The Orthography Reform of 1906 An orthography reform of the Swedish language was introduced in 1906. Find more Swedish words at wordhippo.com! [53], Swedish pronouns are similar to those of English. It has published Finlandssvensk ordbok, a dictionary about the differences between Swedish in Finland and Sweden. An early way out was to carry the circumlocutions one degree further—finding impersonal ways of saying what was needful, avoiding both personal pronoun and title (Får det lov att vara en kopp kaffe?, approximately 'Might it be a cup of coffee? [43], In Finland, a special branch of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has official status as the regulatory body for Swedish in Finland. In this memorandum the National Immigration and Naturalization Board of Sweden has summarized recent legislative reforms providing home language training and home language lessons for immigrant children and children belonging to linguistic minorities. The actual reform had started earlier, including the amended language in the major newspaper Dagens Nyheter. However, most Swedish-speaking people fled to Sweden before the end of World War II, that is, before the invasion of Estonia by the Soviet army in 1944. [25], Swedish is the sole official national language of Sweden, and one of two in Finland (alongside Finnish). The typical methods of language reform are simplification and linguistic purism.Simplification regularizes vocabulary, grammar, or spelling. It was a part of the Victorian dress reform, and worked to reform women's dress toward a more healthy and comfortable one, including abolishing the corset. Otherwise, du could be used to insult a tramp or the like. The Swedish-speaking population is mainly concentrated in the coastal areas of Ostrobothnia, Southwest Finland and Nyland where the percentage of Finland Swedes partly is high, with Swedish being spoken by more than 90% of the population in several municipalities, and on Åland, where Swedish is spoken by a vast majority of the population and is the only official language. In 1786 the Swedish Academy (Svenska Academien) commissioned Carl Gustaf Leopold to create rules for modern Swedish with uniform spelling. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which had only 16 letters. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes (endings), complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles. Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its education system. [61][62] Compound nouns take their gender from the head, which in Swedish is always the last morpheme. Its primary instruments are the glossary Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL, currently in its 14th edition) and the dictionary Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, in addition to various books on grammar, spelling and manuals of style. What does the removal of the Swedish derogation mean? It homogenized the spelling of /v/ and changed the adverbial and neuter adjectival ending -dt to -t or -tt depending on the length of the preceding vowel. The velar fricative [ɣ] was also transformed into the corresponding plosive [ɡ]. Universities and colleges are administered by the state, but they have been given far-reaching autonomy in the use of resources. The main translators were Laurentius Andreæ and the brothers Laurentius and Olaus Petri. is a very rare letter in Swedish since the spelling reform about a century ago. The Swedish Reformation meant the break with the Roman Catholic Church, and the foundation of the Swedish Church. Among the many organizations that make up the Swedish Language Council, the Swedish Academy (established 1786) is arguably the most influential. The Government has therefore decided to expand the remit of the Sfi Voucher Inquiry. [36], Swedish is the official main language of Sweden. In the early 20th century, an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni—the standard second person plural pronoun)—analogous to the French vous. [35] Outside Sweden and Finland, there are about 40,000 active learners enrolled in Swedish language courses. Unlike the nouns, pronouns have an additional object form, derived from the old dative form. Swedish was the sole administrative language until 1902 as well as the dominant language of culture and education until Finnish independence in 1917. The prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. Swedish is an official language also in the rest of Finland, though, with the same official status as Finnish. [60], As with many Germanic languages, new words can be formed by compounding, e. g., nouns like nagellackborttagningsmedel ("nail polish remover") or verbs like smyglyssna ("to eavesdrop"). Swedish has two grammatical numbers – plural and singular. Academic freedom is carefully guarded by faculty and students alike. [74], In a poll conducted in 2005 by the Swedish Retail Institute (Handelns Utredningsinstitut), the attitudes of Swedes to the use of certain dialects by salesmen revealed that 54% believed that rikssvenska was the variety they would prefer to hear when speaking with salesmen over the phone, even though dialects such as gotländska or skånska were provided as alternatives in the poll. Perfect and present participles as adjectival verbs are very common:[53], In contrast to English and many other languages, Swedish does not use the perfect participle to form the present perfect and past perfect. [3], Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. A spelling reform in 1948 eliminated the capitalization of nouns and introduced the letter å for aa, thereby making the spelling more similar to that of Norwegian and Swedish. 