How Sweden exports its culture and keeps its countryside open

Why Swedish became official so late

Swedish is a North Germanic language, closely related to Danish and Norwegian and differing mainly in pronunciation and orthography, and it became the official language of Sweden on 1 July 2009, when a new language law came into force. Until that date the country had no legally designated language at all.

The delay was not an oversight. The question of declaring Swedish official had been raised before and the Riksdag had declined, on the reasoning that a language spoken by essentially the whole population needed no legal protection, and that legislating one might imply something about the languages of people who spoke others. What changed the calculation was European minority-language policy, which required a country to say what its languages were before it could protect any of them.

Five minority languages are recognised: Finnish, Meänkieli, Sámi, Romani and Yiddish. Sweden Finns are the largest linguistic minority at about 5% of the population, and Meänkieli is the Finnic variety of the Torne valley in the far north. Sámi belongs to the indigenous people of the northern territory, and it is not one language but a group of them, several of which have very few remaining speakers. Romani and Yiddish are recognised without being territorial, which was the point of recognising them: the framework had to accommodate languages belonging to communities rather than to places.

The context for all of this is a country that has become substantially more diverse than the one that assumed it needed no language law. Statistics Sweden recorded 2,752,572 residents of foreign background in 2021, 26% of the population, defined as born abroad or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents, of whom 2,090,503 were born abroad. There are no official statistics on ethnicity.

How a state church became a former state church

Sweden left the Catholic communion in the sixteenth century and adopted the Lutheran faith. Gustav I, having taken the throne from the Danish king, promoted a national church headed by himself, and under his reign the whole Bible was translated into Swedish for the first time, which became the foundation of the written language as well as of the church.

That arrangement lasted four and a half centuries. In 2000 the Church of Sweden was separated from the state, making Sweden the second Nordic country to disestablish its national church, after Finland did so in 1869.

The traces remain administrative. Sweden's municipalities are divided into 2,512 parishes, which have no political responsibilities and are traditional subdivisions of the Church of Sweden, still used as census districts. A country can disestablish a church and continue counting its population in units the church drew, because the units were useful and replacing them would have cost more than leaving them alone. That is a recognisably Swedish resolution of a question about principle.

Before the eleventh century Swedes practised Norse paganism, with its centre at the temple at Uppsala. Christianisation in the eleventh century changed the law to forbid the worship of other deities, a prohibition that survived until the late nineteenth century.

What the right of public access permits

The right of public access is the single legal principle that most shapes ordinary Swedish life outdoors. It allows people to explore the country's nature, to pick berries, to walk the trails and to pitch a tent in the forest, on land they do not own.

It comes with an outdoor access code rather than a list of permissions, and the code is where the obligations sit: enjoying nature responsibly, leaving no damage, respecting the privacy of homes and the working use of land. The right applies in most places and there are defined exceptions, which is the part visitors most often miss.

The effect on culture is larger than the effect on law. Outdoor life is a mainstream activity in Sweden rather than a specialist hobby, because the countryside is legally open to everyone rather than owned in a way that excludes them, and a great deal of what Swedes do at weekends follows from that single fact.

What the provinces still mean

Sweden has twenty-five historical provinces, which in their early history communicated poorly with each other and each developed a distinct culture. They lost their importance as administrative and political regions long ago, and the population still identifies with them.

Each province has its own coat of arms, its own dialect features, its own food and often its own folk costume. Colourful traditional costumes appear at Midsummer and comparable occasions. A national costume, the Sverigedräkten designed by Märta Jörgensen mainly in blue and yellow, has been established since 2004 and is worn by royal women on some official occasions, replacing an eighteenth-century predecessor.

The calendar carries the same layering. Alongside the Protestant Christian holidays, Sweden marks Midsummer at the summer solstice, Walpurgis Night on 30 April with bonfires, and May Day on 1 May as a day of labour demonstrations. Two of those three are older than the church that was disestablished in 2000.

What Swedish design actually is

Furniture design has been shaped worldwide by IKEA's international success, and automotive design by Volvo and Saab. Artisan glass from the region known as the Kingdom of Crystal has its own international recognition. Those three, flat-packed furniture, safety-first cars and hand-blown glass, are unlike each other in every respect except one: all three are designed to be used rather than admired.

