Swedish language

The Swedish (in Swedish: svenska (?·i)) is a Germanic language in northern Europe, spoken by 9 to 14 million people. Most of its speakers live in Sweden, Finland and the Åland Islands (autonomous), where it is the official language. The Swede is a Nordic language, as is Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and ferocious. The Nordic languages are a subgroup of Germanic languages, which are part of the linguistic family known as the Indo-European languages. The Swede, like the rest of the Nordic languages, descends from the ancient Nordic, spoken in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. The Swede is largely understandable for a Norwegian and a Danish.

Standard Swedish (rikssvenska) is the national language that evolved from the dialects of central Sweden during the 18th century XIX and was fully established in the early XX century. Although various rural dialects still exist today, the spoken and written language is uniform and standard with more than 99% literate adult inhabitants. Some of the genuine dialects differ considerably from Standard Swedish in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually understandable with Swedish (for example, the North Dalecarlian language). These dialects are confined to rural areas with little social mobility. While not in danger of disappearing, the populations that speak these dialects are shrinking despite efforts by regional authorities to preserve their use.

Swedish is distinguished by its prosody, which differs considerably between varieties. This includes both accent and pitch qualities. The existence of two linguistic tones is a phenomenon shared with the standard Norwegian language, but not with Danish. The language has nine vowel sounds that are distinguished by their length and qualities, forming 17 vowel phonemes. Swedish is also notable for the existence of a voiceless fricative dorso-palatal velar phoneme, a sound found in many dialects, including the most prestigious forms of the standard language. Although similar to other sounds with distinct labial qualities, it has so far not been located in other languages; partially resembles a simultaneous pronunciation of an English sh and a Spanish j. In the written language, this sound is represented by combinations such as sk-, skj, stj-, sj- and others.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Geographic distribution

Swedish is the national language of Sweden, it is the mother tongue of about 7,881,000 native people and 1,028,000 immigrants (according to official statistics from 2001).

Swedish is the language of the Åland Islands, an autonomous province under Finnish sovereignty. On the Finnish peninsula, however, Swedish is the first language of only a minority of people, around 5.6%. The Finno-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas and archipelagos in the South and Southwest of Finland, where they form local majorities in some communities. In the whole of the Finnish population, 46.6% of the population knows and uses the Swedish language.

There were Swedish-speaking communities in the Baltic countries, especially on the islands along the coast. After the loss of the Baltic countries to Russia in the early 18th century century, many Swedish-speakers were relocated to Ukraine. The survivors eventually founded a number of small Swedish-speaking towns, which survived until the Russian Revolution, when their inhabitants were evacuated to Sweden. The dialect they spoke was known as gammalsvenska (Old Swedish).

In Estonia, the remaining Swedish community was treated very well between the first and second world wars. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly coastal, used Swedish as an administrative language and the Swedish-Estonian culture improved. However, most Swedish-speakers immigrated to Sweden after World War II when Estonia fell into the hands of the Soviet Union.

There are small groups of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as the United States, especially in the city of Lindsborg (Kansas), where a colony of Swedish immigrants is concentrated. Descendants also exist in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There is considerable migration between the Nordic countries, due to similarities between languages and cultures, integration generally occurs quickly and groups do not form (note that Finland, despite being a Nordic country, does not belongs to the group of Scandinavian countries, strictly speaking).

Officiality

Swedish is the national and official language in use in Sweden.

In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. Swedish was the language of government use in Finland for approximately 700 years, until in 1892 Finnish, spoken by the vast majority (approximately three-quarters of the then population) of the people of Finland, was equated with Swedish as national language according to Russian plans to isolate the Grand Duchy of Finland from Swedish influence. Today about 350,000 people, or 5.6% of the total population of Finland, have Swedish as their mother tongue according to official statistics from 2002. After an educational reform in the 1970s, both Swedish and Finnish were became compulsory languages in Finnish schools as a first and second language. The introduction of the compulsory teaching of Swedish in schools was seen by many as a step to prevent Finnish nationalist movements. Currently 47% of the Finnish population knows the Swedish language according to the "Eurobarometer" of 2016.

Swedish is the official language in the small self-government Åland Islands, which belongs to Finland, protected by international treaties and Finnish law. But unlike mainland Finland, Finnish is not official on Åland and is not compulsory in schools.

Swedish is also one of the official languages of the European Union.

