Swedish as a foreign language

Swedish belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic sub-family of the Indo-European languages. As such, it is mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish. Because most of the loanwords present in Swedish come from English and German (originally Middle Low German, closely related to Dutch), and also because of similarities in grammar, native speakers of Germanic languages usually have an advantage over speakers of other, less related languages.

The similarity between Swedish and English is further emphasized by many

Difficulties for students

Phonology

One of the main difficulties encountered by students of Swedish is its

In Swedish, there is a grammatical gender distinction between common (en) and neuter (ett). Like other languages with noun classes, Swedish has few consistent rules to determine each word's gender; so the genders have to be learned word by word, although the words of common gender far outnumber the neuter words, and given morphological derivations consistently yield results of a certain gender, e.g. adding -ning to a verb always yields a common gender noun (röka → rökning, "to smoke → smoking") whereas adding -ande always yields a neuter gender noun (famla → famlande, "to fumble → fumbling").

Swedish has five different ways to form regular plurals of nouns, also determined on a word-by-word basis, in addition to irregular plurals. These are -ar, -or, -er, -en and identical to singular.

As in English, there are many irregular verbs and plurals, such as fot; fötter ("foot; feet") and flyga; flög; flugit ("fly; flew; flown"), cf. Germanic umlaut and Germanic strong verb.

Syntax

Swedish utilizes V2 word order in subclauses, a phenomenon rarely encountered cross-linguistically.

Orthography

Certain common words retain their historical written form, e.g. mig /mεj/ and och /ɔk/ or /ɔ/. The pronoun de is pronounced /dɔm/ by most speakers, even though it has traditionally distinct written forms in the nominative (as well as used as a plural article) and accusative case.

Geographic distribution

In addition to the minorities in

Proficiency tests

• Swedex consists of three different levels corresponding to the A2, B1 and B2 levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. It can be taken in examination centers in twenty-five different countries. Swedex tests the skills of the student in five different areas: vocabulary, grammar, listening, writing and reading.^{[citation needed]}
• TISUS is another certificate, often used as a proof of competence in Swedish to gain access to Swedish universities. It tests the reading, oral and written skills of the student.
• In Finland, there is an official examination in the universities, called "public servant's Swedish", as a part of the policy of bilinguality of the state of Finland. The abitur examination includes a Swedish exam, which, while itself optional, is based on compulsory courses in high school.

See also

• Second language
• Language education
• Second language acquisition

Notes

Sources

• (in Swedish) Elert, Claes-Christian (2000) Allmän och svensk fonetik Norstedts, Lund

External links

• Svenska Institutet (in Swedish, English, German, Spanish, and French)
• Språkrådet (in Swedish)
• Swedex examinations (in Swedish)