SWEDISH LANGUAGE

Swedish Svensk, national language of Sweden and, with Finnish, one of the two official languages of Finland. Swedish belongs to the East Scandinavian group of North Germanic languages. Until World War II, it was also spoken in parts of Estonia and Latvia. Swedish was spoken by about 9 million people in the late 20th century. It is closely related to Norwegian and Danish. The history of Swedish from the Common Scandinavian period (6001050) until about 1225 is known chiefly from numerous runic inscriptions. Radical changes took place in the language, especially in the sound system, during the 14th and 15th centuries. Modern Swedish is usually dated from 1526, when a translation of the New Testament was first printed. The standard language began to emerge in the 17th century, formed principally on the Svea dialects spoken in Stockholm and around Lake Mlar but with some features from the Gta dialects. The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, published a Swedish grammar in 1836 and later began a dictionary. A characteristic of Swedish grammar, shared with the other Scandinavian languages, is enclitic definite articles, the placement of the definite article after the noun. Standard Swedish has no case endings in nouns except for the possessive s (as in English) and has only two genders (neuter, common). In most dialects, however, three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) are still differentiated. Swedish has a tone or pitch accent, described by many speakers of English as a singsong rhythm. The vocabulary contains many loanwords, especially from Low German and High German and, in more recent times, from French and English.