Swedish (svenska) is a North Germanic language spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It is mutually intelligible with Norwegian to a considerable extent and to a lesser extent with Danish. Like the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era.
Standard Swedish, used by most Swedish people, is the national language of Sweden. It evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These dialects are confined to rural areas and are spoken primarily by small numbers of people. These dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.
The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters and uses the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet with the three additional letters Å / å, Ä / ä, and Ö / ö to represent the vowel sounds ao, ae, and oe.
Swedish has a large number of vowels. It has 9 vowels that make up 17 phonemes in most varieties and dialects and 18 consonant phonemes. A distinct feature of Swedish is its varied prosody (intonation, stress, tone, etc.) which is often one of the most noticeable differences between the various dialects.
Swedish is a subject-verb-object language, though it can often be changed to stress words or phrases. Swedish words have few inflections; there are two genders, no grammatical cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Adjectives are inflected according to gender, number, and definiteness. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes and definite and indefinite articles.
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