Swedish (Swedish: [ˈsvɛ̂nːska]) 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. 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. Written Norwegian and Danish are usually more easily understood by Swedish speakers than the spoken languages, due to the differences in tone, accent and intonation. Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It has more speakers than any other North Germanic language.
Swedish is the most widely spoken of the Scandinavian languages, boasting
nearly 12 million speakers, primarily in Sweden and Finland. But choosing
to learn Swedish purely on numbers alone is missing the point. The real
beauty of learning Swedish is that you open the door to the other
Scandinavian languages. There’s a high level of mutual intelligibility
between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, meaning speakers of one can
understand speakers of the others without too much difficulty. That’s
quite the nifty language hack.
Did you know that if you learned
Swedish, you’d be able to impress all of your friends the next time you go
to Ikea? But how? Well, because Ikea is a Swedish company, they inject a
healthy amount of method into their madness when it comes to exporting
their goods to the world. I don’t know about you, but I always thought
Ikea’s naming department had a drunk Gothenburg fisherman on call 24/7 to
help them come up with names for their furniture. As it turns out, the
naming system for Ikea furniture actually offers you a window into the
Swedish language as well.