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SWEDISH LANGUAGE PRODUCTS
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Swedish Phrasebase Forum Discussion
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Swedish Phrasebase Forum Topics
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Extinct: no
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Family: Indo European
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Branch: Germanic - Old Norse
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Continent: Europe
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Country: Sweden
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Region: The Göta dialect group is southern, including parts of Småland, south Swedish provinces, Värmland, Västergvtland; the Svea dialect group is northern, including Hälsingland, parts of Östergotland and Uppland, and the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland. Southern Swedish is in Skaåne, Blekinge, southern Småland, southern Halland. Northern Swedish is from northern Hälsingland and Jämtland and northwards. Eastern Swedish is in Finland, Estonia, and Gammalsvenskby, Ukraine. Gutnic is in southeastern Isle of Gotland and Faaroe. Nearly extinct in Estonia. Also spoken in Canada, Estonia, Finland, Norway, UAE, USA.
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Countries Where Spoken: 7,825,000 in Sweden, 93% of the population (1986), including 5,000 speakers of Gutniska (1998 Sven Hakansson). Gutniska has 10,000 second language speakers. Population total all countries 9,000,000 (1999 WA).
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Countries Where Official: Sweden
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Native Speakers: 7,825,000
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Speakers Total: 9,000,000
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Phrasebase members who speak this language at a native level: 422
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Phrasebase members who speak this language at a conversational level: 422
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Phrasebase members primary language they are trying to learn: 1,097
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Phrasebase members secondary language they are trying to learn: 3,435
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Three Letter Code: SWD
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Alternative Names: SVENSKA, RUOTSI
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Dialects: Southern Pa'o, Northern Pa'o, Bilichi, Dermuha, Pa'an (moulmein, Inland Pwo Eastern Karen), Kawkareik (eastern Border Pwo Karen), Tavoy (southern Pwo Karen), Mae Ping, Omkoi (hod), Mae Sarieng, Bassein, Tuan Tet, Maubin, Pa'an (moulmein, Inland Pwo Easter, Jadeji., Na (black Lahu, Musser Dam, Northern Lahu, Loheirn), Nyi (red Lahu, Southern Lahu, Musseh Daeng, Luhishi, Luhushi), Shehleh, , Ilammu, Tamsangmu, Rengjongmu., Hua Lisu (flowery Lisu), Pai Lisu (white Lisu), Lu Shi Lisu., Fannai, Mizo, Ngente, Pang (paang), Tlau., Meitei, Loi, Pangal., Gtsang (tsang), Dbus, Mngahris (ngari)., Dolkhali (dolakha), Sindhupalchok Pahri (pahri, Pahari), Totali, Citlang, Kathmandu-pathan-kirtipur, Baktapur, Baglung., Dayao (north Central Yi), Nanhua (south Central Yi), Dian-qian (yunnan-guizhou, Pan County), Dian Dongbei (northeastern Yunnan), Northern Sichuan Yi, Southern Sichuan Yi, Sani, Axi (mile, Ahi), Awu, Axhebo, Dongshan, Xishan, Shijian, Yuanjin, Exin., One Dialect, But Some Variation Around Solenyama. Lexical Similarity 70% With Amba; 56% To 59% With Bila, Kaiku, Bhele, And Komo; 47% With Bwa, Lika, And Bali; 22% With Nyali And Budu., Modern Standard Arabic (modern Literary Arabic), Classical Arabic (koranic Arabic, Quranic Arabic). Preserves The Ancient Grammar., Central Uyghur, Hotan (hetian), Lop (luobu)., None, So Trong, So Slouy, So Phong, Chali (chari, Shari), Kaleu, Melan So, Emvane So, None, Oraon, Kisan, , None, Munster, Connacht, Donegal, Leinster, Ulster., None, East Sutherlandshire., Northern Welsh, Southern Welsh, Patagonian Welsh., Crimean Gothic, Ostrogoth, Visigoth., , None, None, Northern Swedish (norrland), Eastern Swedish (finland Swedish, Estonian Swedish), Svea, Gutniska (gutamal, Gotlandic, Gutnic).,
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Summary: 'Proper' Swedish is considered to be spoken in Svealand. Dialect investigation is needed of diverse varieties Gutniska, Överkalixmål, Nörpes, Pitemål, provinces around the Bothnic Sea (Västerbotten and Norbotten in Sweden, and Oesterbotten in Finland), and the island of Gotland. Gutniska is descended from Forngutniska (Old Gotlandic), which is ranked as a separate language. A mixed variety, with Turkish influence, Rinkebysvenska, is used among immigrants. There are, or were, Swedish varieties spoken in Estonia and Ukraine which are now more or less extinct. See separate listing for Skåne, often called Southern Swedish. Investigation needed: intelligibility with Gutniska, Överkalixmål, Pitemål, Nörpes, Skåne. National language. Bible 1541-1999.
