Swedish language

**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

|Swedish|English|
| --- | --- |
|Ett/En  One||
|Två  Two||
|Tre  Three||
|Fyra  Four||
|Fem  Five||
|Sex  Six||
|Sju  Seven||
|Åtta  Eight||
|Nio   Nine||
|Tio   Ten||
|Ja  Yes||
|Nej  No||
|Jag  I||
|Du  You||
|Mig  Me||
|Han  He||
|Hon  She||
|Vi  We||
|De/dem  They/them||
|Jag är  I am||
|Sverige  Sweden||
|Hus  House||
|Hem  Home||
|Väg  Way||
|Björnar  Bears||
|Hjälp  Help||

## Basic Swedish Expressions

|Good day/Hello|
| --- |
|How are you?|
|Very good, thank you|
|Thank you|
|Thank you very much|
|Good morning|
|Good evening|
|Goodbye|

## Other websites

- Swedish Dictionary  from Webster's Dictionary
- An introduction to Swedish
- Lexin Swedish-English dictionary

## Infobox (language)

- **name**: Swedish
- **nativename**: __
- **states**: Sweden, Finland
- **speakers**: 11.1 million
- **date**: 2017
- **script**: Latin script, Latin (Swedish alphabet)
Swedish Braille
- **familycolor**: Indo-European
- **fam2**: Germanic languages, Germanic
- **fam3**: North Germanic languages, North Germanic
- **fam4**: East Scandinavian
- **ancestor**: Old Swedish
- **ancestor2**: Modern Swedish
- **nation**:

Nordic Council
- **agency**: Swedish Language Council (in Sweden)
Swedish Academy (in Sweden)
Research Institute for the Languages of Finland (in Finland)
- **iso1**: sv
- **iso2**: swe
- **iso3**: swe
- **lingua**: 52-AAA-ck to -cw
- **map**: Svenska språkets utbredning.png
- **mapcaption**: Major Swedish-speaking areas
- **notice**: IPA