Swedish language

The Vasa Bible is often considered to be a reasonable compromise between old and new; while not adhering to the colloquial spoken language of its day, it was not overly conservative in its use of archaic forms.[15] It was a major step towards a more consistent Swedish orthography. It established the use of the vowels "å", "ä", and "ö", and the spelling "ck" in place of "kk", distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible, perhaps intentionally, given the ongoing rivalry between the countries. All three translators came from central Sweden, which is generally seen as adding specific Central Swedish features to the new Bible.^[16]

Though it might seem as if the Bible translation set a very powerful precedent for orthographic standards, spelling actually became more inconsistent during the remainder of the century. It was not until the 17th century that spelling began to be discussed, around the time when the first grammars were written.^[17] Capitalization during this time was not standardized. It depended on the authors and their background. Those influenced by German capitalized all nouns, while others capitalized more sparsely. It is also not always apparent which letters are capitalized owing to the Gothic or blackletter typeface that was used to print the Bible. This typeface was in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced with a Latin typeface (often Antiqua).^[18]

Some important changes in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the

The period that includes Swedish as it is spoken today is termed nusvenska (lit., "Now-Swedish") in linguistics, and started in the last decades of the 19th century. It saw a democratization of the language with a less formal written form that approached the spoken one. The growth of a state school system also led to the evolution of so-called boksvenska (literally, "book Swedish"), especially among the working classes, where spelling to some extent influenced pronunciation, particularly in official contexts. With the industrialization and urbanization of Sweden well under way by the last decades of the 19th century, a new breed of authors made their mark on Swedish literature. Many scholars, politicians and other public figures had a great influence on the emerging national language, among them prolific authors like the poet Gustaf Fröding, Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf and radical writer and playwright August Strindberg.^[21]

It was during the 20th century that a common, standardized national language became available to all Swedes. The orthography finally stabilized and became almost completely uniform, with some minor deviations, by the time of the spelling reform of 1906.^[22] With the exception of plural forms of verbs and a slightly different syntax, particularly in the written language, the language was the same as the Swedish of today. The plural verb forms appeared decreasingly in formal writing into the 1950s, when their use was removed from all official recommendations.^[23][24]

A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the late 1960s with the so-called

Geographic distribution

Swedish is the sole official national language of Sweden, and one of two in Finland (alongside Finnish). As of 2006, it was the sole native language of 83% of Swedish residents.^[27] In 2007, around 5.5% (c. 290,000) of the population of Finland were native speakers of Swedish,^[28] partially due to a decline following the Russian annexation of Finland after the Finnish War 1808–1809.^[29] The Fenno-Swedish-speaking minority is concentrated in the coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In some of these areas, Swedish is the predominant language; in 19 municipalities, 16 of which are located in Åland, Swedish is the sole official language. Åland county is an autonomous region of Finland.^[30]

According to a rough estimation, as of 2010 there were up to 300,000 Swedish-speakers living outside Sweden and Finland. The largest populations were in the United States (up to 100,000), the UK, Spain and Germany (c. 30,000 each) and a large proportion of the remaining 100,000 in the Scandinavian countries, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia.^[31] Over three million people speak Swedish as a second language, with about 2,410,000 of those in Finland.^[1] According to a survey by the European Commission, 44% of respondents from Finland who did not have Swedish as a native language considered themselves to be proficient enough in Swedish to hold a conversation.^[32] Due to the close relation between the Scandinavian languages, a considerable proportion of speakers of Danish and especially Norwegian are able to understand Swedish.^[33]

There is considerable migration between the

United States Census, some 67,000 people over the age of five were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on the degree of language proficiency.^[34] Similarly, there were 16,915 reported Swedish speakers in Canada from the 2001 census.^[35] Although there are no certain numbers, some 40,000 Swedes are estimated to live in the London area in the United Kingdom.^[36] Outside Sweden and Finland, there are about 40,000 active learners enrolled in Swedish language courses.^[37]

In the

Lindström and Scandia.^[39][40]

Official status

Swedish is the official main language of Sweden.^[41][42] Swedish is also one of two official languages of Finland. In Sweden, it has long been used in local and state government, and most of the educational system, but remained only a de facto primary language with no official status in law until 2009. A bill was proposed in 2005 that would have made Swedish an official language, but failed to pass by the narrowest possible margin (145–147) due to a pairing-off failure.^[43] A proposal for a broader language law, designating Swedish as the main language of the country and bolstering the status of the minority languages, was submitted by an expert committee to the Swedish Ministry of Culture in March 2008. It was subsequently enacted by the Riksdag, and entered into effect on 1 July 2009.^[44]

Swedish is the sole official language of

autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland), where the vast majority of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. In Finland as a whole, Swedish is one of the two "national" languages, with the same official status as Finnish (spoken by the majority) at the state level and an official language in some municipalities

.

