Encyclopedia
Swedish is a
North Germanic language spoken predominantly in
Sweden and in parts of
Finland, especially along the coast and on the
Åland islands, by more than nine million people. It is mutually intelligible with two of the other Scandinavian languages,
Danish and
Norwegian. 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, with a 99%
literacy rate among adults. Some of the genuine 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 usually spoken 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 are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.
Swedish is distinguished by its prosody, which differs considerably between varieties. It includes both lexical stress and tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large
vowel inventory, with nine separate vowels that are distinguished by quantity and to some degree quality, making up a total of 17 vowel phonemes. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a sound found in many dialects, including the more prestigious forms of the standard language. Though similar to other sounds with distinct labial qualities, it has so far not been found in any other language.
Classification and related languages
Swedish is an
Indo-European language belonging to the
North Germanic branch of the
Germanic languages. Together with
Danish it belongs to the East Scandinavian group, separating it from the West Scandinavian group consisting of
Faroese, Icelandic and
Norwegian. More recent analyses divide the North Germanic languages into an
Insular Scandinavian and
Mainland Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on mutual intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced in particular by Danish during the last millennium and has diverged from Faroese and Icelandic.
By generally accepted criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Mainland Scandinavian languages could very well be considered to be dialects of a common Scandinavian language. Due to 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, and some of these on the border between Norway and Sweden, such as those of western
Värmland, take up a middle ground between the national standard languages.
History
In the 9th century,
Old Norse began to diverge into Old West Norse and Old East Norse . 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 medieval period. Though stages of language development are never as sharply delimited as implied here, and should not 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 did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects,
Old West Norse and
Old East Norse .
The subdialect of Old East Norse spoken in Sweden is called
Runic Swedish and the one in Denmark
Runic Danish but until the 12th century, the dialect was the same in the two countries with the main exception of a Runic Danish monophthongization . The dialects are called
runic due to the fact that 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. Due to the limited number of runes, 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
dauđr into a long open
ø as in
døđr "dead". This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from
tauūr into
tuūr. 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
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 loan words for areas like warfare, trade and administration, general grammatical suffixes and even conjunctions where 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 had not yet experienced a reduction of the
gender system. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases; besides the modern nominative and genitive there were also 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 individuals and regions. The combination "aa" similarly became a
a, and "oe" became o
e. These three were later to evolve into the separate letters
ä,
å and ö.
New Swedish
New Swedish 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 was not 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 due to 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 was not 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 was not until the latter half of the 19th century that the orthography reached generally acknowledged standards.
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, due to the Gothic or
blackletter font which was used to print the Bible. This font was in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced with a Latin font .
Some important changes in sound during the New Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the fricative and later into . There was also the gradual softening of /g/ and /k/ into /j/ and the fricative before front vowels. The velar fricative was also transformed into the corresponding
plosive /g/.
Modern Swedish
The period that includes Swedish as it is spoken today is termed
nusvenska in linguistic terminology. 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 authors, scholars, politicians and other public figures had a great influence on the new national language that was emerging, the most influential of these being 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 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 ,
fru or
fröken 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 — analogous to the
French Vous.
Ni wound up being used as a slightly less arrogant form of
du used to address people of lower social status. With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 60s, these previously significant distinctions of
class became less important and
du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts. Though the reform was not 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 60s to early 70s.
Former language minorities
Formerly, there were Swedish-speaking communities in
Estonia, particularly on the islands along the coast of the
Baltic. The Swedish-speaking minority was represented in
parliament, and entitled to use their native language in parliamentary debates. After the loss of the Baltic territories to
Russia in the early 18th century, around 1,000 Swedish speakers were forced to march to
Ukraine, where they founded a village,
Gammalsvenskby , north of the
Crimea. 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.
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 saw an upswing. However, most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II when Estonia was incorporated into the
Soviet Union. 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 mainland
Finland Swedish is spoken as a first language by about 5.5% or about 300,000 people. The
Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated to the coastal areas and
archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In these areas, Swedish is often the dominating language. In three cases, in the municipalities of Korsnäs , Närpes and Larsmo, Swedish is the only official language. In several more, it is the majority language and it is an official minority language in even more. There is considerable migration between the
Nordic countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and cultures , expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. According to the 2004
US census some 67,000 people over age five were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on actual language proficiency. There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as Swedish descendants in
Argentina and
Brazil that have maintained a distinction by language and names.
