Swedish language facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Swedish
svenska
Native to	Sweden, Finland
Native speakers	11.1 million  (2017)
Language family	Indo-European Germanic North Germanic East Scandinavian Swedish
Early forms:	Old Swedish Modern Swedish Swedish
Writing system	Latin (Swedish alphabet) Swedish Braille
Official status
Official language in	Sweden  Finland  Åland Islands  European Union Nordic Council
Regulated by	Swedish Language Council (in Sweden) Swedish Academy (in Sweden) Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (in Finland)
Linguasphere	52-AAA-ck to -cw
Major Swedish-speaking areas
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Swedish is a language mostly spoken in Sweden and in parts of Finland, typically along the southern and western coasts and on the Åland islands. More than nine million people speak Swedish. It is similar to two of the other Scandinavian languages, Norwegian and Danish, and a person who understands one of these languages can understand the others. Other Scandinavian languages, such as Icelandic and Faroese, are less closely related and cannot be understood by Swedish speakers. Standard Swedish is spoken and written throughout Sweden, but there are some local dialects with differences in grammar and vocabulary in small towns and rural areas.

Swedish began as a dialect of Old Norse, which was a language that everyone in Scandinavia understood during the Viking Age. Around the 12th century Swedish began to slowly become different from the other dialects. These dialects later became what we today call Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Danish. Swedish is a Germanic language with some similarities to English because of the Vikings that invaded England in the 10th Century. It is even more similar to German and Dutch, partly because of the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, when Sweden traded very openly with Germany.

There are three characters in the Swedish language that are not used in English. These are å, ä and ö. The letter å is a vowel sound between [a] and [o], similar to the English word awe. The letter ä is a vowel sound similar to [ɛ], like in the English word bed. The letter ö is a vowel sound between [o] and [ɛ], pronounced [øː] like the u in the English word burn. These characters are also used in the Finnish language, while Norwegian and Danish languages replace ä and ö with similar characters æ and ø.

Swedish also has some important differences in grammar. Definite articles are suffixed onto the end of their nouns, so ett hus (a house) becomes huset (the house). Also unlike English, Swedish uses two grammatical genders called Common and Neuter. Nouns of the Common gender are sometimes called "en words", and many words for living (or once-living) things are "en words". Nouns of the Neuter gender are sometimes called "ett words".

Example of some words in Swedish

Basic Swedish Expressions

Images for kids

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  Front page of Gustav Vasa's Bible from 1541, using Fraktur. The title translated to English reads: "The Bible / That is / The Holy Scripture / in Swedish. Printed in Uppsala. 1541".

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  August Strindberg, one of the most influential writers in modern Swedish literature.

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  A sign on the wall of a Swedish hotel, using both the recommended dem and the colloquial dom for the word "them" on the same sign.

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  A Finnish/Swedish street sign in Helsinki, Finland

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  Map of the Estonian islands which formerly housed "Coastal Swede" populations

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  Map showing location of the various modern dialect samples

See also

In Spanish: Idioma sueco para niños