swedish

Swedish  is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 8.7 million people (2007), predominantly inSweden and parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish(see Classification). Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of theGermanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by numbers of speakers.

Standard Swedish, used by most Swedish people, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older ruraldialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish^{[citation needed]}. These dialects are confined to rural areas and are spoken primarily by small numbers of people with low social mobility. Though not facing imminentextinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century^{[citation needed]}, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.

The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, which means that the finite verb appears in second position of a declarative main clause. Swedish morphology is similar to English; that is, words have comparatively few inflections. There are twogenders, two grammatical cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Older analyses posit the cases nominative and genitiveand there are some remains of distinct accusative and dative forms as well. Adjectives are compared as in English, and are also inflected according to gender, number and definiteness. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes (endings), complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles. The prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a highly variable consonantphoneme.