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| Contents | ||
| Swedish (Svenska) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Sweden and Finland |
| Region: | Northern Europe |
| Total speakers: | 9 million |
| Ranking: | 89 |
| Genetic classification: | Indo-European Germanic North Germanic East Scandinavian Swedish |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Finland (with Finnish), Åland (unilingually), and the European Union. (De facto language of Sweden.) |
| Regulated by: | None (However, the Swedish Academy is important.) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | sv |
| ISO 639-2 | swe |
| SIL | SWD |
Swedish is closely related to, and usually mutually intelligible with, Danish and Norwegian. All three diverged from Old Norse about a millennium ago and were strongly influenced by Low German. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian Bokmål are all considered East Scandinavian languages; Swedes usually find it easier to understand Norwegian than Danish (but even if a Swede finds it difficult to understand a Dane, it is not necessarily the other way around).
Swedish is the national language of Sweden, mother tongue for the Sweden-born inhabitants (7,881,000) and acquired by nearly all immigrants (1,028,000) (figures according to official statistics for 2001).
Swedish is the language of the Åland Islands, an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland. In Mainland Finland, however, Swedish is mother tongue for only a minority of the Finns, or about six percent. The Finland-Swedish minority is concentrated in some coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and southwestern Finland, where they form a local majority in some communities.
There were formerly Swedish-speaking communities in the Baltic countries, especially on the islands ( Dagö, Ösel and Ormsö ) along the coast. After the loss of the Baltic territories to Russia in the early 18th century, many of them were forced to make the long march to Ukraine. The survivors of that march eventually founded a number of Swedish-speaking villages, which survived until the Russian revolution when the inhabitants were evacuated to Sweden. The dialect they spoke was known as gammalsvenska (Old Swedish). (Today there exist a few elderly descendants in the village of Gammalsvenskby (Old Swedish Village) in Ukraine, who still speak Swedish and observe holidays according to the Swedish calendar.)
In Estonia, the small remaining Swedish community was very well treated between the first and second world wars. Municipalities with a Swedish majority, mainly found along the coast, had Swedish as the administrative language and Swedish-Estonian culture experienced an upswing. However most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden at the end of World War II when Estonia was reconquered by the Soviet Union.
There are small numbers of Swedish speakers in other countries, such as the United States. (See Languages in the United States.) There are also descendants in Brazil and Argentina resulting from Swedish immigration that have maintained a distinction by language and names, also against groups of European immigrants in the region.
There is considerable migration (labour and other) between the Nordic countries, but due to the similarity between the languages and culture expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. (Note: Finland is, strictly speaking, not a Scandinavian country. It does, however, belong to the so called Nordic countries together with Iceland and the Scandinavian countries.)