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Swedish language
National language of Sweden and one of two official languages of Finland, spoken by about nine million people. It belongs to the East Scandinavian group of the Germanic languages and is closely related to Norwegian and Danish. Its history from the Common Scandinavian period (6001050) until c. 1225 is known chiefly from inscriptions in runic writing. Modern Swedish is usually dated from 1526, when a translation of the New Testament was first printed. The standard language began to emerge in the 17th century, based largely on the Svea dialects spoken in Stockholm. Swedish, like Norwegian, has two tonal word accents.
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Swedish language, member of the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the official language of Sweden and one of the official languages of Finland, and it is spoken by about 9 million people: 8,500,000 in Sweden and 500,000 elsewhere, chiefly in Finland, Norway, and Estonia. A descendant of Old Norse (see Germanic languages; Norse), the Swedish language falls into two major periods historically: Old Swedish, the early form of the language (usually dated from the 9th cent. to the early 16th cent.), and New Swedish, the modern form of the language (since the early 16th cent.). The Swedish language underwent many changes during the Middle Ages but began to be standardized in the 16th cent. as a result of such events as the throwing off of Danish domination, the Reformation, and the translation of the Bible into Swedish. In 1786 the Swedish Academy was established to oversee the development of the language. Swedish absorbed a number of words from Low German in the Middle Ages, from High German in the 16th and 17th cent., from French in the 18th cent., and from English in the 20th cent. On the whole, Swedish grammar is simple. The noun has only the singular, possessive, and plural forms. There are two genders for nouns, a nonneuter (or common) class and a neuter class. The former includes masculine, feminine, and common nouns; the latter, nouns for such categories as countries and substances and also many abstract nouns. Swedish is noted for its musical quality. This results partly from the use of pitch accents, which sometimes serve to differentiate the meanings of homonyms. There is considerable difference between the spoken and written forms of Swedish. For example, a number of inflections used in literary Swedish are not employed in the spoken language. Until the early 13th cent., runes were used for recording Swedish, but thereafter (as Christianity took hold in Scandinavia) they began to be replaced by the Roman alphabet, to which three symbols, , , and , have been added.
Swedish (Sound svenska?) is a North Germanic language (also called Scandinavian languages) spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the land islands, by more than nine million people. It is largely mutually intelligible with two of the other Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian. Standard Swedish is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well-established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized, with a 99% literacy rate among adults. Some of the genuine dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These dialects are confined to rural areas and are usually spoken by small numbers of people with low social mobility. Though not facing imminent extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.
Swedish is distinguished by its prosody, which differs considerably between varieties. It includes both lexical stress and tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory, with nine separate vowels that are distinguished by quantity and to some degree quality, making up a total of 17 vowel phonemes. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a sound found in many dialects, including the more prestigious forms of the standard language. Though similar to other sounds with distinct labial qualities, it has so far not been found in any other language.
Classification and related languages
Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. Together with Danish it belongs to the East Scandinavian group, separating it from the West Scandinavian group consisting of Faroese, Icelandic and Norwegian. More recent analyses divide the North Germanic languages into an Insular Scandinavian and Mainland Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on mutual intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced in particular by Danish during the last millennium and has diverged from Faroese and Icelandic.
By generally accepted criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Mainland Scandinavian languages could very well be considered to be dialects of a common Scandinavian language. Due to several hundred years of sometimes quite intense rivalry between Denmark and Sweden, including a long string of wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the nationalist ideas that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the languages have separate orthographies, dictionaries, grammars, and regulatory bodies. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus from a linguistic perspective more accurately described as a dialect continuum of Scandinavian, and some of these on the border between Norway and Sweden such as those of Bohusln, Dalsland, western Vrmland, western Dalarna, Hrjedalen and Jmtland take up a middle ground between the national standard languages.
History
Main article: History of Swedish
In the 9th century, Old Norse began to diverge into Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Sweden and Denmark). In the 12th century, the dialects of Denmark and Sweden began to diverge, becoming Old Danish and Old Swedish in the 13th century. All were heavily influenced by Middle Low German during the medieval period. Though stages of language development are never as sharply delimited as implied here, and should not be taken too literally, the system of subdivisions used in this article is the most commonly used by Swedish linguists and is used for the sake of practicality.