The Swedish Academy

There is no institution that regulates the Swedish language, but the Swedish Academy (Svenska Akademien) and the Swedish Language Council (Svenska språknämnden) play an important role in following the language. Its main function is to promote the use of the Swedish language, mainly through the publication of dictionaries. Although dictionaries can sometimes be considered as a way to officially define a language, their function is merely descriptive, not prescriptive.

Dialectology

Swedish has more than one variety of the standard language, although speakers of the Helsinki, Stockholm/Uppsala, Lund, and Gothenburg (Göteborg) varieties do not generally regard the other varieties as less prestigious.

The Swedish term rikssvenska is normally considered in Finland to mean the Swedish spoken in Sweden, as opposed to that spoken in Finland (historically the eastern territories), but in Sweden it can also denote the variant spoken in Stockholm/Uppsala, commonly used in the media. This latter definition, sometimes equivalent to 'proper Swedish', while literally meaning 'kingdom Swedish', is often considered controversial.

In addition to the variants of the standard language, numerous dialects of the language can be distinguished, usually defined according to historical divisions and provinces.

• östsvenska mål (spoke in Finland and Estonia)
• dropländska (spoke in Gotland Island)
• götamål (spoke in Götaland)
• norrländska mål (spoke in Norrland, North Sweden)
• sveamål (spoke in Svealand, around Lake Mälaren and Capital)
• skånska mål (spoke in Skåne, South Sweden)

Swedish forms an oral diasystem (not so written) with Norwegian. Both languages present a very characteristic sonority in their main central cities (Uppsala, Stockholm), sonority that is lost as you go north (Lapland) or south (Skania).^{[citation required]}

New dialects

Rinkeby Swedish (rinkebysvenska) is a slang or variety spoken in immigrant neighborhoods by young people in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, with contributions from the Turkish language, Bosnian and Spanish.

Note: Gutniska, Jämska, Sydsvenska (skånska) and Dalecarlense (dalamål) can be considered languages on their own. Virtually all speakers of these languages are bilingual.

Linguistic description

Classification

Västgötalagen (The Law of Gotia West)XIII), the first text preserved in Swedish, written with Latin alphabet.

Swedish is an Indo-European language, which belongs to the Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Together with Danish it belongs to the East-Norse subgroup, separated from the languages of the West-Norse subgroup (Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic). However, a more recent analysis, based on the degree of mutual intelligibility, divides the Nordic languages into two groups: Continental Norse (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish), and Insular Norse (Faroese and Icelandic). This separation arises as a consequence of the isolation of the islands and the common influence of the low Saxon on the Nordic languages during the time of the Hanseatic league.

According to the general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the continental Nordic languages can be considered, to some extent, as variants of a common language. But due to centuries of conflict, mainly between Denmark and Sweden, including a long series of wars during the 16th and 17th centuries, and also due to outbreaks of nationalist ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries, the three languages have developed different spellings, lexicons, grammars, and pronunciation patterns. Therefore, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are described, from a linguistic perspective, as a dialect continuum of 'Norse', and many dialects of the national languages can be considered as intermediate between two languages, such as For example, the Swedish dialects spoken in Dalarna and Värmland, near the Norwegian border. Mutual intelligibility is however markedly asymmetric; some studies have confirmed, for example, that a Dane has less difficulty understanding spoken Swedish than a Swede understands spoken Danish.

Phonology

One of the main problems students of Swedish encounter is the apparent lack of a standard pronunciation. Vowels and some consonantal sounds, especially sibilants, are realized in very different ways in several widely accepted variants. Furthermore, the melodic accent of central Sweden is strikingly different from that of the south and north, which, in turn, differs from that of Dalecarlia and Gotland. Finnish Swedish and Swedish in some areas of northern Sweden do not use melodic accent at all, places where Finnish has been dominant for less than a century.

A notable feature of Swedish is that it has developed minimal pairs whose difference is based on pitch, making Swedish one of the few tonal Indo-European languages (Punjabi and other Indo-Aryan languages have also developed pitch on an independent basis).

Writing

The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters: the Latin alphabet, plus three more letters Å-å, Ä-ä and Ö-ö. These letters are placed in this order at the end of the alphabet after the letter Z, with the first letter of the alphabet being A and the last being Ö. Some archaic words and foreign words use the letter W, considered a variant of V. The acute accent can also be found in words of foreign origin (eg kupé, idé) and in some names (eg Lindén). In these cases it serves to mark the prosodic accent. It should also be mentioned that the letter Y counts as a vowel.

The runic alphabet was used in Old Norse and Old Swedish before the adoption of the Latin alphabet, which replaced the old writing system during the Middle Ages.

