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The home pages for the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.nordic

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Swedish

• Pronunciation: Rather difficult, since Swedish (at least the "standard" variety of it spoken in Sweden) has several unusual vowels and consonants, e. g. the 'sj'-sound in sjuk "sick" and retroflexed dentals (in most parts of Sweden) which are not found in other European languages.

  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.

  The serious student of Swedish also has to learn to deal with regional varieties, or accents, such as Scanian and Finland-Swedish, both of which differ sharply in pronunciation from the Stockholm-area oriented standard "broadcast" Swedish.

• Grammar: Essentially quite easy for an English speaker. 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.

  An interesting development is a suffixed definite article:
  en hund "a dog";
  hunden "the dog [cf. hound]";
  hundar "dogs";
  hundarna "the dogs".

  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.

• Vocabulary: 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.

  Swedish and English also have a special historical link: the ancient Scandinavian language spoken by the Vikings who invaded and settled in England a thousand years ago, essentially the Swedish of that time, injected English with a Scandinavian element still evident today in words it shares with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian such as "are" (Sw: är), "they" (de), "them" (dem/dom), "ill" (illa), "little" (liten), "take" (ta(ga)), "call" (kalla), "husband" (husbonde), "sky" (sky [= "cloud"]), "shake" (skaka) etc.

  During the past century Swedish has borrowed an extraordinary number of words from English, so much so that it is not unusual to encounter sentences such as Min girl-friend är well-dressed till weekenden. "My girlfriend is well dressed for the weekend".

• General usefulness: Swedish is the official language of Sweden, but it also has official status in Finland, where it is spoken natively by more than 300,000 people, and is studied as "the second official language of the country" by the overwhelming majority of the population. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are close enough to one another that knowledge of one gives reading knowledge of the other two, while the ability to understand the spoken versions of the other two can be acquired with a minimum of effort. Thus, a knowledge of Swedish opens the door to the cultures of four different countries, countries which have made important contributions to architecture, social policy, and other fields, and which deserve to be better known. Being a language closely related to English, Swedish also sheds many unexpected insights on the development and structure of our own language. For me, one of the exciting things about learning Swedish was the fun of figuring out Norwegian and Danish.

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