Number of native speakers: 9 million
Official language: Finland, Sweden, European Union (EU), Nordic Council
Language of diaspora: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, United Kingdom, United States
Alphabet: Latin, 29 letters
Linguistic typology: moderatelyĀ inflectional, compounding, SVO
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic
Number of dialects: 6 main groups
Longest word: ursprungsbefolkningsorganisationerna (indigenous peoples organizations) - 36 letters
1-7th century - Proto-Nordic
8-12th century - Old Norse
1200 - the dialects in Denmark begin to diverge from those of Sweden
13-15th century - Old Swedish
1225 - VƤstgƶta Law compiled from the first time
1495 - first timeĀ Ƥ, Ć„ and ƶ were used in print
16-20th century - Modern Swedish
1541 - the Bible was translated into Swedish
>20th century - Contemporary Swedish
There are no sharp dialect boundaries between the Scandinavian languages, and the differences between Danish, Swedish and BokmĆ„l-Norwegian are so small that with a bit of practice and patience, the languages are mutually understandable, especially in writing. In this perspective, Swedish acts as a bridge between Finland and the other Scandinavian languages, because of the languageās official minority status in Finland. However, in spite of the historical-cultural ties, most Finnish speakers today prefer English to Swedish, even in communication with their Nordic neighbours.
Writing system and pronunciation
These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a Ƅ Ƥ b c d e f g h i j k l m n o ƶ p q r s t u v w x y z.
Since the extensive spelling reform, the Swedish writing system is quite phonetic, making it easier for children to learn to read and harder for foreigners to recognize international words.
Swedish has two grammatical genders, common and neuter gender. Like English, the language has lost all case marking other than a genitive -s, which some nowadays regard as a possessive marker rather than a case marker.
Verbs mark neither person nor number. However, inflectional forms remain for gender (adjectives) and number (nouns and adjectives), and there is an enclitic definite article complicating things for nouns.
Swedish marks only 2 tenses inflectionally: present and past. A special supine form is used with the auxiliary ha to create a perfective past tense implying relevance at the time of speaking. The future is expressed with the auxiliary ska plus the infinitive.
Within syntactic groups, light material (articles, determiners, adjectives, adverbs) is placed left, while heavy material (subclauses and prepositional phrases) is placed to the right.
Swedish can create words by compounding, so in theory the lexicon is of unlimited size. It has exported few words, mostly edibles, but also scientific terms.
Apart from linguistic differences, Swedish dialect borders also mark the history of Sweden as an empire and a coalescing nation-state.
There are six main groups of dialects:Ā Norrlandic dialects,Ā Finland Swedish,Ā Svealand dialects,Ā Gutnish dialects,Ā Gƶtaland dialects, andĀ South Swedish dialects.
Norrlandic dialects can be further subdivided into Kalix dialects (kalixmĆ„l), LuleĆ„ dialects (lulemĆ„l), PiteĆ„ dialects (pitemĆ„l), Settler dialects (nybyggarmĆ„l), North Westrobothnian (nordvƤsterbottniska mĆ„l), South Westrobothnian (sydvƤsterbottniska mĆ„l), Ć
ngermanland dialects (ƄngermanlƤndska mƄl), Medelpad dialects (medelpadsmƄl), Jamtlandic dialects (jƤmtmƄl), Hogdal dialects (hogdalsmƄl), and HƤlsing dialects (hƤlsingemƄl).
Standard Swedish is based on the Svealand dialects.
