Everything about Swedish Language totally explained
Swedish is a
North Germanic language, spoken by more than ten million people, predominantly in
Sweden and parts of
Finland, especially along the coast and on the
Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent
mutually intelligible with
Norwegian and to a lesser extent with
Danish (see especially "
Classification"). Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of
Old Norse, the common language of the
Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the
Viking Era.
Standard Swedish is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional
varieties descended from the older rural
dialects still exist, the spoken and
written language is uniform and standardized. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in
grammar and
vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These dialects are confined to
rural areas and are spoken primarily by small numbers of people with low
social mobility. Though not facing imminent
extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they're well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.
The standard word order is
Subject Verb Object, though this can often be changed to stress certain words or phrases. Swedish
morphology is similar to English, for example words have comparatively few
inflections; there are two
genders, no grammatical
cases (though older analyses posit two cases,
nominative and
genitive), and a distinction between
plural and
singular.
Adjectives are compared as in English, and are also inflected according to gender, number and definiteness. The
definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through
suffixes (endings), complemented with separate definite and indefinite
articles. The
prosody features both
stress and in most dialects
tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large
vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the
voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a highly variable consonant
phoneme.
Classification
Swedish is an
Indo-European language belonging to the
North Germanic branch of the
Germanic languages. In the established classification, it belongs to the East Scandinavian languages together with
Danish, separating it from the West Scandinavian languages, consisting of
Faroese,
Icelandic and
Norwegian. However, more recent analyses divide the North Germanic languages into two groups:
Insular Scandinavian, Faroese and Icelandic, and
Continental Scandinavian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, based on mutual intelligibility due to heavy influence of East Scandinavian (particular Danish) on Norwegian during the last millennium and divergence from both Faroese and Icelandic.
By many general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Continental Scandinavian languages could very well be considered dialects of a common Scandinavian language. However, because of several hundred years of sometimes quite intense rivalry between
Denmark and Sweden, including a long string of wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the
nationalist ideas that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the languages have separate
orthographies, dictionaries, grammars, and regulatory bodies. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus from a linguistic perspective more accurately described as a
dialect continuum of Scandinavian (North Germanic), and some of the dialects, such as those on the border between Norway and Sweden – especially parts of
Bohuslän,
Dalsland, western
Värmland, western
Dalarna,
Härjedalen and
Jämtland – take up a middle ground between the national standard languages.
History
In the 9th century,
Old Norse began to diverge into Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Sweden and Denmark). In the 12th century, the dialects of Denmark and Sweden began to diverge, becoming Old Danish and Old Swedish in the 13th century. All were heavily influenced by
Middle Low German during the
Middle Ages. Though stages of language development are never as sharply delimited as implied here, and shouldn't be taken too literally, the system of subdivisions used in this article is the most commonly used by Swedish linguists and is used for the sake of practicality.
Old Norse
In the 8th century, the common
Germanic language of
Scandinavia,
Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that didn't spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects,
Old West Norse (
Norway and
Iceland) and
Old East Norse (
Denmark and
Sweden).
The subdialect of Old East Norse spoken in Sweden is called
Runic Swedish and the one in Denmark
Runic Danish (there was also a subdialect spoken in
Gotland,
Old Gutnish) but until the 12th century, the dialect was the same in the two countries with the main exception of a Runic Danish monophthongization (see below). The dialects are called
runic because the main body of text appears in the
runic alphabet. Unlike
Proto-Norse, which was written with the
Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the
Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Because the number of runes was limited, some runes were used for a range of
phonemes, such as the rune for the
vowel u which was also used for the vowels
o,
ø and
y, and the rune for
i which was also used for
e.
From 1100 and onwards, the dialect of Denmark began to diverge from that of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark which created a series of minor dialectal boundaries,
isoglosses, ranging from
Zealand in the south to
Norrland,
Österbotten and southeastern
Finland in the north.
An early change that separated Runic Danish from the other dialects of Old East Norse was the change of the
diphthong æi to the
monophthong é, as in
stæinn to
sténn "stone". This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read
stain and the later
stin. There was also a change of
au as in
dauðr into a long open
ø as in
døðr "dead". This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from
tauþr into
tuþr. Moreover, the
øy diphthong changed into a long close
ø, as in the Old Norse word for "island". These innovations had affected most of the Runic Swedish speaking area as well in the end of the period, with the exception of the dialects spoken north and east of
Mälardalen where the diphthongs still exist in remote areas.