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. All three diverged from Old Norse about a millennium ago. Swedish, Danish and the Danish language Norwegian (Bokm嬩 are all considered East Scandinavian languages; Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. But even if a Swede finds it difficult to understand a Dane it is not necessarily the other way around.[1]
The primary task of the Swedish Academy is to further the use of the Swedish language. The primary instrument for this is its dictionaries. Even though the dictionaries are sometimes perceived as an official definition of the language, their task is more of a descriptive nature.
Where Spoken
Swedish is the national (but not official) language of Sweden, mother tongue for the Sweden-born inhabitants (7,881,000) and acquired by nearly all immigrants (1,028,000) (figures according to official statistics for 2001).
Swedish is the official language of the small autonomous territory of the Ŭand Islands, under sovereignty of Finland, protected by international treaties and Finnish laws. In contrast to Finland the Ŭand Islands are monolingual - Finnish has no official status.
In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. Swedish had been the language of government in Finland for some 700 years, when in 1892 Finnish was given equal status with Swedish, following Russian determination to isolate the Grand Duchy from Sweden. (This, ironically, means that Finland, with Ŭand, is the only country where Swedish holds official status.) However, Swedish is mother tongue for only a minority of the Finns: about 265,000 in Finland and 25,000 on Ŭand, or 5.6% of the total population according to official statistics for 2002. Since an education reform in the 1970s Swedish has been a compulsory subject in Finnish schools, and mandatory in the final examinations - in Finnish derogatorily referred to as Pakkoruotsi. The Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and southwestern Finland, where they form a local majority in some communities.
There were formerly Swedish-speaking communities in the Baltic states, especially on the islands (Dag?>, ֳel and Orms?long the coast. After the loss of the Baltic territories to Russia in the early 18th century, many of them were forced to make the long march to 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 gammalsvenska (Old Swedish). (Today there exist a few elderly descendants in the village of Gammalsvenskby (Old Swedish Village) in Ukraine, who still speak Swedish and observe holidays according to the Swedish calendar.)
In Estonia, the small remaining Swedish community was very well treated between the first and second world wars. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, had Swedish as the administrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture experienced an upswing. Most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II.
There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as the United States. (See Languages in the United States.) There are also descendants in Brazil [ Portuguese portal ] and Argentina resulting from Swedish immigration that have maintained a distinction by language and names, also against groups of European immigrants in the region.
There is considerable migration (labour and other) between the Scandinavian countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and culture expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. (Note: Finland is, strictly speaking, not a Scandinavian country. It does, however, belong to the group of Nordic countries together with Iceland and the Scandinavian countries.)
Alphabet
The Swedish alphabet is a twenty-eight letter alphabet: the standard twenty-six-letter Latin alphabet with the exception of 'W', plus the three additional letters acute accent and, less often, grave accent can be seen in names and some foreign words. German y and sometimes retained in foreign names. Diaeresis is not considered necessary, although it might exceptionally be seen in elaborated style (for instance: "A嵐", "naﶥ").
The runic alphabet (the futhark) was used before the Latin alphabet for Old Norse and early Swedish (Old Swedish), but this ancient script was gradually overtaken by the Latin alphabet during medieval times, although use of various futharks continued in certain rural districts at least until the 17th century.
Basic Facts
Most Swedish words are of Germanic origin (the oldest category, representing the most common, everyday words) or are borrowed from Latin, French, German, or English. New words are often formed by compounding. New verbs can also be made by adding an -a to an existing noun, as in disk (dishes) and diska (do the dishes). Some compounds are translations of the elements (calques) of German original compounds into Swedish. Examples of Germanic words in Swedish are mus (mouse), kung (king), and g峼/em> (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. Old Swedish formerly had masculine and feminine genders in place of common; some old phrases and ceremonial uses preserve these archaic forms. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memorised. 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., 䰰le, apple, 䰰len, 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, m䮼/em>, 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. Verbs generally do not inflect for person or number. Other tenses are formed by combinations of auxiliary verbs with infinitives or a special form of the participle called the supine. As in all the Germanic languages, there are strong and weak verbs. For most Swedish strong verbs that have a verb cognate in English or German, that cognate is also strong.
Dialects
The written language is uniform, with very few exceptions: Adjectives are typically conjugated according to sex in Southern Sweden, not at all in high-prestige varieties in the rest of Sweden, but sometimes according to numerus in Finland.
Vocabulary (or rather lexicon according to linguist jargon) is rather uniform in Sweden, at least in the style of prose seen in newspapers, and in higher styles. Finland-Swedish has a set of separate terms, being close cognates of their Finnish counterparts, chiefly terms of law and government.
A major problem for students of Swedish is what can be perceived as a lack of standardisation of pronunciation. The pronunciation of vowels, and of some consonant sounds (particularly sibilants), demonstrates marked differences in spoken high-prestige varieties. In addition the melodic accent of South-Sweden is strikingly different from that of the capital-region (including Ŭand), which in turn differs clearly from provincial Dalecarlia and Gotland. In Finland-Swedish melodic accent isn't used at all, as is also typical for parts of northernmost Sweden, where Finnish dominated less than a century ago.
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Note:
Phrasebase uses a variety of sources when compiling the facts and information presented above. This information is continually updated throughout the year.
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