Swedish is one of the official languages of the European Union, and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Swedish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable for interpretation or translation costs.^[45][46]

Regulatory bodies

The

From the 13th to 20th century, there were Swedish-speaking communities in Estonia, particularly on the islands (e. g., Hiiumaa, Vormsi, Ruhnu; in Swedish, known as Dagö, Ormsö, Runö, respectively) along the coast of the Baltic, communities that today have all disappeared. The Swedish-speaking minority was represented in parliament, and entitled to use their native language in parliamentary debates. After the loss of Estonia to the Russian Empire in the early 18th century, around 1,000 Estonian Swedish speakers were forced to march to southern Ukraine, where they founded a village, Gammalsvenskby ("Old Swedish Village"). A few elderly people in the village still speak a Swedish dialect and observe the holidays of the Swedish calendar, although their dialect is most likely facing extinction.^[49]

From 1918 to 1940, when Estonia was independent, the small Swedish community was well treated. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, used Swedish as the administrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture saw an upswing. However, most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden before the end of World War II, that is before the invasion of Estonia by the Soviet army in 1944. Only a handful of speakers remain.^[50]

Swedish dialects have either 17 or 18 vowel

There are 18 consonant phonemes, two of which, /ɧ/ and /r/, vary considerably in pronunciation depending on the dialect and social status of the speaker. In many dialects, sequences of /r/ (pronounced alveolarly) with a dental consonant result in retroflex consonants; alveolarity of the pronunciation of /r/ is a precondition for this retroflexion. /r/ has a guttural or "French R" pronunciation in the South Swedish dialects; consequently, these dialects lack retroflex consonants.^[53]

Swedish is a

The standard word order is, as in most

Adjectives are inflected in two declensions – indefinite and definite – and they must match the noun they modify in gender and number. The indefinite neuter and plural forms of an adjective are usually created by adding a suffix (-t or -a) to the common form of the adjective, e. g., en grön stol (a green chair), ett grönt hus (a green house), and gröna stolar ("green chairs"). The definite form of an adjective is identical to the indefinite plural form, e. g., den gröna stolen ("the green chair"), det gröna huset ("the green house"), and de gröna stolarna ("the green chairs").^[58]

Swedish

Swedish also uses third-person possessive reflexive pronouns that refer to the subject in a clause, a trait that is restricted to North Germanic languages:

Anna gav Maria sin bok.; "Anna gave Maria her [Anna's] book." (reflexive)

Anna gav Maria hennes bok.; "Anna gave Maria her [Maria's] book." (not reflexive)

Swedish used to have a

In formal written language, it used to be considered correct to place the genitive -s after the head of the noun phrase (hästen), though this is today considered dated, and different grammatical constructions are often used.[60]

Verbs are conjugated according to tense. One group of verbs (the ones ending in -er in present tense) has a special imperative form (generally the verb stem), but with most verbs the imperative is identical to the infinitive form. Perfect and present participles as adjectival verbs are very common:^[58]

Perfect participle: en stekt fisk; "a fried fish" (steka = to fry)

Present participle: en stinkande fisk; "a stinking fish" (stinka = to stink)

In contrast to English and many other languages, Swedish does not use the perfect participle to form the present perfect and past perfect. Rather, the auxiliary verb har ("have"), hade ("had") is followed by a special form, called the supine, used solely for this purpose (although often identical to the neuter form of the perfect participle):^[58]

Perfect participle: målad, "painted" – supine målat, present perfect har målat; "have painted"

Perfect participle: stekt, "fried" – supine stekt, present perfect har stekt; "have fried"

Perfect participle: skriven, "written" – supine skrivit, present perfect har skrivit; "have written"

When building the compound passive voice using the verb att bli, the past participle is used:

den blir målad; "it's being painted"

den blev målad; "it was painted"

There exists also an inflected passive voice formed by adding -s, replacing the final r in the present tense:

den målas; "it's being painted"

den målades; "it was painted"

In a subordinate clause, the auxiliary har is optional and often omitted, particularly in written Swedish.