Old Swedish
Old Swedish is the term used for the medieval Swedish language, starting in 1225. Among the most important documents of the period written in
Latin script is the oldest of the provincial
law codes,
Västgötalagen, of which fragments dated to 1250 have been found. The main influences during this time came with the firm establishment of the
Roman Catholic Church and various
monastic orders, introducing many
Greek and
Latin loanwords. With the rise of
Hanseatic power in the late 13th and early 14th century, the influence of
Low Saxon became ever more present. The Hanseatic league provided Swedish commerce and administration with a large number of German-speaking immigrants. Many became quite influential members of Swedish medieval society, and brought terms from their mother tongue into the vocabulary. Besides a great number of loanwords for such areas as warfare, trade and administration; general grammatical suffixes and even conjunctions were imported. Almost all of the naval terms were also borrowed from
Dutch.
Early medieval Swedish was markedly different from the modern language in that it had a more complex
case structure and hadn't yet experienced a reduction of the
gender system.
Nouns,
adjectives,
pronouns and certain
numerals were inflected in four cases; besides the modern
nominative, there were also the
genitive,
dative and
accusative. The gender system resembled that of modern
German, having the genders masculine, feminine and neuter. Most of the masculine and feminine nouns were later grouped together into a common gender. The verb system was also more complex: it included subjunctive and imperative moods and verbs were conjugated according to person as well as number. By the 16th century, the case and gender systems of the colloquial spoken language and the profane literature had been largely reduced to the two cases and two genders of modern Swedish. The old inflections remained common in high prose style until the 18th century, and in some dialects into the early 20th century.
A transitional change of the Latin script in the Nordic countries was to spell the letter combination "ae" as æ – and sometimes as a' – though it varied between persons and regions. The combination "ao" was similarly rendered a
o, and "oe" became o
e. These three were later to evolve into the separate letters
ä,
å and
ö.
Modern Swedish
Modern Swedish (Swedish:
nysvenska) begins with the advent of the
printing press and the European
Reformation. After assuming power, the new monarch
Gustav Vasa ordered a Swedish translation of the
Bible. The
New Testament was published in 1526, followed by a full
Bible translation in 1541, usually referred to as the
Gustav Vasa Bible, a translation deemed so successful and influential that, with revisions incorporated in successive editions, it remained the most common Bible translation until 1917. The main translators were
Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers
Laurentius and
Olaus Petri.
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 wasn't overly conservative in its use of archaic forms. 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.
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 wasn't until the 17th century that spelling began to be discussed, around the time when the first grammars were written. The spelling debate raged on until the early 19th century, and it wasn't until the latter half of the 19th century that the orthography reached generally acknowledged standards.
Capitalization during this time wasn't 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 which 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).
Some important changes in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the
fricative [ʃ] and later into [ɧ]. There was also the gradual softening of [ɡ] and [k] into [j] and the
fricative [ɕ] before
front vowels. The
velar fricative [ɣ] was also transformed into the corresponding
plosive [ɡ].
Contemporary Swedish
The period that includes Swedish as it's spoken today is termed
nusvenska (lit. "Now-Swedish") in linguistic terminology and started in the last decades of the 19th century. The period saw a democratization of the language with a less formal written language that came closer to spoken language. The growth of a public schooling system also lead 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 new national language that was emerging, and among them were prolific authors like the poet
Gustaf Fröding, Nobel laureate
Selma Lagerlöf, and radical writer and playwright
August Strindberg.
It was during the 20th century that a common, standardized national language became available to all Swedes. The orthography was finally stabilized, and was almost completely uniform, with the exception of some minor deviations, by the time of the spelling reform of 1906. 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 spoken today. The plural verb forms remained, in ever decreasing use, in formal (and particularly written) language until the 1950s, when they were finally officially abolished even from all official recommendations.
A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the 1960s, with the so-called
du-reformen, "the you-reform". Previously, the proper way to address people of the same or higher
social status had been by
title and
surname. The use of
herr ("Mr" or "Sir"),
fru ("Mrs" or "Ma'am") or
fröken ("Miss") was only considered acceptable in initial conversation with strangers of unknown occupation, academic title or military rank. The fact that the listener should preferably be referred to in the third person tended to further complicate spoken communication between members of society. In the early 20th century, an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with
ni (the standard
second person plural pronoun), analogous to the
French Vous.
Ni (plural second person pronoun) wound up being used as a slightly less familiar form of
du (singular second person pronoun) used to address people of lower social status. With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, these previously significant distinctions of
class became less important and
du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts. Though the reform wasn't an act of any centralized political decrees, but rather a sweeping change in social attitudes, it was completed in just a few years from the late 1960s to early 1970s. However, among younger generations the form
ni remains in frequent use as a respectful form of address towards older people, and is occasionally used by sales clerks towards customers.