Old Norse
Main article: Old Norse language
The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century: Old West Norse dialect Old East Norse dialect Old Gutnish dialect Crimean Gothic Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility
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The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century: Old West Norse dialect Old East Norse dialect Old Gutnish dialect Crimean Gothic Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility
In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects, Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden).
The subdialect of Old East Norse spoken in Sweden is called Runic Swedish and the one in Denmark Runic Danish (there was also a subdialect spoken in Gotland, Old Gutnish) but until the 12th century, the dialect was the same in the two countries with the main exception of a Runic Danish monophthongization (see below). The dialects are called runic due to the fact that the main body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel u which was also used for the vowels o, and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.
From 1100 and onwards, the dialect of Denmark began to diverge from that of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark which created a series of minor dialectal boundaries, isoglosses, ranging from Zealand in the south to Norrland, sterbotten and southeastern Finland in the north.
An early change that separated Runic Danish from the other dialects of Old East Norse was the change of the diphthong i to the monophthong , as in stinn to stnn "stone". This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin. There was also a change of au as in daur into a long open as in dr "dead". This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from taur into tur. Moreover, the y diphthong changed into a long close , as in the Old Norse word for "island". These innovations had affected most of the Runic Swedish speaking area as well in the end of the period, with the exception of the dialects spoken north and east of Mlardalen where the diphthongs still exist in remote areas.[1]
Old Swedish
A copy of ldre Vstgtalagen - a law code of Vstergtland from the 1280s, one of the earliest texts in Swedish written in the Latin alphabet.
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A copy of ldre Vstgtalagen - a law code of Vstergtland from the 1280s, one of the earliest texts in Swedish written in the Latin alphabet.
Old Swedish is the term used for the medieval Swedish language, starting in 1225. Among the most important documents of the period written in Latin script is the oldest of the provincial law codes, Vstgtalagen, of which fragments dated to 1250 have been found. The main influences during this time came with the firm establishment of the Catholic church and various monastic orders, introducing many Greek and Latin loanwords. With the rise of Hanseatic power in the late 13th and early 14th century, the influence of Low Saxon became ever more present. The Hanseatic league provided Swedish commerce and administration with a large number of German speaking immigrants. Many became quite influential members of Swedish medieval society, and brought terms from their mother tongue into the vocabulary. Besides a great number of loan words for areas like warfare, trade and administration, general grammatical suffixes and even conjunctions where imported. Almost all of the naval terms were also borrowed from Dutch.
Early medieval Swedish was markedly different from the modern language in that it had a more complex case structure and had not yet experienced a reduction of the gender system. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases; besides the modern nominative and genitive there were also dative and accusative. The gender system resembled that of modern German, having the genders masculine, feminine and neuter. Most of the masculine and feminine nouns were later grouped together into a common gender. The verb system was also more complex: it included subjunctive and imperative moods and verbs were conjugated according to person as well as number. By the 16th century, the case and gender systems of the colloquial spoken language and the profane literature had been largely reduced to the two cases and two genders of modern Swedish. The old inflections remained common in high prose style until the 18th century, and in some dialects into the early 20th century.
A transitional change of the Latin script in the Nordic countries was to spell the letter combination "ae" as and sometimes as a' though it varied between individuals and regions. The combination "aa" similarly became aa, and "oe" became oe. These three were later to evolve into the separate letters , and .
New Swedish
Main article: New Swedish
Front page of the Gustav Vasa Bible of 1541. The title translated to English reads: "The Bible / That is / The Holy Scripture / in Swedish. Printed in Upsala. 1541".
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Front page of the Gustav Vasa Bible of 1541. The title translated to English reads: "The Bible / That is / The Holy Scripture / in Swedish. Printed in Upsala. 1541".
New Swedish begins with the advent of the printing press and the European Reformation. After assuming power, the new monarch Gustav Vasa ordered a Swedish translation of the Bible. The New Testament was published in 1526, followed by a full Bible translation in 1541, usually referred to as the Gustav Vasa Bible, a translation deemed so successful and influential that, with revisions incorporated in successive editions, it remained the most common Bible translation until 1917. The main translators were Laurentius Andre and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri.
The Vasa Bible is often considered to be a reasonable compromise between old and new; while not adhering to the colloquial spoken language of its day it was not overly conservative in its use of archaic forms.[2] It was a major step towards a more consistent Swedish orthography. It established the use of the vowels "", "", and "", and the spelling "ck" in place of "kk", distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible, perhaps intentionally due to the ongoing rivalry between the countries. All three translators came from central Sweden which is generally seen as adding specific Central Swedish features to the new Bible.
