Swedish - Language Overview

I chose Swedish to be my first Scandinavian language since my mom was already learning Danish and I wanted to take a different language. I don't know why exactly I reasoned that way, but I like Swedish so I haven't regretted my choice.

Swedish

Geographical Extension

Swedish is spoken throughout Sweden and in parts of Finland as official language.

Spoken by

Swedish is spoken by about nine million native speakers.

Language Family and History

Swedish belongs to the Scandinavian (or North Germanic) languages, and more extensively, to the Indo-European languages (like almost all European languages, by the way). Its closest relatives are Danish and Norwegian, which can be understood so that speakers of either of the three Scandinavian languages are able to communicate with each other.

The Scandinavic languages began to split from the Germanic language during the 8th century. Only a century later, the mutual Scandinavic language called Old Norse divided into Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden). Over the next centuries, each country developed a distinctive dialect which led to the division of former Old East Norse into Old Swedish and Old Danish from the 13th century onwards. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic church with its monasteries brought many loan words from Greek and Latin to Sweden while the Hanseatic Power and the trade through it brought with it a strong influence by Low and High German. Old Swedish had a grammar complexity that resembled the modern German grammar. In the recent centuries, Swedish experienced a simplification of grammar until it reached the form of modern Swedish in the late 19th century. The main reasons for a simplified and unified Swedish language had been the invention of book printing and therefore a wider distribution of written Swedish (especially the Bible), and the industrialization in Sweden which also brought forth new Swedish writers. The last greater reform of the Swedish language to date was the "you-reform" in the 1950s and 1960s when the way in which you address higher-ranking people was changed to a more liberal way.

Grammar Difficulty

Swedish grammar is similar to English grammar in complexity. Although Swedish still has two genders, its overall complexity has been simplified throughout history so that the Swedish language shouldn't be too difficult to learn for English natives.

Pronunciation Difficulty

Swedish has a rather sing-songy pronunciation which might be difficult to immitate. Apart from that, however, it is quite easy to learn.

Special Facts

Old Swedish was written with runes. The runic alphabet only had 16 letters so that many letters were used for more than one phoneme.