Former language minorities
From the 13th to 20th century, there were
Swedish-speaking communities in Estonia, particularly on the islands (for example,
Hiiumaa,
Vormsi,
Ruhnu in Swedish:
Dagö,
Ormsö,
Runö, respectively) along the coast of the
Baltic, which today have all but 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 Swedish and observe the holidays of the Swedish calendar, although the dialect is most likely facing extinction.
From 1918–1930, 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 before the invasion of Estonia by the Soviet army in 1944. Only a handful of older speakers remain today.
Geographic distribution
Swedish is the national language of
Sweden and the first language for the overwhelming majority of roughly eight million Swedish-born inhabitants and acquired by one million immigrants. In the latter half of the 2000s, around 5.5% of the population of
Finland are Swedish speakers, though the percentage has declined steadily over the last 400 years. The
Finland Swedish minority is concentrated in the coastal areas and
archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In some of these areas, Swedish is the dominating language. In 19
municipalities, 16 of which are located in
Åland, Swedish is the only official language. In several more, it's the majority language and it's an official minority language in even more. There is considerable migration between the
Nordic countries, but owing to the similarity between the languages and cultures (with the exception of
Finnish), expatriates generally
assimilate quickly and don't stand out as a group. According to the 2000
US census some 67,000 people over age five were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on actual language proficiency. Outside Sweden, there are about 40,000 active learners enrolled in Swedish language courses.
Official status
Swedish in Sweden is considered the "main language" and is used as the primary language used in local and state government, but not legally recognised as an official language. 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.
Swedish is the only official language of
Åland (an
autonomous province under the
sovereignty of
Finland) where the vast majority of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. In Finland, Swedish is the second national language alongside
Finnish on the state level, and an official language in some rural and coastal municipalities. Three municipalities (
Korsnäs,
Närpes,
Larsmo) in mainland Finland have Swedish as their sole official language. In the Estonian village
Noarootsi, Swedish is the official language together with Estonian. Swedish is also 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 to any
interpretation or
translation costs.
Regulatory bodies
The
Swedish Language Council (
Språkrådet) is the official regulator of Swedish, but doesn't attempt to enforce control of the language, as for instance the
Académie française does. However, many organizations and agencies require the use of the council's publication
Svenska skrivregler in official contexts, with it otherwise being regarded as a de facto orthographic standard. Among the many organizations that make up the Swedish Language Council, the
Swedish Academy (established 1786) is arguably the most influential. Its primary instruments are the
dictionaries Svenska Akademiens Ordlista (
SAOL, currently in its 13th edition) and
Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, in addition to various books on grammar,
spelling and
manuals of style. Even though the dictionaries are sometimes used as official decrees of the language, their main purpose is to describe current usage.
In Finland a special branch of the
Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has official status as the regulatory body for Swedish in Finland. Among its highest priorities is to maintain intelligibility with the language spoken in Sweden. It has published
Finlandssvensk ordbok, a dictionary about the differences between Swedish in Finland and in Sweden from their point of view.
Dialects
The traditional definition of a Swedish
dialect has been a local variant that hasn't been heavily influenced by the standard language and that can trace a separate development all the way back to
Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects, such as those of
Orsa in
Dalarna or
Närpes in
Österbotten, have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic
case inflections. These dialects can be near-incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they're limited to individual
parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as
sockenmål (lit. "parish speech"). They are generally separated into six major groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary. One or several examples from each group are given here. Though each example is intended to be also representative of the nearby dialects, the actual number of dialects is several hundred if each individual community is considered separately.
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" isn't 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 1800s and 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.
A note of importance should also be made to that of the dialects and accents from
Scania in southern Sweden. Almost every town and or city in this region have their own way of speaking and pronoucning words. People might use words that are not generally understandable by people from a town just 20km away. While this is quite uncommon nowdays, almost all everyone who has grown up in this area can tell just from the accent which town an other person grew up in. For example, people from
Lund or
Malmö might identify a person from
Staffanstorp or
Veberöd just by the way they pronounce different words, or create sentences, although these towns are located just 10km away from each other. This is quite extraordinary and people often make jokes among each other about how the way they pronounce words, or say certain things. However, swedes who in grow up in other parts of
Sweden, often can not distinguish between these different accents (or dialects) although that'll always be able to determine that the person is from
Scania. People from other parts of
Sweden often have trouble understanding dialects from
Scania, especially the older generation, but to a lesser degree the younger generation which nowadays to a larger extent speak
Standard Swedish with a bit of an accent.
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.
» 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
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,
Åboland;
older male » 13.
Porvoo,
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.
