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| History of Swedish |
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| The Language |
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Spoken Swedish has a tone or pitch accent, which to an English ear sounds like a "sing song" tune.
The alphabet consists of 29 letters, the regular 26 of the English alphabet, plus å, ä and ö at the end. The ä and the ö distinguish Swedish from Norwegian and Danish which use æ and ø.
An interesting feature of Swedish (along with the other Scandinavian languages) is the enclitic definite article. This simply means whereas we say "the swan", the Swedish word order is "swan the", the particle denoting "the" being tacked on after the noun.
As in English, conservative spelling traditions mean that you do not always write exactly as you hear, nor do you hear every letter that is written. Having mastered this difficulty in English, you should not have any problem with Swedish features such as the silent 'd' and 't', as example in the word "huset" ("the house").
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| And Finally... |
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A smörgårsbord is probably a word you already recognise and is indeed of Swedish origin. But did you know that the Swedes often call it a 'walking smörgårsbord'? It is often so called as people have to walk from their table to a central table to help themselves to the different dishes.
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| Did you know? |
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There are no "primitive" languages. All languages have a system of sounds, words and sentences that can adequately communicate the content of culture. |
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