Swedish Dictionaries

Swedish belongs to the North (Scandinavian) group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is closely related to Danish and Norwegian. Swedish is spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland by close to 9 million people.

Like all Germanic language, Swedish originated from Old Norse which began to split into Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Sweden and Denmark) in the 9th century. In the 12th century, Sweden and Danish emerged as distinct varieties. They became Old Danish and Old Swedish in the 13th century. Both were heavily influenced by Middle Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League spoken around the Baltic and North Seas during the medieval period.

Early medieval Swedish had a more complex grammar than modern Swedish. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases and three genders. (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative), whereas today there are only two (nominative and genitive). The verb system was also more complex: it included subjunctive and imperative moods and verbs were were marked for person and number. By the 16th century, the case and gender systems of the colloquial spoken language had been largely reduced to the two cases and two genders of modern Swedish, and the verbs lost their conjugation.

Swedish is the de facto national language of Sweden, where it is spoken by close to 8 million people, although it does not have the status of an official language there. It is the first or primary language for the majority of Sweden's citizens. In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. Swedish is a mandatory subject in all Finnish schools. Ethnologue estimates that the total number of speakers of Swedish worldwide is 8.8 million. Swedish is one of the official languages of the European Union.