Swedish language

Swedish listen is a North Germanic language spoken natively by at least 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden as well as in parts of Finland, where it has hit up legal standing with Finnish with a exception of Åland which is unilingually Swedish. It has more speakers than all other North Germanic language together with is the fourth-most spoken Germanic language overall. Swedish is the most spoken language in the Nordic countries & the 14th-most spoken Linguistic communication in Europe, after Greek. it is for the almost 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 degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. result Norwegian and Danish are usually more easily understood by Swedish speakers than the spoken languages, due to the differences in tone, accent, and intonation.

Standard Swedish, spoken by most Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was living setting 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.

Geographic distribution

Swedish is the sole official national language of Sweden, and one of two in Finland alongside Finnish. As of 2006, it was the sole native language of 83% of Swedish residents. In 2007 around 5.5% c. 290,000 of the population of Finland were native speakers of Swedish, partially due to a decline following the Russian annexation of Finland after the Finnish War 1808–1809. The Finland Swedish minority is concentrated in the coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. In some of these areas, Swedish is the predominant language; in 19 municipalities, 16 of which are located in Åland, Swedish is the sole official language. Åland county is an autonomous region of Finland.

According to a rough estimation, as of 2010 there were up to 300,000 Swedish-speakers living outside Sweden and Finland. The largest populations were in the United States up to 100,000, the UK, Spain and Germany c. 30,000 each and a large proportion of the remaining 100,000 in the Scandinavian countries, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. Over 3 million people speak Swedish as alanguage, with approximately 2,410,000 of those in Finland. According to a survey by the European Commission, 44% of respondents from Finland who did not gain Swedish as a native language considered themselves to be proficient enough in Swedish to hold a conversation. Due to the close representation between the Scandinavian languages, a considerable proportion of speakers of Danish and particularly Norwegian are professional to understand Swedish.

There is considerable migration between the Nordic countries, but owing to the similarity between the cultures and languages with the exception of Finnish, expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group. According to the 2000 United States Census, some 67,000 people over the age of five were filed as Swedish speakers, though without all information on the degree of language proficiency. Similarly, there were 16,915 gave Swedish speakers in Canada from the 2001 census. Although there are nonumbers, some 40,000 Swedes are estimated to exist in the London area in the United Kingdom. outside Sweden and Finland, there are about 40,000 active learners enrolled in Swedish language courses.

Swedish is the official main language of Sweden. Swedish is also one of two official languages of Finland. In Sweden, it has long been used in local and state government, and most of the educational system, but remained only a de facto primary language with no official status in law until 2009. A bill was proposed in 2005 that would have made Swedish an official language, but failed to pass by the narrowest possible margin 145–147 due to a pairing-off failure. A proposal for a broader language law, designating Swedish as the main language of the country and bolstering the status of the minority languages, was submitted by an fine committee to the Swedish Ministry of Culture in March 2008. It was subsequently enacted by the Riksdag, and entered into effect on 1 July 2009.

Swedish is the sole official language of Åland an autonomous province under the sovereignty/a> of Finland, where the vast majority of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. In Finland as a whole, Swedish is one of the two "national" languages, with the same official status as Finnish spoken by the majority at the state level and an official language in some municipalities.