Though it might seem as if the Bible translation set a very powerful precedent for orthographic standards, spelling actually became more inconsistent during the remainder of the century. It was not until the 17th century that spelling began to be discussed, around the time when the first grammars were written. The spelling debate raged on until the early 19th century, and it was not until the latter half of the 19th century that the orthography reached generally acknowledged standards.
Capitalization during this time was not standardized. It depended on the authors and their background. Those influenced by German capitalized all nouns, while others capitalized more sparsely. It is also not always apparent which letters are capitalized, due to the Gothic or blackletter font which was used to print the Bible. This font was in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced with a Latin font (often antiqua).
Some important changes in sound during the New Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the fricative /?/ and later into /?/. There was also the gradual softening of /g/ and /k/ into /j/ and the fricative /?/ before front vowels. The velar fricative /?/ was also transformed into the corresponding plosive /g/.[3]
Modern Swedish
August Strindberg, often considered to be the founder of modern Swedish literature.
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August Strindberg, often considered to be the founder of modern Swedish literature.
The period that includes Swedish as it is spoken today is termed nusvenska ("Contemporary Swedish", lit. "Now-Swedish") in linguistic terminology. With the industrialization and urbanization of Sweden well under way by the last decades of the 19th century, a new breed of authors made their mark on Swedish literature. Many authors, scholars, politicians and other public figures had a great influence on the new national language that was emerging, the most influential of these being August Strindberg (1849-1912).
It was during the 20th century that a common, standardized national language became available to all Swedes. The orthography was finally stabilized, and was almost completely uniform, with the exception of some minor deviations, by the time of the spelling reform of 1906. With the exception of plural forms of verbs and a slightly different syntax, particularly in the written language, the language was the same as the Swedish spoken today. The plural verb forms remained, in ever decreasing use, in formal (and particularly written) language until the 1950s, when they were finally officially abolished even from all official recommendations.
A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the 1960s, with the so-called du-reformen, "the you-reform". Previously, the proper way to address people of the same or higher social status had been by title and surname. The use of herr ("Mr" or "Sir"), fru ("Mrs" or "Ma'am") or frken ("Miss") was only considered acceptable in initial conversation with strangers of unknown occupation, academic title or military rank. The fact that the listener should preferably be referred to in the third person tended to further complicate spoken communication between members of society. In the early 20th century, an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni (the standard second person plural pronoun) analogous to the French Vous. Ni (plural second person pronoun) wound up being used as a slightly less arrogant form of du (singular second person pronoun) used to address people of lower social status. With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 60s, these previously significant distinctions of class became less important and du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts. Though the reform was not an act of any centralized political decrees, but rather a sweeping change in social attitudes, it was completed in just a few years from the late 60s to early 70s.[4]
Former language minorities
Map of the Estonian islands which formerly housed "Coastal Swede" populations
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Map of the Estonian islands which formerly housed "Coastal Swede" populations
Formerly, there were Swedish-speaking communities in Estonia, particularly on the islands (Hiiumaa, Saaremaa and Vormsi, in Swedish: Dag, sel and Orms, respectively) along the coast of the Baltic. The Swedish-speaking minority was represented in parliament, and entitled to use their native language in parliamentary debates. After the loss of the Baltic territories to Russia in the early 18th century, around 1,000 Swedish speakers were forced to march to Ukraine, where they founded a village, Gammalsvenskby ("Old Swedish Village"), north of the Crimea. A few elderly people in the village still speak Swedish and observe the holidays of the Swedish calendar, although the dialect is most likely facing extinction.[5]
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 saw an upswing. However, most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II when Estonia was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Only a handful of older speakers remain today.