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. Swedish (Swedish: [ˈsvɛ̂nːska] (listen)) is a North Germanic language spoken natively by 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden (as the sole official language) and in parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. The dialects are described as "runic" because the main body of text appears in the runic alphabet. It occurs almost exclusively in names, and a few foreign loan-words (most from latin), and almost always followed by a "u" or, less often, by a "v". Du-reformen ( Swedish pronunciation: [ˈdʉ̂ːrɛˌfɔrmɛn], "the thou-reform") was the process in the late 1960s of popularization of the second-person singular pronoun du as a universal form of address in Sweden. [18], The period that includes Swedish as it is spoken today is termed nusvenska (lit., "Now-Swedish") in linguistics, and started in the last decades of the 19th century. Swedish language education for immigrants in need of reform Swedish language education for immigrants is not as good as it should be. [8] Important outside influences during this time came with the firm establishment of the Christian church and various monastic orders, introducing many Greek and Latin loanwords. Var går gränsen mellan olika dialekter? The definite form of an adjective is identical to the indefinite plural form, e. g., den gröna stolen ("the green chair"), det gröna huset ("the green house"), and de gröna stolarna ("the green chairs"). Some compounds are translations of the elements (calques) of German original compounds into Swedish, like bomull from German Baumwolle ("cotton"; literally, tree-wool). Subjunctive mood is occasionally used for some verbs, but its use is in sharp decline and few speakers perceive the handful of commonly used verbs (as for instance: vore, månne) as separate conjugations, most of them remaining only as set of idiomatic expressions. The Economist explains How immigration is changing the Swedish welfare state An influx of new arrivals and years of neglect have made reform … Swedish has also had historic use in Estonia, although the current status of the Estonian Swedish speakers is almost extinct. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory. The Inquiry has therefore been tasked with the following additional remit: The Swedish model of government administration Sweden has three levels of government: national, regional and local. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål (lit., "parish speech"). [39] 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 expert committee to the Swedish Ministry of Culture in March 2008. [28] The Finland Swedish minority is concentrated in the coastal areas and archipelagos of southern and western Finland. Du-reformen (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈdʉ̂ːrɛˌfɔrmɛn], "the thou-reform") was the process of popularization of the second-person singular pronoun du as a universal form of address in Sweden that took place in the late 1960s. This entails relating the benefit The informal du had been used for addressing children, siblings, close friends and possibly for cousins, but hardly for elder relatives. Only a handful of speakers remain. Swedish is the sole official language of Åland (an autonomous province under the sovereignty of Finland), where the vast majority of the 26,000 inhabitants speak Swedish as a first language. It was seen as a reform in a democratic and egalitarian direction. [59], A large number of French words were imported into Sweden around the 18th century. [14] It was a major step towards a more consistent Swedish orthography. Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. The Swedish AMIF programme prioritises efforts and finances projects in three main areas: 1) asylum, 2) integration and legal migration 3) voluntary return. In modern Swedish, it has become an enclitic -s, which attaches to the end of the noun phrase, rather than the noun itself. Prosody is often one of the most noticeable differences between dialects.