Grammar

There are two grammatical genders in Swedish: common and neuter, usually known as "form-en" and "shape-ett" respectively. In Old Swedish, the masculine and feminine forms existed instead of the common one, and it is still found in some old phrases and ceremonial uses. The gender of nouns is generally arbitrary and must be memorized in most cases. Nouns form the plural in several ways: by adding the suffix -r, -er, -or or -ar in words of common gender, sometimes changing the final vowel of the word (eg pojke -child, pojkar -children, by - village, byar -villages, kvinna -woman, kvinnor -women); adding -n to gender-neutral words ending in a vowel (eg meddelande -message, meddelanden -messages); no change in gender-neutral words ending in a consonant (eg tåg -train, trains); or there are also irregular plurals where a vowel is changed or where a vowel is changed and a suffix is added at the same time (eg fot -pie, fötter -pies, gås -goose, gäss -geese).

In a common feature with the other Scandinavian languages, Swedish features a definite article that is an enclitic (ie, it is a noun suffix). Nouns of "form-in" they take the suffixes -en or -n in the singular and -na in the plural. Nouns of the "form-ett" they take the endings -et or -t (singular) and -na or -n in the plural. Examples:

bil (auto): bile ("the car"), bilarna ("cars")

kvinna (woman): kvinnan ("the woman"), kvinnorna ("women")

Hus (house): huset ("the house"), Husen ("houses")

äpple (manzana): äpplet ("the apple"), äpplena (" apples")

Most infinitive verbs have their ending in -a, -r in the present and -de, -te or -dde in the regular imperfect tense. Verbs make no difference with respect to person or number, except in forms that are intended to sound archaic or very solemn ("jag är hemma"("I'm home") vs. "vi äro hemma"("we are home")). Other tenses use auxiliary verbs. The passive voice (or a reflexive verb) is also formed as an enclitic: rör inte! ("don't touch"), ej röras! ("Do not touch!", "Let it not be touched!").

One of the most interesting features of the Swedish language is the order of words in a sentence. The "typical" of the affirmative sentence is SVO (subject-verb-object) and that of the interrogative sentence is VSO. The peculiar thing about Swedish is that in affirmative sentences the verb always has to occupy the second position, which is why Swedish is called a "V2 language" by linguists. The subject normally occupies the first position, but to give more emphasis to another word, it is placed before the verb and the subject is moved after the verb. Let's see some examples:

Me. vi That's it. vi Me.

Jag såg det / Det såg jag

Me. I do. that tomorrow I do. I do. I do. Me tomorrow.

Jag gör det i morgon / I morgon gör jag det / Det gör jag i morgon

Lexicon

Most Swedish words are of Germanic origin. Some examples of Germanic words in Swedish are hand (hand), hals (neck) and bok (book). Other words have been incorporated into the Swedish language from Latin, German (first Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, and later High German). Often new words are formed by combinations of words. New verbs can be formed by adding an -a or -ra to an existing noun (e.g., plant ("plant small"), plantera ("to plant"). Many Swedish words also come from French: in these cases, the Swedish spelling tries to imitate the French pronunciation. So, for example, we find terms such as byrå (from "bureau"), adjö (from "adieu", goodbye), fåtölj (from "fauteuil", armchair).

Vocabulary is fairly uniform throughout Sweden, at least as used in the media and in literary writing. Finnish Swedish, however, uses some words of its own.

In recent times, and due to the great influence exerted by English on the media and the Internet, what comes to be called Svengelska (the Swedish equivalent of Spanglish) has been born. The incorporation of English terms, however, goes relatively unnoticed because they are related languages. Furthermore, it is completely accepted to conjugate foreign words and write them as if they were words of Swedish origin. Eg “Send me an email (mail)”: “skicka mig ett mejl”, or directly “mejla mig”.

Learn Swedish for Spanish Speakers

Knowing Germanic languages like English or German is helpful as many grammatical rules can be applied to Swedish. You can also learn self-taught at home with certain books, although the most used (Rivstart) are immersion and it is recommended to use them with a teacher.

There are some resources like Duolingo that include Swedish as a language that can be learned through Spanish. Although this app is recommended, there are some reviews that say that one method to learn Swedish is not enough. Since learning a Germanic language like this has to include input and output, once you have reached a basic level of A2, you can start to have immersion routines. such as podcasts, music or television series.

Finding language partners to do exchanges with is somewhat difficult, since Swedish is limited to Sweden and Finland and is not far-reaching, but you can find teachers online with apps like Verbling or Italki.