Swedish introduction

From UniLang Wiki

Swedish (Svenska) is spoken by about 10 million people in Sweden and Finland. Swedish is a Germanic language, related to e.g. English, German, Dutch and the other Scandinavian languages (except Finnish).

Swedish alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÅÄÖ
C, Q, Z, X and W are mostly used in loanwords and proper names.
"Zetterqvist" is a normal Swedish last name.

Swedes seldom have problems understanding Norwegian (~5 million speakers) and if they try hard enough, Danish (~5 million as well) is no problem neither, except some words whose meaning have changed in the three languages. (Ie. "rolig" = "funny" in Swedish but "calm" in Danish).

Swedish has many vowels (18 if you count long and short vowels as different ones, which most phoneticians do.) and some rare consonants; a sch-sound, pronounced almost as an expiration, but not as far down in the throath as the german ach-sound. There are also the "exotic" retroflex consonants (rt, rs, rd and rl) which also exist in many Indian languages(!). Swedish also uses tones to separate similar sounding words – just as Chinese, but Swedish only uses 2 tones, Chinese uses 4–8 tones...

Vowel length is very important in Swedish, "hat" (long a) means "hate", "hatt" (short a) means "hat"; "ful" (long u) means "ugly", "full" (short u) means "drunk" or "full"; "svin" (long i) means "swine", "svinn" (short i) means "waste". Many thousand words are only distinguished by the their vowel length.

Swedish has two genders: the utrum (en-words) and the neutrum (ett-words). Utrum is actually a meltdown of the masculine and feminine genders. Thus, most words describing living things (mostly animals and human beings) are utrum.

More to come...
Felix Ahlner

For a more encyclopedic overview on the Swedish language we also recommend the article at Wikipedia.