Geographic distribution
Swedish is the national language of Sweden and the first language for the overwhelming majority of roughly eight million Swedish born inhabitants and acquired by one million immigrants. In mainland Finland Swedish is spoken as a first language by about 5.5% or about 300,000 people. The Finland Swedish minority is concentrated in the coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In these areas, Swedish is often the dominating language. In three cases, in the municipalities of Korsns (97% Swedish speakers), Nrpes and Larsmo, Swedish is the only official language. In several more, it is the majority language and it is an official minority language in even more. There is considerable migration between the Nordic countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and cultures (with the exception of Finnish), expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. According to the 2004 US census some 67,000 people over age five were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on actual language proficiency. There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as Swedish descendants in Argentina and Brazil that have maintained a distinction by language and names.[6]
Official status
Swedish in Sweden is considered the "main language" and its use is officially recommended for local and state government, but not actually enforced by law. A recently proposed bill that would make Swedish an official language had a decided majority in the Swedish parliament, but failed to pass by the narrowest possible margin (145-147) due to a pairing-off failure.[7] It is currently expected that the bill will be successfully passed if it is put up for a second vote. Swedish is the sole official language of land, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland, where 95% of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. In Finland, Swedish is the second national language alongside Finnish. Swedish is also one of the official languages of the European Union.
Regulatory bodies
There are no official regulatory institutions for the Swedish language. The Swedish Language Council (Sprkrdet) has semi-official status as such and is funded by the Swedish government, but does not attempt to enforce control of the language, as for instance the Acadmie franaise does. However, many organizations and agencies require the use of the council's publication Svenska skrivregler in official contexts, with it otherwise being regarded as a de facto orthographic standard. Among the many organizations that make up the Swedish Language Council, the Swedish Academy (established 1786) is arguably the most influential. Its primary instruments are the dictionaries Svenska Akademiens Ordlista (SAOL currently in its 13th edition) and Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, in addition to various books on grammar, spelling and manuals of style. Even though the dictionaries are sometimes used as official decrees of the language, their main purpose is to describe current usage.
In Finland a special branch of the Research Institute for the Domestic Languages of Finland has official status as the regulatory body for Swedish in Finland. Among its highest priorities is to maintain intelligibility with the language spoken in Sweden. It has published Finlandssvensk ordbok, a dictionary about the differences between Swedish in Finland and in Sweden from their point of view.
Dialects
The linguistic definition of a Swedish dialect is a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by the standard language and that can trace a separate development all the way back to Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects, such as those of Orsa in Dalarna or Nrpes in sterbotten, have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections. These dialects can be near-incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenml (lit. "parish speech"). They are generally separated into six major groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary. One or several examples from each group are given here. Though each example is intended to be also representative of the nearby dialects, the actual number of dialects is several hundred if each individual community is considered separately. Common Swedish terms for different ml, "(styles of) speech", are used here.[8]
Map showing location of the various dialect samples.
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Map showing location of the various dialect samples.
* Norrlndska ml Norrland, the northern half of Sweden
1. verkalix, Norrbotten; younger female
2. Burtrsk, Vsterbotten; older female
3. Asps, Jmtland; younger female
4. Frila, Hlsingland; older male
* Sveaml Svealand
5. lvdalen, Dalarna; older female
6. Grs, Uppland; older male
7. Sorunda, Sdermanland; younger male
8. Kla, Vrmland younger female (transitional dialect)
9. Viby, Nrke; older male
* Gotlndska ml Gotland
10. Sproge, Gotland; younger female
* stsvenska ml land and mainland Finland
11. Nrpes, sterbotten; younger female
12. Dragsfjrd, boland; older male
13. Borg, Nyland; younger male
* Gtaml western and northern Gtaland, traditionally centered in Vstergtland
14. Orust, Bohusln; older male
15. Floby, Vstergtland; older female
16. Rimforsa, stergtland; older female
17. rstad-Heberg, Halland; younger male
18. Stenberga, Smland; younger female
* Sydsvenska ml southernmost Sweden, including Blekinge, southern Halland and southern Smland
19. Jmshg, Blekinge; older female
20. Bara, Skne; older male
All dialect samples are from SweDia, a research project on Swedish dialects available for download (though with information in Swedish only), with many more samples from 100 different dialects with recordings from four different speakers; older female, older male, younger female and younger male.
Standard Swedish
Standard Swedish, which is derived from the dialects spoken in the capital region around Stockholm, is the language used by virtually all Swedes and most Swedish-speaking Finns. The Swedish term most often used for the standard language is rikssvenska ("National Swedish") and to a much lesser extent hgsvenska ("High Swedish"); the latter term is limited to Swedish spoken in Finland and is seldom used in Sweden. There are many regional varieties of the standard language that are specific to geographical areas of varying size (regions, historical provinces, cities, towns, etc.). While these varieties are often influenced by the genuine dialects, their grammatical and phonological structure adheres closely to those of the Central Swedish dialects. In mass media it is no longer uncommon for journalists to speak with a distinct regional accent, but the most common pronunciation and the one perceived as the most formal is still Central Standard Swedish.
