Swedish language

• 1. Introduction

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  Swedish, known to its speakers as svenska, is the native language of at least 10 million people, making it the fourth most spoken Germanic language in the world and the most widely spoken in the Nordic countries. It belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, a cluster of languages that descends from Old Norse, the tongue carried across Scandinavia by the peoples of the Viking Age. That common ancestry means Swedish shares enough with Norwegian and Danish that speakers of those languages can, depending on dialect and accent, understand one another without a translator. Yet Swedish also has a story all its own: a language shaped by religious upheaval, trade empires, class politics, and a single social revolution in the late 1960s that changed the way every Swede speaks to every other Swede. How did a medieval legal document from 1225 become the starting point of a written tradition? Why did a Bible translation outlast its era by nearly four centuries? And how did a pronoun become the site of a culture war? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots in Runes

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  In the 8th century, the common Germanic tongue of Scandinavia known as Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse, and with it came a fork in the road. The dialects of Norway, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland drifted toward what linguists call Old West Norse, while Denmark and Sweden developed Old East Norse. The Swedish varieties of that eastern branch have a specific name: Runic Swedish. The name comes from the writing system those speakers used, the Younger Futhark alphabet, which had only 16 letters. Because the alphabet was so small, individual runes carried multiple sounds. The rune for the vowel u, for example, also represented o, ø, and y. That compression left ambiguities in the record that scholars still work through today.

  From around 1200 onward, the dialects of Denmark began pulling away from those of Sweden, sending waves of linguistic innovation northward unevenly. A striking example is the change of the diphthong æi into the simpler monophthong é, visible in runic inscriptions where an older stain gradually becomes stin, the word for stone. A parallel shift turned the diphthong au, heard in the word for "dead," into a long open ø. Runic inscriptions preserve both stages: the older tauþr gives way to tuþr. These vowel changes eventually reached most of the Runic Swedish-speaking area too, with the exception of dialects north and east of Mälardalen, where remnants of the old diphthongs survived into more recent centuries in remote communities.

• 3. Medieval Law and the Hanseatic Flood

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  1225 is the year traditionally given as the start of Old Swedish, because that is when the Västgötalagen, the Västgöta Law, is believed to have been compiled for the first time. Written in Latin script, it stands among the oldest Swedish law codes and the most important documents of the medieval period. Old Swedish is divided into two sub-periods: äldre fornsvenska, covering 1225 to 1375, and yngre fornsvenska, running from 1375 to 1526.

  The church arrived first. The firm establishment of Christian institutions and various monastic orders brought Greek and Latin loanwords into the language in significant numbers. Then came a different kind of power: the Hanseatic League. With the rise of Hanseatic influence in the late 13th and early 14th century, Middle Low German flooded into Swedish commerce and administration. The League brought with it a large contingent of Low German-speaking immigrants, many of whom became influential members of medieval Swedish society. Their linguistic fingerprints went deep. Besides loanwords covering warfare, trade, and administration, general grammatical suffixes and even conjunctions passed into Swedish from their native languages.

  Early Old Swedish also looked quite different from the language spoken today. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and certain numerals were all inflected across four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. The gender system resembled modern German, with masculine, feminine, and neuter categories. By the 16th century, that complexity had been substantially reduced. The masculine and feminine genders merged into a single common gender, and the four cases collapsed toward the two-case system that modern Swedish uses.

• 4. The Bible That Built a Standard

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  Modern Swedish begins with two forces arriving together: the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. After seizing power, the monarch Gustav Vasa ordered a Swedish translation of the Bible. The New Testament appeared in 1526. A full Bible followed in 1541, a translation so widely used that, with successive revisions, it remained the dominant Swedish Bible until 1917. The three principal translators were Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri, all from central Sweden, a geographic fact that embedded Central Swedish features into what became a touchstone of the written language.

  The translation is remembered as a reasonable middle path: it avoided both the most archaic forms and the roughest colloquialisms of its day. More concretely, it established the vowels å, ä, and ö as fixtures of Swedish orthography, and it standardized the spelling ck in place of kk. That second choice was not merely aesthetic. It distinguished the Swedish Bible clearly from the Danish Bible at a moment when rivalry between the two kingdoms was fierce, and the distinction may well have been intentional.

