Swedish

Swedish is used by approximately 9,000,000 people as a native language and is mainly spoken in Sweden and Finland. Sweden entered the European Union in 1995 and since that time Swedish has been an official EU language. About 95% among a population of 9,100,000 were born with Swedish as their mother tongue. Besides Swedish there are no further official languages in the country. The second largest part of Swedish speakers exists in Finland. Ca. 300,000 Finland-Swedes are registered in Finland and most of them reside on the Åland islands, on the west and the south coast. Finland-Swedes make up 5,5% of the 5,300,000 citizens of Finland. In contrast to Sweden, Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. Until 1944 a minority of around 8,000 speakers of Swedish existed in Estonia. During WWII many of them had to escape to Sweden due to various reasons. Between 1840 and 1930 around 1,300,000 Swedes migrated to the U.S., particularly to the Midwest, e.g. Minnesota and Illinois. At the beginning of the 20th century one fifth of all speakers of Swedish lived there. Even today there are still some people from Swedish origin who practise their culture. In addition there are also some small communities in the Ukraine, Canada and some further countries in northern, central and western Europe.

Swedish
Autoglottonym:	Svenska
Pronunciation:	[svɛnska]
Ethnologue name:	Swedish
OLAC name:	{{{OLACname}}}
Location point:	Sweden: 62 00 N, 15 00 E, Finland: 64 00 N, 26 00 E
Genealogy
Family:	Indo-European
Genus:	Germanic Northwest Germanic North Germanic East Nordic Swedish
Speakers
Country:	Sweden, Finland
Official in:	Sweden Finland European Union
Speakers:	approximately 9,000,000: ~8,700,000 in Sweden (=95%) and 300,000 in Finland (=5,5%)
Writing system:	{{{WritingSyst}}}
Codes
ISO 639-1:	sv
ISO 639-2:	swe
ISO 639-3:	{{{ISO3}}}

Classification

• Indo-European
  • Germanic
    • Northwest Germanic
      • North Germanic
        • East Nordic
          • Swedish

From a synchronal point of view, Swedish belongs to the mainland Scandinavian languages besides Danish, Bokmål and to some parts also Nynorsk. Considering its historical background, Swedish is classified as an East Nordic language among Danish and Bokmål.

Standard Swedish

Standard Swedish, or also called Rikssvenska, is a standardised form of Swedish which is relatively neutral compared to the different dialects. The term describes written and spoken Swedish, however, there is barely a pure spoken standard due to regional variations. Rikssvenska evolved from the dialects spoken around the Stockholm region. It is used in Sweden only and differs from Finland and Estonian Swedish among other things due to its phonology.

Dialectal Variations

• Norrländska mål
• Sveamål
• Gotländska mål
• Östsvenska mål (Finland)
• Saltvik (Finland)
• Götamål
• Sydsvenska mål

Swedish spoken in Finland

Only about one third of all Finland-Swedes live in monolingual territories.

Bilingual with Swedish minorities:

• Uusimaa (Nyland)
• Itä-Uusimaa (Öster-Nyland)
• Kymenlaakso (Kymmenedalen)
• Varsinais-Suomi (Egentliga Finland)

Bilingual with Swedish majority:

• Österbrotten

Unilingual Swedish:

• Åland

Many of the Finnish speaking majority have a good command of Swedish.

Semi-communication

Semi-communication can be practised between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. For reasons of their similarity, those three languages are not treated as foreign but as neighbouring languages. Compared to Danish, Swedish speakers understand Norwegian more easily with respect to its pronunciation.

References

• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
• http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf
• Lindqvist, Christer. Schwedische Phonetik: für Deutschsprachige. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 2007. Print.

Quod Vide

• Schwedisch
• Swedish Phonology
• Nominalphrase im Schwedischen