Official status
Swedish in Sweden is considered the "main language" and its use is officially recommended for local and state government, but not actually enforced by law. A recently proposed bill that would make Swedish an official language had a decided majority in the Swedish parliament, but failed to pass by the narrowest possible margin due to a pairing-off failure.
It is currently expected that the bill will be successfully passed if it is put up for a second vote. Swedish is the sole official language of
Åland, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of
Finland, where 95% of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. In Finland, Swedish is the second national language alongside
Finnish. Swedish is also one of the official languages of the
European Union.
Regulatory bodies
There are no official regulatory institutions for the Swedish language. The Swedish Language Council has semi-official status as such and is funded by the Swedish government, but does not attempt to enforce control of the language, as for instance the
Académie franįaise 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 is arguably the most influential. Its primary instruments are the
dictionaries Svenska Akademiens Ordlista 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 Domestic 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 linguistic definition of a Swedish dialect is a local variant that has not 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 are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as
sockenmål . 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. Common Swedish terms for different
mål, " speech", are used here.
||}
Norrland is a name for the northernmost part of Sweden [i], historically one of the four lands of Sweden [i]...
, the northern half of Sweden
- 1. Överkalix, Norrbotten;
- 2. Burträsk, Västerbotten;
- 3. Aspås, Jämtland;
- 4. Färila, Hälsingland;
- 5. Älvdalen, Dalarna;
- 6. Gräsö, Uppland;
- 7. Sorunda, Södermanland;
- 8. Köla, Värmland
- 9. Viby, Närke;
- 10. Sproge, Gotland;
- 11. Närpes
...
,
Ostrobothnia;
- 12. Dragsfjärd
...
,
Åboland;
- 13. Porvoo, Uusimaa;
...
- 14. Orust, Bohuslän;
- 15. Floby, Västergötland
...
;
- 16. Rimforsa, Östergötland;
- 17. Årstad-Heberg, Halland;
- 18. Stenberga, Småland
...
;
...
- 19. Jämshög, Blekinge;
- 20. Bara, Skåne;
All dialect samples are from , a research project on Swedish dialects available for download , with many more samples from 100 different dialects with recordings from four different speakers; older female, older male, younger female and younger 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
Finland-Swedes. The Swedish term most often used for the standard language is
rikssvenska and to a much lesser extent
högsvenska ; 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 . 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 is 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 recently conducted by , the attitudes of Swedes to the use of certain varieties 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 several "dialects" such as
gotländska or
skånska were provided as alternatives in the poll.
Finland-Swedish
Finland was a part of Sweden from the mid 14th 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.
As of 2004, 5.53% of the total population speak Finland-Swedish as their first language, according to official statistics. Since an educational reform in the 1970s, both Swedish and Finnish have been compulsory school subjects in Mainland Finland, and both were until 2004 mandatory in the final examinations. Education in the pupil's first language is officially called "mother tongue" —
"modersmål" in Swedish or
"äidinkieli" in Finnish — and education in the other language is referred to as "the other domestic language" —
"andra inhemska språket" in Swedish,
"toinen kotimainen kieli" in Finnish. The introduction of mandatory education in Swedish was chiefly intended as a step to avoid further decrease of the number of Swedish speakers and to avoid creating language-barriers between the two spoken languages. Finnish, a
Finno-Ugric language, is fundamentally different from Swedish in grammar and vocabulary and there is no mutual understanding between the two. However, there is a considerable amount of borrowings from Swedish in the Finnish language. One example of the two languages merging in an unofficial sense is the classic Helsinki slang, which was born in the capital city of Finland in the early and middle 20th century, when both languages were almost equally widely spoken in the city area.
Immigrant variants
Rinkeby Swedish is a common name for varieties of Swedish spoken by second and third generation immigrants, especially among younger speakers, primarily in the suburbs of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. There is no consensus among linguists whether Rinkeby Swedish and similar varieties should be denominated as dialects or sociolects.
