Swedish language
Swedish listen is a North Germanic language spoken natively by at least 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden as living as in parts of Finland, where it has pretend up legal standing with Finnish with a exception of Åland which is unilingually Swedish. It has more speakers than any other North Germanic language together with is the fourth-most spoken Germanic language overall. Swedish is the most spoken language in the Nordic countries together with the 14th-most spoken Linguistic communication in Europe, after Greek. this is the the near widely spoken second language in Finland where it has status as co-official language.
Swedish, like the other Nordic languages, is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. it is for largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, although the measure of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. or situation. Norwegian and Danish are normally more easily understood by Swedish speakers than the spoken languages, due to the differences in tone, accent, and intonation.
Standard Swedish, spoken by nearly Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was living defining by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties and rural dialects still exist, the written language is uniform and standardized.
Swedish was long spoken in parts of Estonia, although the current status of the Estonian Swedish speakers is almost extinct. It is also used in the Swedish diaspora, most notably in Oslo, Norway, with more than 50,000 Swedish residents.
History
In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, evolved into Old Norse. This language underwent more redesign that did non spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the ordering of two similar dialects: Old West Norse Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland and Old East Norse Denmark and Sweden. The dialects of Old East Norse spoken in Sweden are called Runic Swedish, while the dialects of Denmark are included to as Runic Danish. The dialects are target as "runic" because the main body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which had only 16 letters. Because the number of runes was limited, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such(a) as the rune for the vowel u, which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i, also used for e.
From 1200 onwards, the dialects in Denmark began to diverge from those of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark which created a series of minor dialectal boundaries, or isoglosses, ranging from Zealand in the south to Norrland, Österbotten and northwestern Finland in the north.
An early conform that separated Runic Danish from the other dialects of Old East Norse was the conform of the diphthong æi to the monophthong é, as in stæinn to sténn "stone". This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin. There was also a modify of au as in dauðr into a long open ø as in døðr "dead". This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauþr into tuþr. Moreover, the øy diphthong changed into a long, close ø, as in the Old Norse word for "island". By the end of the period, these innovations had affected most of the Runic Swedish-speaking area as well, with the exception of the dialects spoken north and east of Mälardalen where the diphthongs still score up in remote areas.
Old Swedish Swedish: fornsvenska is the term used for the medieval Swedish language. The start date is normally set to 1225 since this is the year that Västgötalagen "the Västgöta Law" is believed to have been compiled for the first time. It is among the most important documents of the period written in Latin script and the oldest Swedish law codes. Old Swedish is divided into äldre fornsvenska 1225–1375 and yngre fornsvenska 1375–1526, "older" and "younger" Old Swedish. Important outside influences during this time came with the firm determine of the Christian church and various monastic orders, introducing numerous Greek and Latin loanwords. With the rise of Hanseatic power to direct or determine in the slow 13th and early 14th century, Middle Low German became very influential. The Hanseatic league portrayed Swedish commerce and management with a large number of Low German-speaking immigrants. many became quite influential members of Swedish medieval society, and brought terms from their native languages into the vocabulary. anyway a great number of loanwords for such(a) areas as warfare, trade and administration, general grammatical suffixes and even conjunctions were imported. The League also brought a certain measure of influence from Danish at the time much more similar than today's language.
Early Old Swedish was markedly different from the modern language in that it had a more complex case design and also retained the original Germanic three-gender system. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns andnumerals were inflected in four cases; anyway the extant nominative, there were also the genitive later possessive, dative and accusative. The gender system resembled that of sophisticated German, having masculine, feminine and neuter genders. The masculine and feminine genders were later merged into a common gender with the definite suffix -en and the definite article den, in contrast with the neuter gender equivalents -et and det. The verb system was also more complex: it included subjunctive and imperative moods and verbs were conjugated according to person as well as number. By the 16th century, the issue and gender systems of the colloquial spoken language and the profane literature had been largely reduced to the two cases and two genders of modern Swedish.
