Swedish is a language spoken in Sweden and Finland. Swedish is a one of the Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family.
Swedish is closely related to and often mutually intelligible with Danish and Norwegian. Swedish and Danish are both East Scandinavian languages, while Norwegian is a West Scandinavian language. However, due to long Danish rule of Norway, Norwegian (especially written Norwegian) has been heavily influenced by Danish. As a result, Danish and Norwegian may in practice be considered somewhat more similar to each other than either is to Swedish. In addition, due to Danish pronunciation, Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. All three languages diverged from Old Norse about a millennium ago.
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Where Spoken
Swedish is the official and common language of Sweden, spoken by nearly all of Sweden's 8,873,052 inhabitants (July 2000 estimate). In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages, but Swedish is only spoken by a minority of inhabitants (about 305,000, or 5.9% of total population by July 2000 estimate). Swedish is the majority language, however, in the Åland Islands, an autonomous territory of Finland.
There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as the United States. (See Languages in the United States.)
There used to be a Swedish-speaking community in the Baltic states, especially on islands along the coast and in present-day Estonia. After the loss of the Baltic territories to Russia in the early 18th century, many of them were forced to make a long march to the Ukraine. The survivors of that march eventually founded a number of Swedish-speaking villages which survived until the Russian revolution, when the inhabitants were evacuated to Sweden. The dialect they spoke was known as gammelsvenska (Old Swedish). In Estonia, the small remaining Swedish community was very well treated between the first and second world wars. Municpalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, had Swedish as adminstrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture experienced an upswing. Most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II.
Alphabet
Swedish is written using a twenty-nine letter alphabet: the standard twenty-six-letter Roman alphabet plus the additional letters Å / å, Ä / ä, and Ö / ö. These letters are sorted in that order following z. Centuries ago, an early form of Swedish (Old Swedish) was written using the runic alphabet, but its usage has been completely replaced.
Basic Facts
Most Swedish words are of Germanic origin (the oldest category, representing the most common, everyday words) or are borrowings from Latin, French, German, or English. New words are often formed by compounding. Some compounds are translations of the elements of German original compounds into Swedish. Examples of Germanic words in Swedish are mus (mouse), kung (king), and gås (goose).
With respect to inflection, Swedish has five different kinds of nouns and four different kinds of verbs. Nouns come in two grammatical genders: common and neuter. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memorized. Most nouns form the plural in a variety of ways: by adding -r with or without a mutation in the terminal vowel (e.g., flicka, girl, flickor, girls), by adding -n (e.g., äpple, apple, äpplen, apples), by no marker at all (e.g., barn, child or children), or by mutation of the root vowel from back to front (e.g., man, man, män, men). The last form is rare.
Most verbs end in -a in the infinitive, -r in the present tense, and -de, -te, or -dde in the past. Other tenses are formed by combinations of auxiliary verbs with infinitives or a special form of the participle called the supine.
Dialects
The Swedish Academy maintains an official definition of the Swedish language.
The Swedish spoken in Finland, "Finlandssvenska", differs from mainland standard Swedish, rikssvenska, mostly in pronunciation but also in sometimes using words considered archaic in Sweden.
See Also
Common phrases in different languages.
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