The Swedish linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas has described these varieties as being most prominent among teenagers living in suburbs with a large immigrant population and particularly teenage boys. In this context it can be seen as an expression of a
youth culture specific to these suburbs. Rinkeby Swedish is however not limited to the children of immigrants and is often surprisingly similar to variants in geographically distant immigrant-dominated suburbs. In a survey made by Kotsinas, foreign learners of Swedish were asked to identify the native language and time spent in Sweden of several teenage speakers living in Stockholm. The survey showed that the participants had great difficulty in accurately guessing the origins of the speakers and that they generally underestimated the time spent in Sweden. 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 is usually noted for having a relatively large
vowel inventory consisting of 9 vowels that make up 17 phonemes in most varieties and dialects , though this is slightly misleading since the average amount of vowel phonemes when considering all languages tend to be higher than the average in the world's major languages. There are 18 consonant phonemes out of which and /r/ show quite considerable variation depending on both social and dialectal context.
A distinct feature of Swedish is its varied prosody, 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. Oftentimes the prosody is the first to be changed, perhaps because it is the element most disruptive to understanding, or simply the easiest to adapt. The prosodic features of Swedish are sometimes summarized as a "melodic accent", though this term is not used by linguists and is used mostly as a descriptive, but still rather vague, term for the prosodic features of Swedish and
Norwegian.
Vowels
Swedish vowels are contrastive in terms of quality, and the frontal vowels appear in
rounded-unrounded pairs. Unstressed is rendered as in most dialects, and a lowering of vowels is very common before /r/ and the various
retroflex assimilations such as , . Various patterns of diphthongs occur in different dialect groups. Among the most distinguishable are those of
Skåne in southern Sweden and in
Gotland.
Consonants
The uniquely Swedish phoneme and its allegedly double
places of articulation is a difficult and complex issue that is still debated among phoneticians. Though the acoustic properties of the various -sounds are fairly similar, the realizations can vary considerably according to geography, social status, age, gender as well as social context and are notoriously difficult to describe and transcribe accurately.
The sje-sound has a great variety of allophones in Swedish, and often quite subtle realizations. Most common are various -like sounds, with occurring mainly in northern Sweden and in Finland. can sometimes be used in the varieties influenced by major immigrant languages like
Arabic and
Kurdish.
The realizations of /r/ are also highly variable in different dialects and varieties. In Central Swedish dialects often becomes a fricative , in consonant clusters often as , and especially in Central Standard Swedish as the approximant . Uses of
taps like are also common. In southern Sweden uvular trills or voiced fricatives, , are commonly used to realize /r/. Unlike Central and most of the Finland-Swedish variants, /r/ is not assimilated into retroflex realizations in the southern variants. is hence realized as . In some dialects in casual Swedish, r is sometimes mute, especially in the plural ending and present tense ending before a following word that begins with a consonant that does not combine into a retroflex consonant.
Prosody
Prosody in Swedish often varies substantially between different dialects including the spoken varieties of Standard Swedish. As in most languages, stress can be applied to emphasize certain words in a sentence. To some degree prosody may indicate
questions, although less so than in English. Swedish is, like English, a stress-timed language and has many words that are differentiated by stress:
- formel — "formula"
- formell — "formal"
Stress in most dialects differentiates between two kinds of accents. Often referred to as acute and grave accent, they may also be referred to as
accent 1 and
accent 2 and are described as
tonal word accents by Scandinavian linguists. Most dialects of Swedish make this distinction, although the actual realizations vary and are generally difficult for non-natives to distinguish. In some dialects of Swedish, including those spoken in Finland, this distinction is absent or only detectable through advanced phonetic analysis. Generally, accent 2 is characterized by a later timing of the intonational pitch rise as compared with accent 1; the so-called two-peaked accents also have another, earlier and non-intonational pitch rise in accent 2, hence the term.
Noteworthy are some three-hundred two-syllable word pairs that are differentiated only by their use of either grave or acute accent. The main rule is that a word that in dictionary form has one syllable has accent 1, while those that are bisyllabic have accent 2. Bisyllabic forms resulting from declination or derivation also tend to have accent 2, except for the definite article, which doesn't induce that accent. This distinction has been present in Scandinavian dialects at least since Old Norse.
