FACTS ABOUT SWEDEN / THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE sharingsweden.se PHOTO: CECILIA LARSSON LANTZ/IMAGEBANK.SWEDEN.SE PHOTO: THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE Sweden is a multilingual country. However, Swedish is and has always been the majority language and the country’s main language. Here, Catharina Grünbaum paints a picture of the language from Viking times to the present day: its development, its peculiarities and its status. The national language of Sweden is Despite the dominant status of Swedish, Swedish and related languages Swedish. It is the mother tongue of Sweden is not a monolingual country. Swedish is a Nordic language, a Ger- approximately 8 million of the country’s The Sami in the north have always been manic branch of the Indo-European total population of almost 10 million. a domestic minority, and the country language tree. Danish and Norwegian Swedish is also spoken by around has had a Finnish-speaking population are its siblings, while the other Nordic 300,000 Finland Swedes, 25,000 of ever since the Middle Ages. Finnish languages, Icelandic and Faroese, are whom live on the Swedish-speaking and Meänkieli (a Finnish dialect spoken more like half-siblings that have pre- Åland islands. in the Torne river valley in northern served more of their original features. Swedish is one of the two national Sweden), spoken by a total of approxi- Using this approach, English and languages of Finland, along with Finnish, mately 250,000 people in Sweden, German are almost cousins. for historical reasons. Finland was part and Sami all have legal status as The relationship with other Indo- of Sweden until 1809. domestic minority languages. Romany, European languages is particularly clear There has been a Swedish-speaking Yiddish and sign language for the deaf when we encounter so-called native population in Estonia since the Middle also have a form of legal minority- words that we have from our shared Ages. Today, only a fraction of it remains. language status. origin. These are words such as fader Since the mid-19th century and As a result of immigration and the (father), moder (mother), hus (house), up to the present day, more than influx of refugees in recent decades, at mus (mouse), hund (dog), ko (cow), a million people have emigrated from least 150 languages are now spoken in öga (eye), öra (ear), näsa (nose), blod Sweden, primarily to North America. Sweden. Arabic is the most widespread, (blood), dag (day), natt (night), sten It is estimated that Swedish is spoken with at least 150,000 speakers. No (stone), ben (bone), jord (earth), vatten by several hundred thousand people official statistics are kept on language (water), ung (young), ljuv (sweet), äta worldwide. affiliation in Sweden. (eat), dricka (drink), leva (live), dö (die). FACTS ABOUT SWEDEN / THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE sharingsweden.se THE SWEDISH ALPHABET KELSEY MCNEAL/ABC VIA GETTY IMAGES PHOTO: The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters and ends with å, ä and ö. V and w are pronounced in the same way, as are s and z. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Å Ä Ö a b c d e Its many long vowel sounds and falling and rising pitch mean that Swedish is f g h i j considered a melodic language, as parodied in The Muppet Show. k l m n o How does Swedish sound? the same sound as in the French words p q r s t The characteristic immediately apparent bleu /-ö/, bœuf /-öff/ and chauffeur /-ö:r/. to a foreign ear is that Swedish is a Swedish also contains combinations u v w x y melodious language with falling and of consonants that can be difficult for rising tones and varying pitch accents: many foreigners to pronounce: vrak, z å ä ö /´hunden/, /`ra:dhu:s/, /`å:terställa/, sprängts, östgötsk. /pro´ble:m/, /problem´a:tisk/, fotograf´i:/. The combinations of letters sj, skj A sequence of letters such as buren and stj are pronounced /∫/, for example can be pronounced in two ways. The as in the English word she. For example: INDO-EUROPEAN HERITAGE noun buren (the cage) has accent 1, sjö (sea), sjuk (sick), skjorta (shirt), with the full emphasis on bur-: /´bu:ren/. stjärna (star). The Indo-European heritage is visible However, the participle form buren The same is true of sk before the in the Swedish syster, Danish søster, Icelandic systir, English sister, German (carried), of the verb bära, has accent 2, front vowels e, i, y, ä, ö: skepp (ship), schwester, Dutch zuster, Russian sestra, with partial emphasis on the second