Contexts - The Rough Guide to Sweden - page 372

Swedish language
For most foreigners, Swedish is nothing more than an obscure, if somewhat
exotic, language spoken by a few million people on the fringe of Europe, and
whose most famous speaker is the Swedish chef from The Muppets . Many
travellers take their flirtation with the odd hurdy-gurdy sounds of the
language no further than that, since there is no need whatsoever to speak
Swedish to enjoy a visit to Sweden - recent surveys have shown that 95
percent of Swedes speak English to some degree. However, Swedish
deserves closer inspection, and if you master even a couple of phrases you'll
meet with nothing but words of encouragement.
Despite what you might think, Swedish is one of the easiest languages for English-
speakers to pick up; its grammar has developed along similar lines to that of English
and therefore has no case system to speak of (unlike German). Many everyday words
are common to both English and Swedish, having been brought over to Britain by the
Vikings, and anyone with a knowledge of northern English or lowland Scottish dialects
will already be familiar with a good number of Swedish words and phrases. Your
biggest problem is likely to be perfecting the “tones”, different rising and falling accents
which Swedish uses (the hurdy-gurdy sounds you're no doubt already familiar with).
Swedish is a Germanic language and, as such, related to English in much the same
way as French is related to Italian. However, its closest cousins are fellow members of
the North Germanic group of tongues: Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian. Within
that subgroup, Swedish is most closely linked to Danish and Norwegian, and the
languages are mutually intelligible to quite an extent. A knowledge of Swedish will
therefore open up the rest of Scandinavia to you; in fact Swedish is the second official
language of Finland. Unlike Danish, for example, Swedish spelling closely resembles
pronunciation, which means you stand a sporting chance of being able to read words
and make yourself understood.
Basics
Swedish nouns can have one of two genders : common or neuter. The good news is that
three out of four nouns have the common gender. The indefinite article precedes the
noun, and is en for common nouns, and ett for neuter nouns. The definite article, as in
all the other Scandinavian languages, is suffixed to the noun, for example, en katt , a cat,
but katten , the cat; ett hus , a house, but huset , the house. The same principle applies in
the plural: katter , cats, but katterna , the cats; hus , houses, but husen , the houses. he
plural definite article suffix is therefore - na for common nouns and - en for neuter
nouns (and confusingly identical with the definite article suffix for common nouns).
Forming plurals is possibly the most complicated feature of Swedish. Regular plurals
take one of the following endings: - or , - ar , - er , - r , - n , or no ending at all. Issues like the
gender of a word, whether its final letter is a vowel or a consonant, and stress can all
affect which plural ending is used. You should learn each noun with its plural, but to
be honest, the chances are you'll forget the plural ending and get it wrong. Swedes have
no apparent difficulty in forming plurals and can't understand why you find it so hard.
Show them the plurals section in any grammar and savour their reaction.
Adjectives cause few problems. They generally precede the noun they qualify and
agree in gender and number with it; en ung flicka, , a young girl (ie no ending on the
adjective); ett stort hus , a big house; fina böcker , fine books. The - a ending is also used