Though this terminology and its definitions are long since established among linguists, most Swedes are unaware of the distinction and its historical background, and often refer to the regional varieties as "dialects". In a poll that was recently conducted by HUI, the attitudes of Swedes to the use of certain varieties by salesmen revealed that 54% believed that rikssvenska was the variety they would prefer to hear when speaking with salesmen over the phone, even though several "dialects" such as gotlndska or sknska were provided as alternatives in the poll.[9]
Areas where Finland Swedish populations are found shown in yellow
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Areas where Finland Swedish populations are found shown in yellow
Finland Swedish
Main article: Finland Swedish
Finland was a part of Sweden from the mid 14th century until the loss of the Finnish territories to Russia in 1809. Swedish was the sole administrative language until 1902 as well as the dominant language of culture and education until Finnish independence in 1917. According to official statistics from 2004, 5.53% of the total population speaks Finland Swedish as their first language. Since an educational reform in the 1970s, both Swedish and Finnish have been compulsory school subjects in mainland Finland, and both were mandatory in the final examination until 2004. The subject providing lessons in the pupil's first language is officially and in everyday speech called "mother tongue" ("modersml" in Swedish or "idinkieli" in Finnish) and lessons in the other language are referred to as "the other domestic language" ("andra inhemska sprket" in Swedish, "toinen kotimainen kieli" in Finnish). The introduction of mandatory education in Swedish was chiefly intended as a step to avoid further decrease of the number of Swedish speakers and to avoid creating language-barriers between the two spoken languages. Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language, is fundamentally different from Swedish in grammar and vocabulary, and they are not mutually understandable. However, there are a considerable amount of borrowings from Swedish in the Finnish language. One example of the two languages merging in an unofficial sense is the classic Helsinki slang, ("Stadin slangi") which arose in the capital city of Finland in the early and middle 20th century, when both languages were almost equally widely spoken in the city area.
Immigrant variants
Rinkeby Swedish (after Rinkeby, a heavily segregated suburb of northern Stockholm) is a common name for varieties of Swedish spoken by second and third generation immigrants, especially among younger speakers, primarily in the suburbs of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malm. There is no consensus among linguists whether Rinkeby Swedish and similar varieties should be denominated as dialects or sociolects.
The Swedish linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas has described these varieties as being most prominent among teenagers living in suburbs with a large immigrant population and particularly teenage boys. In this context it can be seen as an expression of a youth culture specific to these suburbs. Rinkeby Swedish is however not limited to the children of immigrants and is often surprisingly similar to variants in geographically distant immigrant-dominated suburbs. In a survey made by Kotsinas, foreign learners of Swedish were asked to identify the native language and time spent in Sweden of several teenage speakers living in Stockholm. The survey showed that the participants had great difficulty in accurately guessing the origins of the speakers and that they generally underestimated the time spent in Sweden. The greatest difficulty proved to be identifying the speech of a boy whose parents were both Swedish; only 1.8% guessed his native language correctly.[10]
Sounds
Main article: Swedish phonology
Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.
Swedish is usually noted for having a relatively large vowel inventory consisting of 9 vowels that make up 17 phonemes in most varieties and dialects (short /e/ and /?/ coincide), though this is slightly misleading since the average amount of vowel phonemes when considering all languages tend to be higher than the average in the world's major languages. There are 18 consonant phonemes out of which /?/ and /r/ show quite considerable variation depending on both social and dialectal context.
A distinct feature of Swedish is its varied prosody, which is often one of the most noticeable differences between the various dialects. Native speakers who adapt their speech when moving to areas with other regional varieties or dialects will often adhere to the sounds of the new variety, but nevertheless maintain the prosody of their native dialect. Oftentimes the prosody is the first to be changed, perhaps because it is the element most disruptive to understanding, or simply the easiest to adapt. The prosodic features of Swedish are sometimes summarized as a "melodic accent", though this term is not used by linguists and is used mostly as a descriptive, but still rather vague, term for the prosodic features of Swedish and Norwegian.
Vowels
The vowel phonemes of Standard Swedish
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