Jag ser att han (har) stekt fisken; "I see that he has fried the fish"

Subjunctive mood is occasionally used for some verbs, but its use is in sharp decline and few speakers perceive the handful of commonly used verbs (as for instance: vore, månne) as separate conjugations, most of them remaining only as set of idiomatic expressions.^[58]

Where other languages may use

The vocabulary of Swedish is mainly Germanic, either through common Germanic heritage or through loans from German, Middle Low German, and to some extent, English. Examples of Germanic words in Swedish are mus ("mouse"), kung ("king"), and gås ("goose"). A significant part of the religious and scientific vocabulary is of Latin or Greek origin, often borrowed from French and, lately, English. Some 1–200 words are also borrowed from Scandoromani or Romani, often as slang varieties; a commonly used word from Romani is tjej ("girl").^[64]

A large number of French words were imported into Sweden around the 18th century. These words have been transcribed to the Swedish spelling system and are therefore pronounced recognizably to a French-speaker. Most of them are distinguished by a "French accent", characterized by emphasis on the last syllable. For example, nivå (fr. niveau, "level"), fåtölj (fr. fauteuil, "armchair") and affär ("shop; affair"), etc. Cross-borrowing from other Germanic languages has also been common, at first from Middle Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic league and later from Standard German. Some compounds are translations of the elements (calques) of German original compounds into Swedish, like bomull from German Baumwolle ("cotton"; literally, tree-wool).^[65]

As with many Germanic languages, new words can be formed by compounding, e. g., nouns like nagellackborttagningsmedel ("nail polish remover") or verbs like smyglyssna ("to eavesdrop").

The Swedish alphabet is a 29-letter alphabet, using the 26-letter ISO basic Latin alphabet plus the three additional letters ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩ constructed in the 16th century by writing ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ on top of an ⟨a⟩, and an ⟨e⟩ on top of an ⟨o⟩. Though these combinations are historically modified versions of ⟨a⟩ and ⟨o⟩ according to the English range of usage for the term diacritic, these three characters are not considered to be diacritics within the Swedish application, but rather separate letters, and are independent letters following ⟨z⟩. Before the release of the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista in April 2006, ⟨w⟩ was treated as merely a variant of ⟨v⟩ used only in names (such as "Wallenberg") and foreign words ("bowling"), and so was both sorted and pronounced as a ⟨v⟩. Other diacritics (to use the broader English term usage referenced here) are unusual in Swedish; ⟨é⟩ is sometimes used to indicate that the stress falls on a terminal syllable containing ⟨e⟩, especially when the stress changes the meaning (ide vs. idé, "winter lair" vs. "idea") as well as in some names, like Kastrén; occasionally other acute accents and, less often, grave accents can be seen in names and some foreign words. The letter ⟨à⟩ is used to refer to unit cost (a loan from the French), equivalent to the at sign (⟨@⟩) in English.^[70]

The German ⟨ü⟩ is treated as a variant of ⟨y⟩ and sometimes retained in foreign names and words, e. g., müsli ("muesli/granola"). A proper diaeresis may very exceptionally be seen in elaborated style (for instance: "Aïda"). The German convention of writing ⟨ä⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ if the characters are unavailable is an unusual convention for speakers of modern Swedish. Despite the availability of all these characters in the Swedish national top-level Internet domain and other such domains, Swedish sites are frequently labelled using ⟨a⟩ and ⟨o⟩, based on visual similarity, though Swedish domains could be registered using the characters ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩ from 2003.^[71]

In Swedish orthography, the colon is used in a similar manner as in English, with some exceptions: the colon is used for some abbreviations, such as 3:e for tredje ("third") and S:t for Sankt ("Saint"), and for all types of endings that can be added to numbers, letters and abbreviations, such as a:et ("the a") and CD:n ("the CD"), or the genitive form USA:s ("USA's").^[72]

According to a traditional division of Swedish dialects, there are six main groups of dialects:^[73][74]

• Norrland dialects
• Finland Swedish
• Svealand dialects
• Gotland dialects
• Götaland dialects
• South Swedish dialects

The traditional definition of a Swedish

This type of classification, however, is based on a somewhat romanticized nationalist view of ethnicity and language. The idea that only rural variants of Swedish should be considered "genuine" is not generally accepted by modern scholars. No dialects, no matter how remote or obscure, remained unchanged or undisturbed by a minimum of influences from surrounding dialects or the standard language, especially not from the late 19th century onwards with the advent of mass media and advanced forms of transport. The differences are today more accurately described by a scale that runs from "standard language" to "rural dialect" where the speech even of the same person may vary from one extreme to the other depending on the situation. All Swedish dialects with the exception of the highly diverging forms of speech in Dalarna, Norrbotten and, to some extent, Gotland can be considered to be part of a common, mutually intelligible dialect continuum. This continuum may also include Norwegian and some Danish dialects.^[76]

