10.2.2. Swedish

93 % of Sweden, the key Scandinavian state, speak Swedish (7,825,000 out of 8,4mln people); 296,000 first-language speakers settle in Finland; 626,102 live in the USA; 21,680 are citizens of Canada; 21,000 live in Norway. So the total number of the speakers of Swedish is 9,000,000 in all countries (1995 WA).

Swedes have one of the highest standards of living in the world. They have enjoyed a long period of peace and political stability.

Dialectal variation is diverse in Sweden: southern Swedish (Skåne), central Swedish (Göta, Svea), northern Swedish (Norrland), eastern Swedish (Finland Swedish), Dalska (Dalecarlian). Dialect investigation is needed for Dalecarlian, Gutniska, Nörpes, Skåne, Pitemal and Överkalixmal dialectal areas. As for ‘proper’ Swedish, it is spoken in Svealand.

The active use of Swedish extends into Finland. Swedish is a mother tongue in Finnish rural communities along the coast of Österbotten, opposite Sweden. Swedish is also spoken in some urban communities. It is the main language on the semi-dependent Aland islands, an autonomous district of Finland which consists of 80 inhabited islands.

Historically Swedish is closer to Danish than any other Scandinavian language. In spite of it, both in forms and in pronunciation Swedish remains at an older stage of development than Danish. Also, the years of Swedish domination over Norway (1814-1905) brought Swedish and Norwegian closer together. For a Swede today it is easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. Moreover, Swedish and Norwegian share such a feature as a musical word accent.

The Swedish alphabet consists of 29 letters: the regular 26 of the Roman alphabet, å, ä, and ö as additional letters. The ä and the ö make Swedish different from Norwegian and Danish, which both use ø and æ.

The history of Swedish is divided into two periods: Old Swedish (fornvenska) and New Swedish (nysvenska).

Old Swedish is further subdivided into Runic Swedish (800-1225), Classical Swedish (1325-1375), and Late Old Swedish (1375-1526). New Swedish comprises Early New Swedish (1526-1732) and Late New Swedish (from 1732 to the present).

However, some scholars are for a more precise chronological division of the history of Swedish: 1) Runic Old Swedish, 2) Classical Old Swedish, 3) late Old Swedish, 4) early New Swedish, 5) properly Modern Swedish.

The earliest Swedish writings are in the Latin alphabet in the form of provincial laws called landskapslagar, written down in the 13th century, and the 14^th century Landslag, the king’s common law for all Swedish provinces. To Old Swedish, too, belong the revelations of the nun and mystic Saint Bridget (Birgitta). Most of the best Swedish ballads and songs were also composed in this period.

During the Reformation the literary centre shifted from the homeplace of St.Birgitta (Vadstena) to Stockholm and Uppsala.

Almost all literature of the 16^th century is religious: the chief writers, the brothers Olaus (1493-1552) and Laurentius Petri (1499-1573) had been converted to Lutheranism at Wittenberg. They translated the Old Testament into Swedish (1541). Olaus Petri composed the Swedish chronicle. He got known as the Swedish Martin Luther.

The father of Swedish poetry Georg Stiernhielm lived in the seventeenth century (1598-1672). In belles-lettres of the eighteenth century the leading figure was Olof von Dalin.

The Gustavian era (1772-1805) is renowned by royal patronage of literature. Gustavius III, a poet and essayist himself, encouraged other gifted men of letters: the poets Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751-1795), Anna Maria Lenngren (1754-1817), Karl Mikael Bellmann (one of the finest writers of Swedish poems and songs), and some others.

The spirit of Romanticism brought into prominence Erik Gustav Geijer, Esaias Tegnér; the most important Swedish nineteenth-century novelists were K.J.L.Almqvist, Fredrika Bremer and Abraham Viktor Rydberg. The outstanding literary figure of the late 19^th century was August Strindberg who excelled as a dramatist, short-story writer, autobiographer, poet, novelist, and essayist.

The 20^th century Swedish literature revives an interest in Swedish history and rural life.

Old Swedish had a number of phonetic peculiarities:

1) all stressed syllables became long: short syllables were lengthened, and long syllables shortened;

2 )unstressed vowels were reduced in most Swedish dialects;

3) a long [a] labialized to o: o [o:] > [u:], [u], [ü:] >[u], [u:] (upp [up:] ‘up’, hus [hs] ‘house’).

4) under the influence of Danih, diphthongs became monophthongs (12^th): Icel. auga, but Sw. oga ‘eye’; icel. Éyra, but Sw. ora ‘ear’.

5) palatalisation and spirantisation of g,k and sk: [g]>[j], [k].[ ʧ], [sk]>[∫] before front vowels.

In the Middle Ages Swedish, like Danish and Norwegian, borrowed many words from Middle Low German. To illustrate: skäp (wardrobe), dräkt (cloths), bult (bolt) – most of them referring to trade, handicraft and administration.

Swedish philologists, beginning from the late 17^th century, did a lot to establish a literary standard. The first grammar of Swedish came out in 1684 (it was written in Latin), Swedish dictionaries were compiled in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Swedish Academy, whose task was to protect the purity of the language, was founded in 1786.

Normalisation of Swedish orthography dates from the 16^th century. The spelling reforms of 1889 and 1906 simplified some of the spellings.

The puristic movement against Danicisms dates from the 16^th century. The leading representatives of the movement called for the ‘Scandinavian purity’ of Swedish. Some of them were so extreme that they wanted to extricate from Swedish even Latin, Greek and French borrowings, as well as German derivational elements (Abraham Viktor Rydberg).

On the whole, during the Later Middle Ages Swedish borrowed words from Low German, in the 18^th century many words came from French. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries English became by largest source of foreign borrowings. It is interesting to mention some English words of Swedish origin: smorgasbord (sandwich + table), and tungsten (heavy + stone).

The Swedish standard written language is closely related to the town dialects of central Sweden in Uppsala, Stockholm and the towns of Södermanland. Swedish has a variety of dialects which resemble Danish. One of these is Scanian. The Swedes ewefer to the Scanians as people “who insist on speaking Danish”. It appears that for more than 800 years Scania was a prosperous region of Denmark. Scania was conquered by the Swedes in 1658. The attempts at making the Scanians Swedish have not been so far very successful.