Svenska Akademiens Ordlista
Encyclopedia
Svenska Akademiens ordlista, or SAOL for short, is a dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...

 published every few years by the Swedish Academy
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden.-History:The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...

. It is a single volume that is considered the final arbiter of Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 spelling. Traditionally it carries the motto of the Swedish Academy, "Snille och Smak" ("Talent and Taste"), on its blue cloth cover.

Whenever a new edition comes out lively discussions about new and changed entries erupt around the country. In some instances the Academy has been ahead of its times and has later had to change entries back to older spellings. Josjuice is probably the most well-known instance.

History

The history of SAOL is the history of orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 of the Swedish language
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

. While Swedish spelling was an entirely personal business in the Catholic Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, its gradual standardization (known as Modern Swedish) started in 1526 with the translation of the New testament of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 (Gustav Vasa Bible
Gustav Vasa Bible
The Gustav Vasa Bible is the common name of the Swedish Bible translation published in 1540-41. The full title is as appears on the right: Biblia / Thet är / All then Helgha Scrifft / på Swensko...

), as part of the Lutheran reformation. The edition was revised in 1703, known as the Swedish Bible of Carolus XII
Charles XII of Sweden
Charles XII also Carl of Sweden, , Latinized to Carolus Rex, Turkish: Demirbaş Şarl, also known as Charles the Habitué was the King of the Swedish Empire from 1697 to 1718...

. The Swedish Academy
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden.-History:The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...

 was founded in 1786 with the task of caring for Swedish literature and language, including the publication of a grand dictionary. Spelling evolved slowly in the 18th century and was largely based on etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

. Because of its historic relationship to English heart and German Herz, this word was spelled hjerta in Swedish even though it's pronounced ˈjɛrta. The word for woman was spelled qvinna, similar to English queen. The question words hvad, hvar, hvilken had a silent H, like English what, where, which still have. In 1801 the Academy published an official orthography (Carl Gustaf Leopold, Afhandling om svenska stafsättet, 266 pages). A shorter version for schools was published by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist
thumb|right|Painted by Almqvist, 1823Carl Jonas Love Almqvist , was a romantic poet, early feminist, realist, composer, social critic and traveller....

, Svensk Rättstafnings-Lära in 1829.

Already in the 1750s, voices had been raised to adopt spelling to pronunciation, but this didn't resonate with the conservatively minded Academy. Public schools were made mandatory in Sweden by law in 1842 and the influence of school teachers increased, as did the pressure to reform Swedish spelling. The most radical reformists wanted to do away with all silent letters and change the remaining ones to a smaller subset of the alphabet. A similar reform movement for Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

, which at this time was the written language also in Norway
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

, was led by Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) and his follower Niels Matthias Petersen (1791–1862). In 1869 a pan-Scandinavian orthography congress (Nordiska rättstavningsmötet) gathered in Stockholm. Secretary for the Swedish section was Artur Hazelius
Artur Hazelius
Artur Immanuel Hazelius , Swedish teacher, scholar and folklorist, founder of the Nordic Museum and the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm....

, who in 1871 published the proceedings of the conference. The Academy was not pleased, and as a countermeasure Johan Erik Rydqvist (1800–1877) published the first edition of SAOL in 1874, based on the orthography in Leopold's work of 1801. A second edition followed in the same year and new ones in 1875, 1880 and the 5th edition in 1883, without much change.

To further reform, a Swedish orthographic society (Svenska rättstavningssällskapet) was formed on November 28, 1885, chaired by linguist Adolf Noreen
Adolf Noreen
Adolf Gotthard Noreen was a Swedish linguist who served as a member of the Swedish Academy from 1919 until his death.-Biography:...

 (1854–1925), and published a journal Nystavaren. Tidskrift för rättskrivningsfrågor (4 volumes, 1886–1898, edited by Otto Hoppe). There was continued opposition, not least from Academy member Esaias Tegnér (junior) (1843–1928). However, many of the proposed changes, albeit far from all, were introduced in the 6th edition of SAOL in 1889. Many words spelled with E were changed to Ä (elf-älf, hjerta-hjärta, jern-järn), and under Q it was stated that Q may at will be replaced with K. By a government resolution on November 16, 1889, the spelling used in this edition of SAOL was to be used for teaching in Swedish highschools (allmänna läroverk) and teacher colleges (seminarier). This was a direct blow against the society's own dictionary published in 1886, and reform movement lost much of its momentum.

In the 7th edition of SAOL in 1900, many of the old optional forms (Q) were dropped.

In 1898 school teachers started to sign mass petitions for further reform. In 1903 the association of Swedish public school teachers (Sveriges allmänna folkskollärarförening) requested a government ruling that it "would no longer be considered wrong" ("ej måtte betraktas som fel") to write tt instead of dt and v instead of f, fv and hv. More associations joined this petition in 1905. A government proposal to this effect was signed on April 7, 1906, by education minister Fridtjuv Berg (1851–1916), and put before the parliament of 1907. A protest against the reform signed by 40,000 concerned citizens was handed to the government in 1908, but had no effect. The liberal Fridtjuv Berg was a former school teacher and one of the founding members of the orthographic society.

The reform of 1906 was the most radical in the history of Swedish orthography. Spelling with dt, fv and hv is now commonly known as "old spelling" (gammalstavning). The new spelling was adopted in schools starting in 1907. It was used from the first edition of Selma Lagerlöf
Selma Lagerlöf
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish author. She was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige ....

's geography textbook Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a work of fiction by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf. It was published in two books, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils in 1906 and Further Adventures of Nils in 1907...

). The proceedings of the Swedish parliament adopted the new spelling from the year 1913. After endless discussions through the 19th century, a new Swedish Bible translation was finally adopted in 1917, using the new spelling. Sweden's largest printed encyclopedia of all times, the 2nd edition of Nordisk familjebok
Nordisk familjebok
Nordisk familjebok is a Swedish encyclopedia, published between 1876 and 1957.- History :The first edition was published in 20 volumes between 1876 and 1899. The first edition is known as the "Iðunn edition" because of the picture of Iðunn on the cover...

was started in 1904 and used the old spelling through all 38 volumes until 1926. The Academy introduced the new spelling in the 8th edition of SAOL in 1923.

The 9th edition of SAOL appeared in 1950.

In the 10th edition in 1973, the Academy tried to launch new alternative spellings such as jos (juice) and sebra (zebra), without attracting any significant number of followers.

The 11th edition of SAOL appeared in 1986 and the 12th edition in 1998.

While the letter Q in the 8th edition only listed the letter Q itself, the 11th edition also listed quantum satis, quenell, quilt and quisling.

From the beginning of times, W had in Swedish been considered as a mere decoration of V. In Swedish typography, blackletter
Blackletter
Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...

 (fraktur) used W where antiqua used V. With orthographic standardization and spelling reform, W was abandoned except for some family names and a few loan words such as whisky, whist, wienerbröd
Danish pastry
Danish pastry is a sweet pastry which has become a specialty of Denmark and neighbouring Scandinavian countries and is popular throughout the industrialized world, although the form it takes can differ significantly from country to country...

and wobbler (also spelled visky and vobbler). In Swedish dictionaries and telephone books, V and W have been sorted as one letter. In the 13th edition of SAOL in 2006, the Academy broke with this tradition, listing W as a letter of its own. This change was sparked by a new influx of loan words such as webb (World Wide Web).

External links

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