Education
 

Swedish

From Learn Any Language

Swedish
Svenska

Swedish is the language spoken in Sweden and some parts of Finland and Estonia. Swedish is spoken by approximately 10 million people.
Information
Ranking 74
Language Family Indo-European
Germanic
North Germanic
East Scandanavian
Swedish
Number of Speakers 20 million
Writing System Left-to-Right
Latin Alphabet
Where it is Spoken
Spoken in Denmark
Finland
Norway
Sweden
USA
Canada
Germany
Official in Finland
Sweden
Region Scandanavia

Contents

[edit] Phonology

Swedish is vowel rich language and have 17 different vowel sounds: iː, eː, ɛː, ɑː, oː, uː, ʉː, yː, øː, the long vowels and ɪ, ɛ, a, ɔ, ʊ, ɵ, ʏ, œ the short vowels.

[edit] Grammar

Swedish is a Germanic language and as English it has lost most of its inflections, as opposed to German. Swedish nouns are conjugated for number only and Swedish pronouns are conjugated for number and case (as in English). The definite article in Swedish is, unlike both English and German, placed in the end of a word. 

träd tree
trädet the tree

Swedish verbs are not conjugated in person, therefore 'to be' is 'att vara' whatever the preceding pronoun would be.

[edit] Orthography

Swedish spelling is far easier than English spelling - however it is not as close to the pronounciation as e.g. Spanish or Finnish are. French loanwords are often spelled half French, half Swedish (pretentiös - pretentieuse) - but sometimes entirely French or entirely Swedish (byrå - bureau, fåtölj - fauteuil). English loandwords do generally keep their original spelling, but some of them have been assimilated into Swedish spelling, more or less (webb - web, räls - rails, kex - cakes).

The Swedish spelling was reformed 1906 and during the 1970s the plural forms of verbs fell out of use in the written language (in the spoken language they had been absent for centuries). Thanks to the spelling reform of 1906 the v-sound and the t-sound are spelled with a v and a t. The v-sound is sometimes spelled with w but that is only in loan words.

Some common words in Swedish have kept a spelling, which represents a pronunciation that has been out of use for very long or very old rules of how words are spelled. These words are och (pronounced ock, meaning and), mig (pronounced mej, meaning me), dig (pronounced dej, meaning you (thee)) and sig (pronounced sej, meaning himself, herself or itself).

[edit] Common difficulties

The so called sj-sound, the y-sound and the u-sound are sounds that learners of Swedish often find hard to pronounce.

[edit] Resources

There is an FSI-course for Swedish.

Retrieved from "http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Swedish"