Swedish as a foreign language
Encyclopedia
Swedish
as a foreign language
is studied by about 40,000 people worldwide at the university level. This is done at over two hundred universities
and college
s in 41 countries. Swedish is the Scandinavian language which is most studied abroad.
Svenska Institutet (The Swedish Institute) plays a key role in organising the learning of Swedish abroad. In addition to collaborating with universities where Swedish is taught, the Institute organises summer courses for students and conferences for teachers, as well as publishing a textbook called Svenska utifrån.
branch of the Germanic
sub-family of the Indo-European languages
. As such, it is mutually intelligible
with Norwegian
and Danish
. Because most of the loanword
s present in Swedish come from English
and German
(originally Middle Low German
, closely related to Dutch
), as well as similarities in grammar, native speakers of Germanic languages usually have an advantage over speakers of other, less related languages.
. Swedish words have either an acute
or a grave accent
, usually described as tonal word accents by Scandinavian linguists. These accents may vary between dialects and can be difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish. However, the number of words that are only distinguished by their word accents are few and usually easy to tell apart by context.
Several phoneme
s of Swedish often present difficulties for students. Among the most difficult are the fricatives s, ɕ and ɧ, which are all phonetically close to one another. Swedish has also a large inventory of vowels, which might be difficult to distinguish between. There might also be mixups for the orthography, considering the diacritics
in the letters Å
, Ä
and Ö
. The difference of /l/
and /r/
can also present difficulties for speakers of languages that don't distinguish the two, such as Vietnamese
.
distinction between common en and neuter ett. Like other languages with noun class
es, Swedish has few consistent rules to determine the gender for each word. Therefore, the genders have to be learned on a word-by-word basis, although the words of common gender far outnumber the neuter words in practice.
For nouns, Swedish has five different ways to form regular plurals, also determined on a word-by-word basis, in addition to irregular plurals.
There is a large number of irregular verbs and plurals similarly to the English, such as (fot; fötter "foot; feet") and (flyga; flög; flugit "fly; flew; flown"), cf. Germanic umlaut
and Germanic strong verb
.
, Swedish is a compulsory subject in school for Finnish-speakers in Finland
, where Swedish is a co-official language with Finnish
; there's a significant minority of Finns whose native language is Swedish. In official documents and in education, Swedish is considered "the second domestic language" (fi. toinen kotimainen kieli, sv. det andra inhemska språket) for Finnish-speakers, while the same holds true for Finnish for Swedish-speakers. Finland was a part of Sweden from 13th century to 1809, and the use of Swedish in government prevailed for much of 19th century. Language reforms did not replace Swedish, but gave Finnish
(which is a completely unrelated Uralic language) an "equal status" as an official language of the state. This situation remains to this day, despite the near-complete switchover to Finnish in practical usage in governmental affairs. There is compulsory teaching and language testing on all levels of education, and a basic working knowledge in Swedish is required for state government officials.
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...
as a foreign language
Foreign language
A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her...
is studied by about 40,000 people worldwide at the university level. This is done at over two hundred universities
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
and college
College
A college is an educational institution or a constituent part of an educational institution. Usage varies in English-speaking nations...
s in 41 countries. Swedish is the Scandinavian language which is most studied abroad.
Svenska Institutet (The Swedish Institute) plays a key role in organising the learning of Swedish abroad. In addition to collaborating with universities where Swedish is taught, the Institute organises summer courses for students and conferences for teachers, as well as publishing a textbook called Svenska utifrån.
Language classification
Swedish belongs to the North GermanicNorth Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages, the languages of Scandinavians, make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages...
branch of the Germanic
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
sub-family of the Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
. As such, it is mutually intelligible
Mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...
with Norwegian
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...
and 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...
. Because most of the loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s present in Swedish come from English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
(originally Middle Low German
Middle Low German
Middle Low German is a language that is the descendant of Old Saxon and is the ancestor of modern Low German. It served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic League...
, closely related to Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
), as well as similarities in grammar, native speakers of Germanic languages usually have an advantage over speakers of other, less related languages.
Phonology
One of the main difficulties encountered by students of Swedish is its phonologySwedish phonology
The phonology of Swedish is notable for having a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree quantity, making 17 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Swedish pronunciation of consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages...
