Voice Over Sydney: Just as Danish and Norwegian, Swedish also belongs to the North Germanic language group. It is not a widely spoken language: some 9 million people speak it in Sweden, although it is also used in some regions of Finland, where over 5% of the population use it. Swedish is recognized as an official language in Finland, too.
Nordic countries constitute an entity in themselves, they are close geographically, ethnically and share similar sounding languages. Even a shallow exploration into Scandinavian history reveals that all Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland share common roots. If you ask people what they associate Scandinavia with, the most likely answer surely is “the Vikings”. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that any common features still present in Scandinavian languages today (apart from Finnish) can be traced back to Viking times. Indeed Old Norse, which was the North Germanic language spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Ages is the mother of all those four languages. Old Norse was spoken until around 1300 AD. Old Norse was an evolution of the very early Proto-Norse, which was spoken in the region during the 8th century, evolving into the different modern North Germanic languages after the Viking Ages.
Voice Over Sydney: Characteristics of the Swedish Language
Along with other North Germanic languages, it derives from Old Norse and is currently the most widely spoken North Germanic language. It is composed of the Roman alphabet in addition to a handful of other letters. Sweden – Stockholm and Swedish Flag
The standard word order in Voice over Sydney Swedish follows that of most Germanic languages, that is, the finite verb always appears in second position in a declarative main clause. Morphologically Swedish is similar to English, that is, words have practically lost inflections apart from some exceptions and there are no grammatical cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Swedish has masculine and femenine gender, though. Again, just as it happens in English, adjectives are compared in the same way, but they are inflected depending on gender, number and definiteness. Older analyses posit the cases nominative and genitive and there are some remains of the use of accusative and dative forms as well. Unlike English, though, the definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes and not articles. This is then complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles.
Voice Over Sydney: Other Countries where Swedish is spoken
Swedish is also spoken in Norway, Brazil (where between 800,000 to 1 million people claim Scandinavian ancestry – the first sea line between the two countries was initiated in 1909), Argentina, Estonia and the USA. In fact, the US alone accounts for approximately 300,000 Scandinavian speakers. Out of the 9.5 million Swedish-speaking people, there are over 7.9 million who access the Internet worldwide in Swedish.