  The paradox is that this landmark text did not immediately stabilize Swedish spelling. Inconsistency actually increased through the rest of the 16th century. Capitalization varied by author: those influenced by German conventions capitalized all nouns, while others were far more selective. The Gothic or blackletter typeface used to print the Bible made it difficult to even tell which letters were uppercase. That typeface remained in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced by a Latin typeface commonly called Antiqua. The first time the new letters ä, å, and ö appeared in print was in a publication called Aff dyäffwlsens frästilse, "By the Devil's temptation," published by Johan Gerson in 1495.

• 5. The Du Revolution

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  A very significant shift in Swedish unfolded in the late 1960s under the name du-reformen, the du reform. Before it, Swedish social life carried a formidable linguistic burden. The accepted way to address a stranger of unknown occupation, academic title, or military rank was through titles and surnames, combined with third-person phrasing. Using herr for Mr or Sir, fru for Mrs or Ma'am, or fröken for Miss was considered the only polite approach with strangers. Worse, the convention that the other person should be referred to in the third person rather than addressed directly made everyday conversation awkward and hierarchical.

  An earlier attempt in the early 20th century had tried to replace the title system with ni, the standard second-person plural pronoun, analogous to the French vous. The effort failed. Ni wound up being repurposed as a subtly condescending form of du, the second-person singular, and came to signal that the speaker regarded the listener as socially inferior.

  What finally broke the system was not a government decree but a sweeping change in social attitudes accompanying the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society through the 1950s and 1960s. Du became the standard form of address even in formal and official contexts. The transition was remarkably fast: the reform completed itself within just a few years, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Today, the older form ni as a polite address still appears occasionally in both spoken and written Swedish, particularly among older speakers.

• 6. Swedish Beyond Sweden

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  Swedish is the sole official language of Åland, an autonomous county of Finland where the vast majority of the roughly 26,000 inhabitants speak it as a first language. Finland as a whole has two national languages, Swedish and Finnish, with the same official status at the state level. In 2007, around 5.5 percent of Finland's population, approximately 290,000 people, were native Swedish speakers, a proportion that has declined steadily since Russian annexation of Finland following the Finnish War of 1808-1809. The Swedish-speaking population is concentrated in coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. Finland's public broadcaster, Yle, operates two Swedish-language radio stations, Yle Vega and Yle X3M, along with a TV channel, Yle Fem.

  In Sweden itself, Swedish gained formal legal recognition as the country's official main language only in 2009. A bill proposed in 2005 to establish that status failed by the narrowest possible margin, 145 votes to 147, due to a pairing-off failure. A broader language law submitted to the Swedish Ministry of Culture in March 2008 was subsequently enacted by the Riksdag and entered into force on the 1st of July 2009.

  Beyond Scandinavia, the language has carried far. As of 2010, an estimated 300,000 Swedish speakers lived outside Sweden and Finland, with the largest population, up to 100,000, in the United States. The United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany each hosted around 30,000. The 2000 United States Census recorded some 67,000 people over the age of five as Swedish speakers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Swedish immigration to states like Minnesota was substantial; by 1940, approximately 6 percent of Minnesota's population spoke Swedish. Small communities in places like Lindström and Scandia still retain some connection to the language.

• 7. Rinkeby and Living Change

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  Rinkeby is a suburb in northern Stockholm with a large immigrant population, and it has given its name to a variety of Swedish studied closely by linguists. Rinkeby Swedish is spoken by young people of foreign heritage in certain suburbs and urban districts across Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Its features are shared across these cities in ways that cross the geographic boundaries typical of a dialect, leading some scholars to classify it instead as a sociolect, a variety tied to social identity rather than place.

  Swedish linguist Ulla-Britt Kotsinas conducted a survey that captured just how distinctive this variety had become. Foreign learners were asked to identify the origins of Rinkeby Swedish speakers they heard on recordings. The hardest case was a boy whose parents were both Swedish. Only 1.8 percent of the listeners correctly identified his native language. The variety had diverged so far from standard expectations that even careful listeners could not place it.

  A gender-neutral pronoun, hen, has also entered Swedish in recent years, used particularly in literary Swedish alongside the existing han for he and hon for she. Swedish has long been open to such coinages: the language can build new words by compounding existing ones, a process that produces formations like nagellackborttagningsmedel, meaning nail polish remover, or smyglyssna, to eavesdrop. New vocabulary also arrives by derivation, as when the noun bil, meaning car, generates the verb bila, meaning to travel recreationally by car. The Swedish Language Council, Språkrådet, serves as the regulator of the language in Sweden, though unlike France's Académie française it does not attempt to enforce its guidance. Its most authoritative instrument, the spelling dictionary Svenska Akademiens ordlista, is currently in its 14th edition.