| Swedish (svenska 
listen?.) is a language spoken principally in Sweden, Finland (Finland-Swedish, Swedish: finlandssvenska), and Åland.
Until World War II, Swedish was also spoken by a notable minority in the
coastland of Estonia (estlandssvenska). Swedish may be considered a pluricentric language in the sense that several prestige dialects exist that within each their geographical areas are
considered the most elevated, although the differences are chiefly confined to prosody, pronounciation and to lesser degree to vocabulary. The written standard language is uniform.
Swedish is classified as a member of the Eastern branch of the Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family.
History
Swedish is closely related to, and usually mutually intelligible with, Danish and Norwegian. All three diverged
from Old Norse about a millennium ago and were strongly
influenced by Low German. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian Bokmål are all
considered East Scandinavian languages; Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish, since Norwegian
pronunciation is closer to that of Swedish.
Geographic distribution
Swedish is the national language of Sweden, mother tongue for the overwhelming majority of eight million Sweden-born inhabitants and acquired by one
million immigrants. Swedish is also the sole official language of the Åland
Islands, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland, where around 95% of the 26,000
inhabitants have Swedish mother tongue.
In Mainland Finland, where the Swedish language is official
together with Finnish, Swedish is mother tongue for a relatively small minority of the Finns of about 5½%. The Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In these areas Swedish is often
dominating. In the municipality of Korsnäs
98 % of the population is Swedish-speaking. In Korsnäs, like the municipalities of Närpes and Larsmo, Swedish is the only administrative language.
Formerly, there were Swedish-speaking communities in the Baltic
countries, especially on the islands (Hiiumaa, Saaremaa and Vormsi) along 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 Old Swedish (gammalsvenska). 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. However most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II
when Estonia was reconquered by the Soviet Union.
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 and Argentina resulting from Swedish immigration that have
maintained a distinction by language and names, also against groups of other European immigrants in the region.
There is considerable migration (labour and other) between the Nordic 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 so called Nordic
countries together with Iceland and the Scandinavian countries.)
Official status
Swedish is the de-facto national language of Sweden, but it does not hold the status of an official language there.
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. Today about 290,000, or 5.6% of the total population are Swedish speakers according to official
statistics for 2002. After an educational reform in the 1970s, both Swedish and Finnish
are compulsory school subjects, mandatory in the final examinations: education in the pupil's own language is officially called
"mothertongue" — "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 Finlandization.
Swedish is the official language of the small autonomous territory of the Åland Islands,
under sovereignty of Finland,
protected by international treaties and Finnish laws. In contrast to the mainland of Finland the Åland Islands are monolingual
— Finnish has no official status, and is not mandatory in
schools.
Swedish is also an official language of the European Union.
The Swedish Academy
There are no real regulatory institutions for the Swedish language, but the Swedish Academy and the Swedish
Language Council (Svenska språknämnden) have important roles. The primary task of the Swedish Academy is to further
the use of the Swedish language. The primary instrument for this is the publication of dictionaries; Svenska Akademiens Ordlista and Svenska Akademiens Ordbok. Even though the
dictionaries are sometimes perceived as an official definition of the language, their function is rather intended to be
descriptive.
Dialects
Swedish is distinguished by having more than one high-status
variety, which is unusual for languages of its modest size. People speaking the high-status varieties typical for Helsinki, Stockholm/Uppsala, Lund and Gothenburg do not usually consider other varieties of Swedish to be more prestigious.
The Swedish term rikssvenska is problematic to translate. In Finland, it always means Swedish as spoken in Sweden
compared to as spoken in Finland, but in Sweden it might also denote the high-status variety spoken in Stockholm/Uppsala
dominating in national ethermedia. The definition of rikssvenska in the latter sense ("Proper Swedish") is somewhat
controversial, a concept by many professional linguistics claimed to be vague at best.
Beside the high-status dialects, one can distinguish between a large number of Swedish dialects, often defined in terms of
historical divisions, provinces and Lands of Sweden:
- ¹ Gutnish, Jamska, Scanian (Skånska)
and Dalecarlian (Dalmål) can in their own
right be considered as separate languages. Practically all speakers of these languages are bilingual in Swedish, and the
consideration here is principally the dialect of Swedish spoken by these individuals. None of them are recognized as
separate languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. See also:
Minority languages in Sweden
- ² Jamska belongs to the group of (Insular) West Scandinavian languages, as opposed to the other dialects of Swedish which
belong to the (Continental) East Scandinavian group. The proper name of the language is Jamska, though the spelling
Jämtska is sometimes used.
