| SWEDISH LANGUAGE
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SOME FACTS
Swedish language, member of the North Germanic,
or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily
of the Indo-European family of languages.
It is the official language of Sweden and
one of the official languages of Finland,
and it is spoken by about 9 million people:
8,500,000 in Sweden and 500,000 elsewhere,
chiefly in Finland, Norway, and Estonia.
A descendant of Old Norse, the Swedish language
falls into two major periods historically:
Old Swedish, the early form of the language
(usually dated from the 9th cent. to the
early 16th cent.), and New Swedish, the
modern form of the language (since the early
16th cent.). The Swedish language underwent
many changes during the Middle Ages but
began to be standardized in the 16th cent.
as a result of such events as the throwing
off of Danish domination, the Reformation,
and the translation of the Bible into Swedish.
In 1786 the Swedish Academy was established
to oversee the development of the language.
Swedish absorbed a number of words from
Low German in the Middle Ages, from High
German in the 16th and 17th cent., from
French in the 18th cent., and from English
in the 20th cent. On the whole, Swedish
grammar is simple. The noun has only the
singular, possessive, and plural forms.
There are two genders for nouns, a nonneuter
(or common) class and a neuter class. The
former includes masculine, feminine, and
common nouns; the latter, nouns for such
categories as countries and substances and
also many abstract nouns. Swedish is noted
for its musical quality. This results partly
from the use of pitch accents, which sometimes
serve to differentiate the meanings of homonyms.
There is considerable difference between
the spoken and written forms of Swedish.
For example, a number of inflections used
in literary Swedish are not employed in
the spoken language. Until the early 13th
cent., runes were used for recording Swedish,
but thereafter (as Christianity took hold
in Scandinavia) they began to be replaced
by the Roman alphabet, to which three symbols,
a, a, and o, have been added.
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