Swedish
Language · official in 3 countries and territories
Sweden had no law making Swedish its official language until 1 July 2009, although the language had long run its government and schools. Swedish, a North Germanic descendant of Old Norse, is official in 3 places on record: Sweden, Finland beside Finnish, and the autonomous Åland Islands, where it stands alone.
The language on record
- Own name
- svenska
- ISO 639-1
- SV
- ISO 639-3
- SWE
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- North Germanic
- Official in
- 3 countries
Where Swedish is official
Sweden, and Finland with its autonomous Åland Islands. Finland gives Swedish and Finnish equal status at state level; Åland has Swedish as its sole official language.
Official beside Swedish
About Swedish
Why Sweden passed a language law so late
Swedish was long the primary language of Sweden in practice only. A bill to make it official failed in 2005 by 145 votes to 147, after a pairing-off arrangement went wrong. An expert committee proposed a broader law in March 2008, naming Swedish the main language of the country and strengthening the minority languages, and the Riksdag enacted it with effect from 1 July 2009.
The Swedish Language Council, Språkrådet, regulates the language without enforcing its rules. Its member the Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, publishes the spelling dictionary Svenska Akademiens ordlista, which mostly describes current usage.
How the Reformation Bible fixed the spelling
The New Testament appeared in Swedish in 1526 and the full Bible in 1541, translated by Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri. It fixed å, ä and ö and wrote ck for kk, which set it apart from the Danish Bible, and it stayed in common use, revised, until 1917. Spelling grew less consistent after it, and only the reform of 1906 made the written language almost uniform. W counted as a variant of v until the 13th edition of the Academy's word list in April 2006.
What replaced titles in everyday address
Until the 1960s, strangers were addressed by title and surname, with herr, fru or fröken, and often in the third person. An early 20th-century attempt to use ni as a polite pronoun failed, and ni ended up as a form for addressing people of lower status. The du-reformen of the late 1960s and early 1970s made du standard even in official settings. No decree ordered it.
How Swedish stands in Finland
Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, with equal status at state level. In 2007 around 290,000 people, 5.5% of the population, spoke Swedish natively, mostly on the southern and western coasts and archipelagos, where 19 municipalities have Swedish as their sole official language; 16 of them are in Åland. A branch of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland regulates Finland Swedish and works to keep it intelligible to speakers in Sweden.
Common questions
Questions about Swedish
Can Danes and Norwegians understand Swedish?
Largely, depending on dialect and accent. A considerable share of Danish speakers, and more of Norwegian speakers, understand Swedish.
How many letters does the Swedish alphabet have?
Twenty-nine: the 26 basic Latin letters, then å, ä and ö after z. The three extra letters were formed in the 16th century by writing a small o or e above a vowel. Swedes treat them as separate letters, not accented ones.
What language is spoken on Åland?
Swedish, the sole official language of the autonomous region, and the first language of the great majority of its inhabitants.