The word usually applied is functionalism, and the fair summary of Swedish design is a set of decisions about who an object is for. Mass production at a price ordinary households could pay was a stated goal rather than a commercial accident, and it connects the design tradition directly to the political tradition that built the welfare state in the same decades.

What that produces is a national aesthetic recognisable across categories and difficult to describe without sounding like a catalogue. Its clearest single monument is on the World Heritage List: Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery in Stockholm inscribed in 1994, which is a burial ground designed as landscape.

What the country writes and films

Carl Linnaeus's work reshaped biological taxonomy and is the Swedish contribution with the longest reach. In literature the names that travelled are August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren, whose children's series are read in dozens of languages, and more recently the Nordic noir detective tradition, of which the Millennium series is the best known example.

Film and music both became international in the twentieth century, through figures such as Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman, and Sweden's pop music output since has been out of proportion to its population. Alongside it runs a death metal scene of real depth, with a melodic variety associated with Gothenburg and bands including In Flames, Dark Tranquillity and At the Gates, and Stockholm groups such as Amon Amarth and Opeth.

Video games are the newest of these exports. Minecraft, released by the Swedish developer Mojang Studios in 2009, became one of the best-selling video games there has been, and a set of newer studios has followed it out of the same country. A population of ten million supporting a games industry of that weight is the same arithmetic as the music one, and it has the same explanation: state-funded music and computing education, cheap broadband early, and no domestic market worth targeting. The pattern across all of them is consistent: a small domestic market, an early orientation towards export, and English used as a working language without displacing Swedish at home. A Swedish studio or band assumes from the first day that its audience is somewhere else, which is a different starting assumption from the one a French or German equivalent makes.

What is eaten and when

Swedish cooking is traditionally simple, built on what keeps through a long winter: preserved fish, dairy, root vegetables, bread and berries gathered in a short season. The dishes that travelled are the ones that industrialised well, and the one that became an international marker is the cinnamon roll, which has had its own day in the Swedish calendar since 1999.

The more revealing habit is fika, a coffee break taken with something sweet, which is a scheduled social institution rather than a snack. It appears in workplaces at fixed times, and the fact that a country with this reputation for reserve built a formal ritual for talking to colleagues is a better description of Swedish sociability than the reputation is.

The year is punctuated by meals attached to specific dates. Midsummer, Walpurgis Night on 30 April and the Christmas period each carry their own food, and the provinces contribute local variants of most of it. Berry and mushroom picking in late summer belongs to the same pattern and is enabled by the right of public access rather than by ownership.

Restaurant cooking has changed more than home cooking. A Nordic culinary movement built on local, seasonal and foraged ingredients reframed the same raw materials that home kitchens had always used, and the exports it produced were reputational rather than commercial: the ingredients stayed where they were and the ideas travelled.

What is inscribed and what it says

Sweden holds 15 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, thirteen cultural, one natural and one mixed, and the list is unusually revealing about what the country values.

Very little of it is grand. Engelsberg ironworks, inscribed in 1993, and the Great Copper Mountain mining area at Falun, inscribed in 2001, are industrial. The naval port of Karlskrona, inscribed in 1998, and the Grimeton radio station at Varberg, inscribed in 2004, are technical. The decorated farmhouses of Hälsingland, inscribed in 2012, the church town of Gammelstad at Luleå, inscribed in 1996, and the agricultural region of southern Öland, inscribed in 2000, are vernacular and rural. The rock carvings at Tanum, inscribed in 1994, and Birka and Hovgården, inscribed in 1993, are prehistoric and Viking.

The exceptions prove the rule. Drottningholm, inscribed in 1991, is the royal palace, and the Hanseatic town of Visby on Gotland, inscribed in 1995, is a walled medieval trading city. Skogskyrkogården is twentieth-century design. The Struve Geodetic Arc, inscribed in 2005 and shared with nine other countries, is a chain of survey points used to measure the shape of the earth, and it is a heritage site consisting of marks in the ground across a third of a continent. Sweden's contribution to it is a handful of those points, which is a fair emblem for the whole list: the value is in what was done rather than in what was built.

The mixed property is the Laponian Area, inscribed in 1996, a region of the far north that is simultaneously wilderness and a living Sámi cultural landscape, and it is listed as both because separating the two would misdescribe it. Sweden: travel covers reaching these places, and Sweden: geography the country they sit in.