Distinct word tones also characterize certain elements of its vocabulary, for which reason acquisition of a good Swedish pronunciation requires a considerable amount of commitment and work. Swedish, like English, has reduced its case system to an opposition between basic and possessive. The gender system has been reduced to an opposition between common and neuter, and the verb system has no inflections for person or number.
Adjectives still maintain the old Germanic distinction between strong and weak declensions .
On the other hand, due to the fact that Swedish has not reduced unstressed vowels to the extent most of the other Germanic languages have, the morphology still bears many relicts from an earlier period, with nouns and verbs falling into several classes depending on such things as their linking vowel in plural formation for nouns and the phonological shape of the past tense marker for verbs. In this respect closely related Danish and Norwegian have gone further along the road to simplification. Syntax has evolved into something very similar to English, although Germanic inversion of sentences that do not begin with a subject remains, main and subordinate clauses have essentially the same word order. The basic elements of the Swedish vocabulary are either Scandinavian or borrowed from Low German, and thus cognate with English. Swedish has also borrowed liberally from Latin, French, and Greek, for which reason learning its vocabulary is relatively easy for an English speaker.