Swedish
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| Spoken by | 10 millions |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Sweden, Finland |
| Language family: | Germanic |
Swedish is the language spoken in Sweden and some parts of Finland and Estonia. Swedish is spoken by approximately 10 million people.
Contents |
[edit] Phonology
[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] Ortography
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 - bureu, fåtölj - foutille). 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 pronounciation that has been out of use for very long or very old rules of how words are spelled. Theese 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] Courses
There's an FSI course for Swedish.