The samples linked below have been taken from SweDia, a research project on Swedish modern dialects available for download (though with information in Swedish only), with many more samples from 100 different dialects with recordings from four different speakers: older female, older male, younger female and younger male. The dialect groups are those traditionally used by dialectologists.^[77]

1. Överkalix, Norrbotten; younger female
2. Burträsk, Västerbotten; older female
3. Aspås, Jämtland; younger female
4. Färila, Hälsingland; older male
5. Älvdalen, Dalarna; older female; traditionally considered a dialect, but now often recognized as Elfdalian, a separate language
6. Gräsö, Uppland; older male
7. Sorunda, Södermanland; younger male
8. Köla, Värmland younger female
9. Viby, Närke; older male
10. Sproge, Gotland; younger female
11. Närpes, Ostrobothnia; younger female
12. Dragsfjärd, Southwest Finland; older male
13. Borgå, Eastern Uusimaa; younger male
14. Orust, Bohuslän; older male
15. Floby, Västergötland; older female
16. Rimforsa, Östergötland; older female
17. Årstad-Heberg, Halland; younger male
18. Stenberga, Småland; younger female
19. Jämshög, Blekinge; older female
20. Skåne; older male

Standard Swedish is the language used by virtually all Swedes and most Swedish-speaking Finns. It is called rikssvenska or standardsvenska ("Standard Swedish") in Sweden.^[78] In Finland, högsvenska ("High Swedish") is used for the Finnish variant of standard Swedish and rikssvenska refers to Swedish as spoken in Sweden in general.^[79]

In a poll conducted in 2005 by the Swedish Retail Institute (Handelns Utredningsinstitut), the attitudes of Swedes to the use of certain dialects by salesmen revealed that 54% believed that rikssvenska was the variety they would prefer to hear when speaking with salesmen over the phone, even though dialects such as gotländska or skånska were provided as alternatives in the poll.^[80]

Finland was a part of Sweden from the 13th century until the loss of the Finnish territories to Russia in 1809. Swedish was the sole administrative language until 1902 as well as the dominant language of culture and education until Finnish independence in 1917. The percentage of Swedish speakers in Finland has steadily decreased since then. The Swedish-speaking population is mainly concentrated in the coastal areas of Ostrobothnia, Southwest Finland and Nyland where the percentage of Finland Swedes partly is high, with Swedish being spoken by more than 90% of the population in several municipalities, and on Åland, where Swedish is spoken by a vast majority of the population and is the only official language. Swedish is an official language also in the rest of Finland, though, with the same official status as Finnish.^[81] The country's public broadcaster, Yle, provides two Swedish-language radio stations, Yle Vega and Yle X3M, as well a TV channel, Yle Fem.^[82]

Rinkeby Swedish (after Rinkeby, a suburb of northern Stockholm with a large immigrant population) is a common name among linguists for varieties of Swedish spoken by young people of foreign heritage in certain suburbs and urban districts in the major cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. These varieties could alternatively be classified as sociolects, because the immigrant dialects share common traits independent of their geographical spread or the native country of the speakers. However, some studies have found distinctive features and led to terms such as Rosengård Swedish (after Rosengård in Malmö), a variant of Scanian.^[83] A survey made by the Swedish linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas showed that foreign learners had difficulties in guessing the origins of Rinkeby Swedish speakers in Stockholm. The greatest difficulty proved to be identifying the speech of a boy speaking Rinkeby Swedish whose parents were both Swedish; only 1.8% guessed his native language correctly.^[84]

New linguistic practices in multilingual urban contexts in fiction and hip-hop culture and rap lyrics have been introduced that go beyond traditional socio-linguistic domains.^[85] See also Källström (Chapter 12) and Knudsen (Chapter 13).

