Languages
Native
Swedish
95%
Language Samples
Hej, hur mår du?
Hello, how are you?
Jag mår mycket bra, tack.
I am very well, thanks.
Ett, två, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju, åtta, nio, tio.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Swedish is a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse, the common tongue of the Viking Age Scandinavians. It diverged from Danish and Norwegian gradually through the medieval period, with a distinct standard form emerging in the 16th century following the Reformation and the translation of the Bible into Swedish (1541). The language has absorbed loanwords from Low German during the Hanseatic period, from French during the 17th–18th century Age of Greatness, and from English in the modern era. Today Swedish is the official language of Sweden and a co-official language of Finland, spoken natively by about 10 million people.
Similar Languages
Norwegian
90%
Danish
85%
German
60%
English
55%
Media
Uppsala University, founded in 1477, is the oldest university in Scandinavia and a centre of Swedish language scholarship.
Photo: Dr. Mirko Junge · CC BY-SA 3.0
Did You Know
01
Swedish has a distinctive pitch accent: many words change meaning depending on whether the stress is a single-tone or a double-tone contour.
02
The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, awards the Nobel Prize in Literature each year.
03
Swedish contains the letters Å, Ä, and Ö, which are considered separate letters placed at the end of the alphabet rather than variants of A and O.