. Swedish words have either an acute
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
or a grave accent
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
, usually described as tonal word accents by Scandinavian linguists. These accents may vary between dialects and can be difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish. However, the number of words that are only distinguished by their word accents are few and usually easy to tell apart by context.
Several phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s of Swedish often present difficulties for students. Among the most difficult are the fricatives s, ɕ and ɧ, which are all phonetically close to one another. Swedish has also a large inventory of vowels, which might be difficult to distinguish between. There might also be mixups for the orthography, considering the diacritics
Diacritics
diacritics is a quarterly academic journal established in 1971 at Cornell University and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Articles serve to review recent literature in the field of literary criticism, and have covered topics in gender studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, queer...
in the letters Å
Å
Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
, Ä
Ä
"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
and Ö
Ö
"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
. The difference of /l/
Alveolar lateral approximant
The alveolar lateral approximant, also known as clear l, is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is l.As a...
and /r/
Alveolar trill
The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R...
can also present difficulties for speakers of languages that don't distinguish the two, such as Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
.
Grammar
In Swedish, there is a grammatical genderGrammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
distinction between common en and neuter ett. Like other languages with noun class
Noun class
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...
es, Swedish has few consistent rules to determine the gender for each word. Therefore, the genders have to be learned on a word-by-word basis, although the words of common gender far outnumber the neuter words in practice.
For nouns, Swedish has five different ways to form regular plurals, also determined on a word-by-word basis, in addition to irregular plurals.
There is a large number of irregular verbs and plurals similarly to the English, such as (fot; fötter "foot; feet") and (flyga; flög; flugit "fly; flew; flown"), cf. Germanic umlaut
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...
and Germanic strong verb
Germanic strong verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one which marks its past tense by means of ablaut. In English, these are verbs like sing, sang, sung...
.
Writing system
Certain common words retain their historical written form, e.g. mig /mεj/.Geographic distribution
In addition to the minorities in SwedenSweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
, Swedish is a compulsory subject in school for Finnish-speakers in Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
, where Swedish is a co-official language with Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
; there's a significant minority of Finns whose native language is Swedish. In official documents and in education, Swedish is considered "the second domestic language" (fi. toinen kotimainen kieli, sv. det andra inhemska språket) for Finnish-speakers, while the same holds true for Finnish for Swedish-speakers. Finland was a part of Sweden from 13th century to 1809, and the use of Swedish in government prevailed for much of 19th century. Language reforms did not replace Swedish, but gave Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
(which is a completely unrelated Uralic language) an "equal status" as an official language of the state. This situation remains to this day, despite the near-complete switchover to Finnish in practical usage in governmental affairs. There is compulsory teaching and language testing on all levels of education, and a basic working knowledge in Swedish is required for state government officials.
Proficiency tests
- Swedex consists of two different levels corresponding to the A2 and B1 levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for LanguagesCommon European Framework of Reference for LanguagesThe Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, abbreviated as CEFR, is a guideline used to describe achievements of learners of foreign languages across Europe and, increasingly, in other countries...
. It can be taken in examination centers in twenty-four different countries. Swedex tests the skills of the student in five different areas: vocabulary, grammar, listening, writing and reading. - TISUSTISUSTISUS is an official exam of proficiency in the Swedish language required for students applying to study at Swedish universities....
is another certificate, often used as a proof of competence in Swedish to gain access to Swedish universities. The fee amounts to 1,600 SEKSwedish kronaThe krona has been the currency of Sweden since 1873. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it, but especially in the past, it sometimes preceded the value...
(172.75 € or 250.33 USD as of November 2, 2007) if the examination is taken in SwedenSwedenSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
or 2,000 SEK (216,46 € or 313,49 USD) if it is taken abroad. It tests the reading, oral and written skills of the student. - In Finland, there is an official examination in the universities, called "public servant's Swedish", as a part of the policy of bilinguality of the state of Finland. The abiturAbiturAbitur is a designation used in Germany, Finland and Estonia for final exams that pupils take at the end of their secondary education, usually after 12 or 13 years of schooling, see also for Germany Abitur after twelve years.The Zeugnis der Allgemeinen Hochschulreife, often referred to as...
examination includes a Swedish exam, which, while itself optional, is based on compulsory courses in high school.