Excerpt from Barfotabarn (1933), by Nils Ferlin (1898–1961):^[86]

• Languages of Sweden
• Languages of Finland
• Swedish as a foreign language
• Swenglish

References

• Andersson, Erik (2002), "Swedish", in König, Ekkehard; van der Auwera, Johan (eds.), The Germanic Languages, Routledge language family descriptions, Routledge, pp. 271–312,
  ISBN 978-0-415-28079-2
• Bergman, Gösta (1984), Kortfattad svensk språkhistoria, Prisma Magnum (in Swedish) (4th ed.), Stockholm: Prisma,
  OCLC 13259382
• Bolander, Maria (2002), Funktionell svensk grammatik (in Swedish), Stockholm: Liber,
  OCLC 67138445
• OCLC 59441560
• Dahl, Östen (2000), Språkets enhet och mångfald (in Swedish), Lund:
  OCLC 61100963
• Dahl, Östen; Edlund, Lars-Erik, eds. (2010), Sveriges nationalatlas. Språken i Sverige (in Swedish), Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien,
  ISBN 978-91-87-76057-0
• Elert, Claes-Christian (2000), Allmän och svensk fonetik (in Swedish) (8th ed.), Stockholm: Norstedts Akademiska Förlag,
  ISBN 978-91-1-300939-1
• Engstrand, Olle (1999), "Swedish", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140–142,
  OCLC 40305532
• Engstrand, Olle (2004), Fonetikens grunder (in Swedish), Lund: Studentlitteratur,
  OCLC 66026795
• Ferlin, Nils (1976) [1933], Barfotabarn (in Swedish), Stockholm: Bonnier,
  ISBN 978-91-0-024187-2
• Garlén, Claes (1988), Svenskans fonologi (in Swedish), Lund: Studentlitteratur,
  OCLC 67420810
• Granberry, Julian (1991), Essential Swedish Grammar, New York:
  OCLC 23692877
• Haugen, Einar (2009). "Danish, Norwegian and Swedish". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages. New York: Routledge. pp. 125–144.
  ISBN 978-0-415-35339-7
  .
• Hultman, Tor G. (2003), Svenska Akademiens språklära (in Swedish), Stockholm: Norstedts,
  OCLC 55849724
• Josephson, Olle (2005), Ju: ifrågasatta självklarheter om svenskan, engelskan och alla andra språk i Sverige (in Swedish) (2nd ed.), Stockholm: Nordstedts ordbok,
  ISBN 978-91-7227-446-4
• Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt (1994), Ungdomsspråk (in Swedish), Uppsala: Hallgren & Fallgren,
  OCLC 60994967
• Leinonen, Therese (2011), "Aggregate analysis of vowel pronunciation in Swedish dialects", Oslo Studies in Language, 3 (2),
  doi:10.5617/osla.101, archived
  from the original on 27 June 2013, retrieved 20 March 2013
• Nationalencyklopedin, online edition Archived 1 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine (in Swedish)
• Parkvall, Mikael (2009), "Sveriges språk. Vem talar vad och var?" (PDF), RAPPLING 1. Rapporter Från Institutionen för Lingvistik Vid Stockholms Universitet. (in Swedish), archived (PDF) from the original on 11 October 2017, retrieved 30 January 2015
• Pettersson, Gertrud (1996), Svenska språket under sjuhundra år: en historia om svenskan och dess utforskande (in Swedish), Lund: Studentlitteratur,
  OCLC 36130929
• ISBN 978-91-47-08460-9
• ISBN 978-91-47-04974-5
• Svensson, Lars (1974), Nordisk paleografi: Handbok med transkriberade och kommenterade skriftprov (in Swedish), Lund: Studentlitteratur,
  OCLC 1303752
• Wessén, Elias (1998) [1973], Våra ord: deras uttal och ursprung : kortfattad etymologisk ordbok (in Swedish) (2nd ed.), Stockholm: Norstedts,
  ISBN 978-91-7227-053-4

Further reading

• Swedish Essentials of Grammar Viberg, Åke; et al. (1991) Chicago: Passport Books.
  ISBN 0-8442-8539-0
• Swedish: An Essential Grammar. Holmes, Philip; Hinchliffe, Ian; (2000). London; New York: Routledge.
  ISBN 0-415-16048-0
  .
• Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar Second Edition. Holmes, Philip; Hinchliffe, Ian; (2003). London; New York: Routledge.
  ISBN 0-415-27884-8
  .
• Svenska utifrån. Schematic grammar-Swedish structures and everyday phrases Byrman, Gunilla; Holm, Britta; (1998)
  ISBN 91-520-0519-4
  .

External links

Swedish edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Swedish

For a list of words relating to Swedish language, see the Swedish language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Swedish.

New International Encyclopedia article about "Swedish language

".

• Swadesh list of Swedish basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
• Swedish-English/Swedish-Arabic/Swedish-Russian/Swedish-Spanish Dictionaries from Språkrådet – Institute for Language and Folklore
• People's dictionary
• Online version of Svenska Akademiens ordbok (in Swedish)