Bara,
Scania;
older male
Standard Swedish
Standard Swedish, which is derived from the dialects spoken in the capital region around
Stockholm, is the language used by virtually all Swedes and most
Swedish-speaking Finns. The Swedish term most often used for the standard language is
rikssvenska ("National Swedish") and to a much lesser extent
högsvenska ("High Swedish"); the latter term is limited to Swedish spoken in Finland and is seldom used in Sweden. There are many regional varieties of the standard language that are specific to geographical areas of varying size (regions,
historical provinces, cities, towns, etc.). While these varieties are often influenced by the genuine dialects, their grammatical and phonological structure adheres closely to those of the Central Swedish dialects. In
mass media it's no longer uncommon for journalists to speak with a distinct regional accent, but the most common pronunciation and the one perceived as the most formal is still Central Standard Swedish.
Though this terminology and its definitions are long since established among linguists, most Swedes are unaware of the distinction and its historical background, and often refer to the regional varieties as "dialects". In a poll that was 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'd prefer to hear when speaking with salesmen over the phone, even though several dialects such as
gotländska or
skånska were provided as alternatives in the poll.
Finland Swedish
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.
Immigrant variants
Rinkeby Swedish (after
Rinkeby, a suburb of northern Stockholm with a large population of immigrants) is a common name among linguists for varieties of Swedish spoken by young people of foreign heritage in the suburbs 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. Some studies have however found distinctive features and lead to terms such as Rosengård Swedish (after
Rosengård in Malmö). 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 whose parents were both Swedish; only 1.8% guessed his native language correctly.
Sounds
Swedish has 9 vowels that make up 17
phonemes in most varieties and dialects (short /e/ and /ɛ/ coincide). There are 18
consonant phonemes out of which the
voiceless palatal-velar fricative, /ɧ/, and /r/ show considerable variation depending on social and dialectal context. A distinct feature of Swedish is its varied
prosody (intonation, stress, tone, etc.) which is often one of the most noticeable differences between the various dialects. Native speakers who adapt their speech when moving to areas with other regional varieties or dialects will often adhere to the sounds of the new variety, but nevertheless maintain the prosody of their native dialect. Often the prosody is the first to be changed, perhaps because it's the element most disruptive to understanding, or simply the easiest to adapt.
Vocabulary
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, as of lately, English.
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 quite 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, "arm chair") 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).
As with many Germanic languages, new words can be formed by compounding, for example nouns like
nagellackborttagningsmedel ("nail polish remover") or verbs like
smygfilma ("to film in secret"). Similar to
German or
Dutch, very long, and quite impractical, examples like
produktionsstyrningssystemsprogramvaruuppdatering ("production controller system software update") are possible but seldom this ungainly, at least in spoken Swedish and outside of technical writing. Compound nouns take their
gender from the
head, which in Swedish is always the last morpheme. New words can also be coined by
derivation from other established words, such as the
verbification of
nouns by the adding of the
suffix -a, as in
öl ("beer") and
öla ("to drink beer").
Writing system
The
Swedish alphabet is a 29-letter
alphabet, using the basic 26-letter
Latin alphabet plus the three additional letters
Å /
å,
Ä /
ä, and
Ö /
ö constructed in modern time from the habit of writing the later letter of ao, ae and oe on top of the former. Though these combinations are historically modified versions of
A and
O according to the English range of usage for the word
diacritic, these 3 characters are not considered as diacritics within the narrower Swedish application since they're sorted in that order following
z as independent letters. 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 word 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); 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, equivalent to the
at sign (@) in English.
German
ü is treated a variant of
y and sometimes retained in foreign names. A
diaeresis may very exceptionally be seen in elaborated style (for instance: "Aïda"). The letters
ä and
ö can be the result of a phonetic transformation called
omljud, equivalent to German
umlaut, where
a or
å is softened to
ä during conjugation (
natt –
nätter,
tång –
tänger), and
o is softened to
ö (
bok –
böcker). This is far from the only use of these characters, however. Additionally, for adjectives subject to
omljud,
u gets softened to
y (
ung –
yngre); this is never written
ü. 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.
In Swedish
orthography, the
colon is used in a similar manner as in English with some exceptions. The colon is used with numbers, such as
10:50 kronor for
tio kronor och femtio öre (10.50
SEK); for abbreviations such as
1:a for
första (first) and
S:t for
Sankt (Saint); and all types of suffixes that can be added to numbers, letters and abbreviations, such as
53:an for
femtiotrean (the 53),
första a:t for "the first a" and
tv:n for
televisionen (the television).