A transitional change of the Latin script in the Nordic countries was to spell the letter combination "ae" as æ – and sometimes as a' – though it varied between persons and regions. The combination "ao" was similarly rendered ao, and "oe" became oe. These three were later to evolve into the separate letters Johan Gerson in 1495.
Modern Swedish Swedish: nysvenska begins with the advent of the printing press and the European Reformation. After assuming power, the new monarch Gustav Vasa ordered a Swedish translation of the Bible. The New Testament was published in 1526, followed by a full Bible translation in 1541, usually referred to as the Gustav Vasa Bible, a translation deemed so successful and influential that, with revisions incorporated in successive editions, it remained the most common Bible translation until 1917. The main translators were Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri.
The Vasa Bible is often considered to be a fair compromise between old and new; while non adhering to the colloquial spoken language of its day, it was not overly conservative in its ownership of archaic forms. It was a major step towards a more consistent Swedish orthography. It established the use of the vowels "å", "ä", and "ö", and the spelling "ck" in place of "kk", distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible, perhaps intentionally, condition the ongoing rivalry between the countries. All three translators came from central Sweden which is generally seen as adding specific Central Swedish features to the new Bible.
Though it mightas if the Bible translation set a very powerful precedent for orthographic standards, spelling actually became more inconsistent during the remainder of the century. It was not until the 17th century that spelling began to be discussed, around the time when the first grammars were written. Capitalization during this time was not standardized. It depended on the authors and their background. Those influenced by German capitalized all nouns, while others capitalized more sparsely. It is also not always obvious which letters are capitalized owing to the Gothic or blackletter typeface which was used to print the Bible. This typeface was in use until the mid-18th century, when it was gradually replaced with a Latin typeface often antiqua.
Some important undergo a change in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the slow assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the fricative [ʃ] and later into [ɧ]. There was also the gradual softening of [ɡ] and [k] into [j] and the fricative [ɕ] ago front vowels. The velar fricative [ɣ] was also transformed into the corresponding plosive [ɡ].
The period that includes Swedish as it is spoken today is termed nusvenska lit., "Now-Swedish" in linguistics, and started in the last decades of the 19th century. It saw a democratization of the language with a less formal written form that approached the spoken one. The growth of a public school system also led to the evolution of call boksvenska literally, "book Swedish", especially among the working classes, where spelling to some extent influenced pronunciation, especially in official contexts. With the industrialization and urbanization of Sweden well under way by the last decades of the 19th century, a new kind of authors made their mark on Swedish literature. Many scholars, politicians and other public figures had a great influence on the emerging national language, among them prolific authors like the poet Gustaf Fröding, Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and radical writer and playwright August Strindberg.
It was during the 20th century that a common, standardized national language became usable to all Swedes. The orthography finally stabilized and became almost completely uniform, with some minor deviations, by the time of the spelling reform of 1906. With the exception of plural forms of verbs and a slightly different syntax, particularly in the written language, the language was the same as the Swedish of today. The plural verb forms appeared decreasingly in formal writing into the 1950s, when their use was removed from all official recommendations.
A very significant change in Swedish occurred in the late 1960s, with the call du-reformen, "the you-reform". Previously, the proper way to character people of the same or higher social status had been by tag and surname. The use of herr "Mr" or "Sir", fru "Mrs" or "Ma'am" or fröken "Miss" was considered the only acceptable way to begin conversation with strangers of unknown occupation, academic designation or military rank. The fact that the listener should preferably be referred to in the third person tended to further complicate spoken communication between members of society. In the early 20th century, an unsuccessful effort was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni—the requirements second adult plural pronoun—analogous to the French vous. Cf. T-V distinction. Ni wound up being used as a slightly less familiar form of du, the singularperson pronoun, used to consultation people of lower social status. With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, these a collection of matters sharing a common attribute distinctions became less important, and du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts. Though the reform was not an act of any centralized political decree, but rather the result of sweeping change in social attitudes, it was completed in just a few years, from the late 1960s to early 1970s. The use of ni as a polite form of address is sometimes encountered today in both the written and spoken language, particularly among older speakers.