skinn (skin), sky (sky), skämmas (be French sœur, Latin soror and Sanskrit syllable: /`bu:ren/. ashamed), sköld (shield). svasr. A particular characteristic of the The standard Swedish r sound is sound of Swedish is the many vowel an apical r, as in Spanish and Italian sounds, a, o, u, å, e, i, y, ä, ö, which can (but not as clearly articulated). In the CLASSIC SWEDISH TONGUE be both long and short. southern parts of the country, a velar r TWISTERS Vowel length often determines mean- is used, as in French. ing in Swedish: mat (food) pronounced with a long a, matt (dull) pronounced Grammatical peculiarities with a short a, ful (ugly) pronounced The hardest feature of Swedish for Sju sjösjuka with a long u, full (full) pronounced with foreigners to learn is the inverse word a short u. order in sentences that start with some- I sjömän M A Foreigners also notice the special thing other than the subject. The verb G på skeppet E : Y Swedish u sound. U is pronounced always comes second in the sentence. U S Shanghai, U For example, ‘Anna kommer i dag’ F not as in the German word Buch (or D O sköljde sju G the English word boot), but as a sound (Anna is coming today) but ‘I dag kom- A N A somewhere between the vowels in mer Anna’ (Today, is coming Anna) skjortor i sjön. Y / S H (not ‘Today, Anna is coming’). U Buch and grün. The u can be short, as (Seven seasick T T E A peculiarity of Nordic languages is seamen on the ship R in hund, and long, as in hus. S T Shanghai washed O the postpositive definite article: man– The letters å, ä och ö are more visually C K . seven shirts C mannen (the man), hus–huset (the O than aurally distinctive. Å represents in the sea). M the same vowel sound as in the English house), hundar–hundarna (the dogs). words more and hot. Ä is equivalent to Swedish can also have a double definite the vowels in care and best. Ö represents form: det lilla huset (the little house). 2 | FACTS ABOUT SWEDEN / THE SWEDISH LANGUAGE sharingsweden.se RUNIC SWEDISH The Nordic languages can form a spe- memory of Holmbjörn, his brother, cial passive form with -s: ‘brevet skrevs’ a good young man. Öpir carved this The runic alphabet is called Futhark after the six letters in the first group. (the letter is written), ‘brevet har skrivits’ inscription’. However, many stones The 16-character Viking era Futhark (the letter was written). talk about deeds at home and journeys in its commonest form is shown here. The old system of three grammatical and voyages to the east and west. These are the so-called Swedish- genders, han, hon, det (he, she, it), has The language of the rune stones is Danish runes or normal runes. been reduced to two in standard Swed- called runic Swedish. ish: den and det. We now have båten The runic Swedish period was fol- (the boat) – den, huset (the house) – det. lowed by the Old Swedish period, which ᚠf ᚢu ᚦth ᚬa ᚱr ᚴk However, where the gender is impor- includes the entire Middle Ages and tant, masculine and feminine pronouns ended with the Reformation in the 16th are used: mannen (the man) – han, century. Runic characters were then kvinnan (the woman) – hon, hingsten replaced by the Latin alphabet. The lan- ᚼh ᚾn ᛁi ᛅa ᛋs (the stallion) – han, stoet (the mare) – hon. guage we find in the very oldest records References to time are a relic: Hur mycket in provincial law-rolls from the early 13th är hon? Hon är halv två (What time is it? century shows that Swedish and Danish It is one thirty). had become separate languages. ᛏt ᛒb ᛘm ᛚl ᛦr In recent years, people have also started to use a new gender-neutral pronoun, Influence from other languages Bokstav (the Swedish word for letter) hen, partly to replace the combination Swedish has always been open to loans means ‘line carved in beechwood’. Wood was the commonest material, han eller hon (he or she) and partly for from elsewhere but has still survived but stone has been better preserved. people who do not want to be catego- as a separate language. The arrival of PHOTO: BENGT A LUNDBERG/RIKSANTIKVARIEÄMBETET BENGT PHOTO: rised as either man or woman. Christianity in the 11th century brought In modern Swedish, the verb has the with it a number of words of Latin and same form in the singular and plural: Greek origin such as kyrka (church), jag är (I am), vi är (we are); jag tar (I take), präst (priest), mässa (mass) and paradis vi tar (we take). The old plural forms are (paradise). now found almost only in hymns and The influence from the rest of Europe in Swedish drinking songs: ‘Vi äro små continued in the Middle Ages.