[51]. With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, these class distinctions became less important, and du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts. Some important changes in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into /ɧ/ and the softening of /g/ and /k/ into /ʝ/ and /ɕ/ before front vowels. In certain cases, the definite form indicates possession, e. g., jag måste tvätta håret ("I must wash my hair"). The goals of teaching in Swedish for Immigrants have therefore been given a … By no later than 30 April 2020 TWAs must provide workers whose existing contracts contain a Swedish derogation provision with a written statement telling them that with effect from 6 April 2020, those provisions no longer apply. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus from a linguistic perspective more accurately described as a dialect continuum of Scandinavian (North Germanic), and some of the dialects, such as those on the border between Norway and Sweden, especially parts of Bohuslän, Dalsland, western Värmland, western Dalarna, Härjedalen, Jämtland, and Scania, could be described as intermediate dialects of the national standard languages.[4]. Swedish also uses third-person possessive reflexive pronouns that refer to the subject in a clause, a trait which is restricted to North Germanic languages: Swedish used to have a genitive that was placed at the end of the head of a noun phrase. The letter à is used to refer to unit cost (a loan from the French), equivalent to the at sign (@) in English. With the rise of Hanseatic power in the late 13th and early 14th century, Middle Low German became very influential. [58], The vocabulary of Swedish is mainly Germanic, either through common Germanic heritage or through loans from German, Middle Low German, and to some extent, English. In particular, the use of second-person plural (Ni) to address an unknown person is considered respectful or neutral rather than degrading. In standard Swedish, that form had become archaic and solemn well before the 20th century. But most people could not bring themselves to feel civil using that. Swedish morphology is similar to English; that is, words have comparatively few inflections. The initiator was the Minister of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs Fridtjuv Berg in the Government led by the Prime Minister Staaf. Old Swedish is divided into äldre fornsvenska (1225–1375) and yngre fornsvenska (1375–1526), "older" and "younger" Old Swedish. [29], According to a rough estimation, as of 2010 there were up to 300,000 Swedish-speakers living outside Sweden and Finland. The German convention of writing ä and ö as ae and oe if the characters are unavailable is an unusual convention for speakers of modern Swedish. In parallel with du-reformen, the use of titles was further reduced. Hon, for example, has the following nominative, possessive, and object forms:[53]. [12], Modern Swedish (Swedish: nysvenska) begins with the advent of the printing press and the European Reformation. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, although the degree of mutual intelligibility is largely dependent on the dialect and accent of the speaker. This was published in 1801 as Afhandling om Svenska stafsättet. The masculine and feminine genders were later merged into a common gender with the definite suffix -en and the definite article den, in contrast with the neuter gender equivalents -et and det. It is also not always apparent which letters are capitalized owing to the Gothic or blackletter typeface which was used to print the Bible. [72], Standard Swedish is the language used by virtually all Swedes and most Swedish-speaking Finns. The dental and velar fricatives /ð/ and /ɣ/ were transformed to the corresponding plosives /d/ and /g/. First, authorities and influential circles had tried rehabilitating the Ni in a so-called "ni-reform". Sweden - Sweden - The welfare state: The coalition government that was formed in 1939 was replaced shortly after the end of the war in 1945 by a Social Democratic government under the leadership of Per Albin Hansson. (Cf. The gender system resembled that of modern German, having masculine, feminine and neuter genders. plus surname, or in a family setting, alternatively even less respectfully, with the plain name or third person pronoun han ("he") or hon (she). Excerpt from Barfotabarn (1933), by Nils Ferlin (1898–1961):[81], North Germanic language spoken in Sweden and Finland, Language minorities in Estonia and Ukraine, Lars-Erik Edlund, "Språkhistorisk översikt" in, The oldest dated fragments are from 1250 and the oldest complete manuscript is from c. 1280, Mikael Parkvall & Gunvor Flodell, "Sveriges språk ute i världen" in, The number of registered Swedes in Zmeyovka (the modern Ukrainian name of, Research Institute for the Languages of Finland, Main outlines of Finnish History – thisisFINLAND, "The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages", "Konvention mellan Sverige, Danmark, Finland, Island, och Norge om nordiska medborgares rätt att använda sitt eget språk i annat nordiskt land", "20th anniversary of the Nordic Language Convention", "Domain names with characters like å, ä, ö (IDN)", "Hur många dialekter finns det i Sverige? 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