- anden — "the duck"
- anden — "the spirit"
In the example below, the first word derives from
and and has accent 1, while the second derives from
ande and has accent 2. The mono- and bisyllabic rule seems to have been present since
Old Norse, but nowadays a great number of polysyllables have accent 1. These are mostly words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, but have subsequently become bisyllabic, as have many loanwords.
Grammar
Swedish nouns and adjectives are declined in two genders and two cases, as well as number. The two cases are nominative and genitive. Nominative is the dictionary form while the genitive suffix is
-s, identical to that of English. Swedish nouns belong to one of two genders: uter or neuter, which also determine the declensions of adjectives. For example, the word
fisk is an uter noun and can have the following forms:
| | Singular | Plural |
|---|
| Indefinite form | Definite form | Indefinite form | Definite form |
|---|
| Nominative | fisk | fisken | fiskar | fiskarna |
|---|
| Genitive | fisks | fiskens | fiskars | fiskarnas |
|---|
As in other North Germanic languages there are definite and indefinite articles, but indicating the definite form of a noun is done mainly by a suffix which varies according to gender
. The separate articles
en/ett and
den/det are used to make more subtle variations of meaning and are part of a quite complex system of determining definitiveness. The articles are used to add an extra dimension to this system and the definitive articles also double as demonstrative pronouns, and can be further specified with adverbs such as
där; "there" or
här; "here".
Den fisken and
den där fisken would both translate as "that fish", but with the second example adding a level of definitiveness that is not distinguished in English.
Swedish adjectives are inflected in two declensions: strong or weak. This depends on the presence or absence of definite articles. In the strong declension they make distinction between uter gender and neuter gender .
In the weak declension, they have a general form but can also take a particular masculine ending specific for males:
den gamle mannen, the old man. The first variant of the weak form is also used for all plurals.
Swedish pronouns are basically the same as those of English but distinguish four genders and have an additional object form, derived from the old dative form.
Hon has the following forms in nominative, genitive, and object form:
- hon - hennes - henne
Verbs are conjugated according to tense. One group of verbs have a special imperative form, though with most verbs this is identical to the infinitive form. Perfect and present participles as adjectivistic 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 does not use the perfect participle to form the present perfect and past perfect tenses. Rather, the auxiliary verb
"har",
"hade" is followed by a special form, called supine, used solely for this purpose :
- 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, this auxiliary
"har",
"hade" is optional and often omitted.
- Jag ser att han 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 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 or
man ur huse , 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, like in English . Adjectives precede the noun they determine.
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 ,
kung , and
gås . A significant part of the religious and scientific vocabulary is of
Latin or Greek origin, often borrowed through
French and, as of late, 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 distingushed by a "french accent", characterized by emphasis on the last syllable . Examples:
miljö ,
nivå ,
ateljé ,
byrå ,
fåtölj ,
portmonä ,
toalett ,
garage ,
trottoar ,
affär ,
paraply , etc.
Cross-borrowing from other Germanic languages is also common, at first from Middle Low German, the lingua franca of the
Hanseatic league, later from standard German. Some compounds are translations of the elements of German original compounds into Swedish, e.g
bomull from German
Baumwolle, cotton .
Finland-Swedish has a set of separate terms, often calques of their
Finnish counterparts, chiefly terms of law and government.
New words are often formed by compounding, and, like many Germanic languages, Swedish compounds words freely and frequently. Like for instance
nagellacksborttagningsmedel , but as in
German or
Dutch extremely long, though quite impractical, examples like
produktionsstyrningssystemsprogramvaruuppdatering are possible. Compound nouns take their gender from the
head, which in Swedish is always the last morpheme. A very productive method for creating new verbs is the adding of
-a to an existing noun, as in
bil and
bila .
Writing system
The Swedish alphabet is a twenty-nine letter
alphabet, using the basic twenty-six-letter
Latin alphabet plus the three additional letters
Å /
å,
Ä /
ä, and
Ö /
ö. These letters are not considered diacritic embellishments of any other characters and are sorted in that order following
z. Prior to the release of the 13th edition of
Svenska Akademiens Ordlista in April 2006,
w was treated as a variant of
v used only in names and foreign words , sorted and pronounced as a
v. Diacritics 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; occasionally other acute accents and, less often, grave accents can be seen in names and some foreign words. The letter
ā 
