Swedish

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to some extent with Danish.

Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era.

It is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by number 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 rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized.

The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, which means that the finite verb (V) appears in second position of a declarative main clause (SVO), unless it is moved to the first position by some syntactic process. Swedish morphology is similar to English; that is, words have comparatively few inflections. There are two genders and no grammatical case. As in modern English, Swedish only has remnants of a case system in the pronoun system and a few other words. Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with 9 plain vowels and 13 diphthongs.

There are two genders and no case. Adjectives can be compared as in English, and are also inflected according to gender and number. Standard Swedish also has numerous compound words.