa ä e å

mentioned in the other comment is understandable to a swedish speaker, but it's written half-phonetically. The words i, å, and ö are properly spelled, however.

I grew up on one of those islands on a river. The flow of the river passing like a stream of time.