What Language Speak in Sweden?
Swedish is one of the world’s most widely spoken Scandinavian languages, boasting wide global recognition from IKEA furniture designs to ABBA songs. Additionally, Swedish has many cognates that English speakers find comfortingly familiar.
English features an expansive vowel inventory and distinct suffixes to denote gender, number and definiteness. Furthermore, English features stress as well as tonal qualities found in many dialects.
Romani
Romani dialects have spread throughout Europe, each taking on local influences. For example, in the Balkans the Romani language features two-way case system (nominative and oblique), while most German dialects don’t possess such features.
What Language Speak in Sweden? has a national minority law that supports and protects Finnish, Meankieli, Romani Chib, Sami and Yiddish as national minority languages. Children whose parents belong to these minority groups have the right to learn their native tongue and use it in interactions with government agencies.
Ashkenazic Jews
Sweden’s National Minority Language Policy gives Yiddish great respect. It allows Jewish residents to conduct government business in Yiddish and promotes initiatives to expand its use. Furthermore, Swedish television and radio have produced a series that follows Jewish journalist Tomas Woodski around the globe.
The pronunciation of Hebrew differs between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, with Sephardic pronunciation distinguishing between letters ayin, alef and chet/chaf; modern Hebrew does not make this distinction.
English
This language features an expansive vocabulary and distinct inflection patterns. Additionally, its comparative and superlative forms are distinct, and its noun system includes both indefinite and definitive articles.
Swedish schools teach English at all levels and students typically attain fluency by the end of high school. Jonkoping, Kalmar and Vaxjo have the highest English proficiency rates.
Pronunciation can be tricky for English-speakers as Swedish vowels tend to be more pronounced than their English equivalents and don’t tend to reduce to schwa sounds as easily. Learning compound words such as sjukskoterska or tandssticksask may also prove challenging.
German
Many Germans find Swedish pronunciation more challenging than English due to different rules for sounds and pronunciation. German has a guttoral R sound which contrasts with the alveolar Swedish “R.” Additionally, German has cases and verb inflections while standard Swedish has only two genders.
Sweden is home to several European languages, such as German, French and Spanish that are commonly spoken among immigrant communities and used in business, education and international communication.
French
Your smartphone comes equipped with a voice recording feature; use this to practice Swedish pronunciation and see how closely your accent and pronunciation match that of native speakers.
Swedish immigrant communities speak a range of languages, such as Arabic, Somalian, Kurdish, Turkish and Bosnian. Some national minority languages even enjoy official recognition by Swedish government agencies allowing their use when communicating with these agencies.
Italian
Swedish is a North Germanic language closely related to Danish and Norwegian, which contains many vowels that may make pronunciation challenging for beginners.
Sweden is home to numerous immigrant communities that speak a range of languages, such as Arabic, Persian and Turkish. These national minority languages have been officially recognized and granted children who speak them the right to mother-tongue education at school. Dialects of Swedish can differ across Sweden but remain nearly intelligible between regions.
Norwegian
Norwegian is a North Germanic language which shares its roots with Danish and Swedish. With 10 million native speakers worldwide, Norwegian forms part of the Nordic languages family alongside Icelandic and Faroese.
Norwegian pronunciation resembles Danish closely, yet with some key distinctions. Notable differences include how -er is changed into -en in Norwegian, while zero-ending words take on an additional suffix called -ene.
What Language Speak in Sweden?, as a diverse multicultural country, embraces immigrant communities with multiple languages spoken across its borders. Sweden currently recognizes five national minority languages that may only be taught at schools if they meet certain criteria.
Danish
Danish is closely related to other Scandinavian languages, yet has its own distinctive phonology. For instance, Danish features stod, which is an suprasegmental feature used extensively lenition of plosives. Furthermore, this dialect lacks person marking on verbs whereas Bokmal and Nynorsk possess this feature.
Learning Danish pronunciation may seem complex at first, but with practice you should soon be able to form sentences and string together some words. The hardest part will likely be pronouncing the t and o sounds correctly.
Swedish
Learning Swedish can be difficult, particularly in regards to pronunciation. Although its alphabet and vowels are similar to English’s, their tones vary considerably with some vowels being soft while others hard.
As an example, “sjukskoterska” can be pronounced softly with an “sj” sound; while its final “sk” can be hardened into an “sc” sound. Other pronunciations may also exist depending on where in Finland one lives.
Gothenburg dialect is famously noted for sounding more “sing-songy,” with vowels being shortened before suffixes and loss of rs in certain words such as kille and gem.