Phonology
Swedish is notable for having a large vowel inventory, with 17 different monophthongs, and for a considerable variance in the pronounciation of the /r/
phoneme and some fricative consonants. Many dialects of
Swedish, also common in national broadcasts, assimilate the r-sound to retroflex consonants. Notable exceptions are Finland-Swedish and
South-Swedish varieties. One of the Swedish "u"-sounds (
[ʉ]) has no equivalent anywhere in the world except for the Norwegian languages.
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. This includes in many dialects,
including that of the capital area, the voiceless dorso-palatal and velar fricative
[ɧ], (pronounced somewhere between "sh" in English she and "ch" in German doch), that in most of these
dialects must be distinguished from the voiceless retroflex fricative
[ʂ] (pronounced somewhere between "sh" in English she and "ch" in German ich). In other important
dialects, the same opposition is rather differently produced.
In addition the melodic accent of South-Sweden is strikingly
different from that of the capital-region (including Åland), which in turn differs
clearly from provincial Dalecarlia and Gotlandia. In Finland-Swedish melodic accent isn't
used at all, as is also typical for those parts of northernmost Sweden, where Finnish dominated less than a century ago.
Stress
Vocal stress in Swedish is somewhat unusual: Although there are
inflection rules to prevent two unemphasized syllables in a row, words may instead have two emphasized syllables
consecutive. This can be hard for foreign speakers to pick up and replicate.
For example, the Swedish word hungrig (hungry), has both syllables emphasized, using the Swedish grave accent as
described in Thorén 1997 (http://www.webgraph.se/bosse.thoren/prosodi_eng.html). An English speaker can hear the same
effect by saying out loud "It wasn't a wetsuit, it was a wet suit!" and listening to how the last two words are
pronounced.
Grammar
The written language is uniform, with very few exceptions: Adjectives are
typically declined according to natural gender in Southern Sweden, not at all in high-prestige varieties in the rest of Sweden, but sometimes according to numerus in Finland.
Vocabulary
Swedish is a Germanic language and its vocabulary is almost
entirely Germanic. Examples of Germanic words in Swedish are mus (mouse), kung (king), and gås (goose). Some
words are borrowed from Latin and French. Cross-borrowing from other Germanic languages is also common, at first from Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic league, later from High German, and
English. New words are often formed by compounding, and like many
Germanic languages, Swedish compounds words freely and frequently. Compound nouns take their gender from the head, which
in Swedish is always the last noun. New verbs can also be made by adding an -a to an existing noun, as in disk (dish) and
diska (do the dishes). Some compounds are translations of the elements (calques)
of German original compounds into Swedish, e.g bomull from German baumwoll, cotton (lit. tree-wool).
A significant 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. (This is seldom the case when English borrows French words!)
Examples include nivå (fr. niveau, "level"), ateljé (fr. atelier, "studio"), and paraply (fr.
parapluie, "umbrella").
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.
Orthography
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 Å / å, Ä / ä, and Ö /
ö. These letters (not considered diacritics) are sorted in that order following z. 'W' is not considered as
a unique letter, but a variant of 'v' used only in names (such as "Wallenberg") and foreign words ("bowling"). Diacritics are unusual in Swedish: é and occasionally
other acute accents and, less often, grave accents can be seen in names and some foreign words. German ü
is considered a variant of y and sometimes retained in foreign names. Diaeresis is not considered necessary, although it might exceptionally be seen in
elaborated style (for instance: "Aïda", "naïve").
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.
Examples
- Swedish: svenska
- hello: hej (hey)
- good-bye: hej då (hey-doh)
- please: snälla (snell-ah)
- thank you: tack (tahck)
- you're welcome: varsågod (var-show-good)
- where is...? var ligger .... (var ligg-ehr)
- that one: den där (den dehr)
- how much?: hur mycket (huwr muwk-eh)
- English: engelska (eng-el-skah)
- yes: ja /ja/ (ya), jo¹
- no: nej /nEj/ (neigh)
- generic toast: skål /skOl/ (skaal or skol)
- dangerous: farligt (far-ligt)
- ¹ Jo is used instead of ja for "yes" when answering a negative statement/question, such as Ska du inte
äta? (Won't you eat?), Jo, det ska jag. (Yes, I will.) or Du kommer inte hinna [med bussen]. (You won't make it
[to the bus]), Jo, det kommer jag. (Yes, I will.). Ja in this context would be ambigous (felt to be incorrect, but
probably interpreted as agreeing), while mm would agree with the speaker (won't eat, won't make it). This can be somewhat
of a problem for native Swedish speakers learning English, as they
search for an equivalent word coming up emptyhanded. ("How do you say jo in English?" "Yes" "But that's ja!")
External links
References
- Bolander, Maria Funktionell svensk grammatik (Liber AB, Falköping 2002) ISBN 91-47-05054-3
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