How many People Understand Swedish?

Swedish as a Language:
Swedish is the native language of Sweden and of Swedish settlers in other parts of the world, notably in Finland. Swedish belongs to the northern or Scandinavian branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages. It is an eastern development of the language known as Dönsk tunga ("Danish tongue"), spoken not only in Denmark but in all of Scandinavia even before the early Middle Ages.

The Swedish branch of this common tongue developed into a separate language during the period 900-1500 and is called Old Swedish. Until after 1200 the only records of the language are runic inscriptions, cut primarily on tombstones and memorial stones. The Latin alphabet was introduced in the 13th century; periods of further differentiation followed, and some approximation to Danish occurred. The written language, based on two of the most widely spoken dialects, was made uniform throughout all of Sweden in the 14th century. Aside from differences in vocabulary, Swedish now differs from Danish especially in its retention, after a vowel, of the old voiceless consonants k, t, and p, which in Danish changed to g, d, and b, and in its retention of the vowels a and o in unstressed syllables, whereas Danish has e or no vowel.

The main body of the Swedish vocabulary is of old Germanic stock. The principal foreign ingredients are Latin and Greek words that came in with Christianity and also with the growth of scholarship. Low German words dating from the time of the Hanseatic League (13th-16th century), German words from the 17th century, and French words borrowed in the 17th and 18th centuries are all part of modern Swedish. Swedish has a unique accent that involves both stress and variations in musical pitch, which gives it a singsong rhythm. A simplified spelling reform was introduced in 1906.

Swedish Spoken Outside of Sweden:
In Finland where some 64 percent of the population is urban, both Finnish and Swedish are the official languages. More than 93 percent of the population speaks Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language (related to the languages spoken in Finland, Estonia, and Hungary). Prior to the last year or so, finnish schools required everyone to learn Swedish. Just recently, however, Swedish became a voluntarily subject. It is estimated that approximately 33 percent of the Finish population speaks Swedish as their native language. About 6 percent of the people, concentrated largely in the Ahvenanmaa archipelago, speak only Swedish.

Norwegian, as with the other Scandinavian languages, is derived from an ancient common Scandinavian language, which can be traced through runic inscriptions to the 3rd century AD. Because of the significant dialectal changes that occurred during the Viking age (circa 800-1050), Old Norse (or Old Norwegian), a language from which the modern tongue is derived, came into being and was spread by Norwegian migration to Iceland and other areas in the North Atlantic. The Latin alphabet, replacing runic signs, was introduced with Christianity, and a distinct Norwegian written language evolved in the 11th century. During the subsequent centuries, the Norwegian language was influenced by Danish, Low German, and Swedish. The Danish influence was dominant between 1380 and 1814, when Norway was united with Denmark under the Danish crown.

Icelandic, the language of the people of Iceland, is also a member of the North Germanic (Scandinavian) branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is derived from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings who came to Iceland from Norway in the 9th century AD. From 1380 to 1918 Iceland was ruled by Denmark; despite this, Icelandic remained virtually uninfluenced, its purity of form assured by geographic isolation and a strong literary tradition. Even today Icelandic differs little from Old Norse, and modern readers can easily read the medieval Eddas and sagas. Island is a country of approximately 271,033 people (1998 estimate) that could be added to the marketing database.

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