Grammar
Swedish
nouns and
adjectives are declined in
genders as well as
number. Nouns belong to one of two genders—common for the
en form or neuter for the
ett form—which also determine the declension of
adjectives. For example, the word
fisk ("fish") is a common noun (
en fisk) and can have the following forms:
|
Singular |
Plural |
| Indefinite form | fisk |
fiskar
|
| Definite form | fisken |
fiskarna
|
The definite singular form of a noun is created by adding a suffix (
-en,
-n,
-et or
-t), depending on its gender and if the noun ends in a vowel or not. The definite articles
den,
det, and
de are used for variations to the definitiveness of a noun. They can double as
demonstrative pronouns or
demonstrative determiners when used with
adverbs such as
här ("here") or
där ("there") to form
den/det här (can also be "denna/detta") ("this"),
de här (can also be "dessa") ("these"),
den/det där ("that"), and
de där ("those"). For example,
den där fisken means "that fish" and refers to a specific fish;
den fisken is less definite and means "that fish" in a more abstract sense, such as that set of fish; while
fisken means "the fish". In certain cases, the definite form indicates possession, for example,
jag måste tvätta håret ("I must wash my hair").
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 created by adding a suffix (
-t or
-a) to the common form of the adjective, for example,
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, for example,
den gröna stolen (the green chair),
det gröna huset (the green house), and
de gröna stolarna (the green chairs). The irregular adjective
liten (little/small) is declined differently:
| |
| Common singular |
Neuter singular |
Plural |
| Indefinite form | liten |
litet |
små
|
| Definite form | lilla |
lilla |
små
|
Swedish
pronouns are basically the same as those of English but distinguish two genders and have an additional
object form, derived from the old
dative form, as well as a distinct
genitive case.
Hon ("she") has the following forms in nominative, genitive, and object form:
» hon -
hennes -
henne
Possession is expressed with the
enclitic -s, which attaches to the end of a (possibly complex) noun phrase. In formal writing, however, usage guides generally don't recommend the enclitic to attach to anything but the head noun of the phrase; but this is nevertheless common in speech.
» mannen; "the man"
mannens hatt; "the man's hat"
» mannen i grå kavaj; "the man in a grey suit"
mannen i grå kavajs hatt; "the hat of the man in a grey suit", "the man in a grey suit's hat"
Verbs are
conjugated according to
tense. One group of verbs (the ones ending in
-er in present tense) have a special
imperative form, though with most verbs this is identical to the
infinitive form.
Perfect and
present participles as adjectival verbs are very common:
» Perfect participle:
en stekt fisk; "a fried fish"
Present participle:
en stinkande fisk; "a stinking fish"
In contrast to English and many other languages, Swedish doesn't use the perfect participle to form the present perfect and past perfect tenses. Rather, the
auxiliary verb "har",
"hade" ("have"/"has", "had") is followed by a special form, called
supine, used solely for this purpose (although sometimes identical to the perfect participle):
» Perfect participle:
målad; "painted" - supine
målat, present perfect
har målat; "have painted"
Perfect participle:
stekt, "fried" - supine
stekt, present perfect
har stekt; "have fried"
The Past participle is used to build the compound passive voice, instead.
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's 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.
The lack of cases in Swedish is compensated by a wide variety of
prepositions, similar to those found in
English. As in modern
German, prepositions used to determine case in Swedish, but this feature remains only in idiomatic expressions like
till sjöss (genitive) or
man ur huse (dative singular), though some of these are still quite common.
Swedish being a Germanic language, the
syntax shows similarities to both English and German. Like English, Swedish has a
Subject Verb Object basic word order, but like German, it utilizes
verb-second word order in main clauses, for instance after
adverbs, adverbial phrases and
dependent clauses.
Prepositional phrases are placed in a
Place Manner Time order, as in English (but not German). Adjectives precede the noun they modify.
Sample
Excerpt from Barfotabarn (1933), by Nils Ferlin (1898–1961):
| Original |
Translation |
| Du har tappat ditt ord och din papperslapp, |
You've lost your word and your written note, |
| du barfotabarn i livet. |
you barefooted child of life. |
| Så sitter du åter på handlar'ns trapp |
Now you're sitting again on the trader's porch |
| och gråter så övergivet. |
and crying, abandoned. |
| Vad var det för ord – var det långt eller kort, |
What was it, that word – was it long, was it short, |
| var det väl eller illa skrivet? |
was it well or poorly written? |
| Tänk efter nu – förr'n vi föser dig bort, |
Think twice now – lest we send you away, |
| du barfotabarn i livet. |
you barefooted child of life. |
Further Information
Get more info on 'Swedish Language'.
|
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