Languages of Sweden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sweden has no official language, but Swedish, a North Germanic language which is quite simmilar to its sister North Germanic Languages, Danish and Norwegian, is spoken by the vast majority of the eight million inhabitants of the country, holds a de-facto position as such, and is also the national language of the Swedish people.

Contents 1 Swedish 2 Minority Languages 2.1 Finnish 2.2 Meänkieli 2.3 Sami 2.4 Romani 2.5 Yiddish 3 Learned languages 4 Reference 5 See Also

[edit] Swedish

The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly nine million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to Ethnolouge). Swedish is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to SIL's Ethnologue, and by a large number of Finland-Swedes.

[edit] Minority Languages

See Minority languages of Sweden

In 1999, the Minority Language Committee of Sweden formally declared five minority languages of Sweden: Finnish, Meänkieli (also known as Tornedal, Tornionlaaksonsuomi or Tornedalian), the Sami Language, Romani, and Yiddish.

[edit] Finnish

Finnish, a Finno-Ugric language belonging to the larger Uralic language group, has long been spoken in Sweden (the same is due to Swedish in Finland, see Finland-Swedes, Åland), due to the fact that for centuries, a third of Sweden was in modern-day Finland. Today, ethnic Finns constitute around 2% of the population of Sweden, and the Finnish Language is spoken by around 200,000 people. Finnish is mainly spoken in the Torne Valley.

[edit] Meänkieli

Meänkieli is also a Finno-Urgic language spoken by the Tornedalian people, quite closley related to Finnish, meaning that there is a great deal of mutual inelligibility between the two languages, and the former is sometimes considered a dialect of the latter. Meäknieli is most used in the municipalites of Gällivare, Haparanda, Kiruna, Pajala and Övertorneå, all of which lie in the Torne Valley. Between 40,000 and 70,000 people speak Meänkeli as their first langauge.

[edit] Sami

The Sami people (formerly known as Lapps) are a people indigenous to all of northern Scandanavia (see Lappland) who speak a closely-related group of languages usually grouped together under the name "Sami", although at least three separate Sami Languages are spoken in Sweden. The languages are, like Finnish and Meänkeli, in the Finno-Urgic group of the Uralic Language Family, but the Sami languages are subdivided further into the Finno-Lappic group. The Sami Languages, due to prolonged exposure to Germanic-language-speaking neighbors in Sweden and Norway, have a large number of Germanic loanwords, which are not normally found in other Finno-Ugric languages, like Finnish, Estonian, or Hungarian. Around 17,000 Sami people live in Sweden, and worldwide, between 20,000 and 40,000 people speak Sami Languages (many Sami now speak Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, or Russian as their first language, depending on the country in which they reside), and in Sweden, the largest concentrations of Sami-language-speaking Sami are found in the municipalities of Arjeplog, Gällivare, Jokkmokk and Kiruna, and its immediate neighbourhood.

[edit] Romani

Romani (also known as the Romani Chib)is the language spoken by the Roma People, a nomadic ethnic group originating in northern India. Due to the geographic origins of its speakers, Romani is an Indo-Aryan language, closely related to langues spoken in modern-day India, and sometimes written with an Indic Script (see Romani writing systems). Around 90% of Swedens Roma people speak Romani, meaning that there are aproximately 9,500 Chib speakers. In Sweden, there is no major geographic center for Romani like there is for Finnish, Sami, or Meänkieli, but it is considered to be of historical importance by the Swedish government, and as such the goverment is seen as having an obligation to preserve them, a distiction also held by Yiddish.[1]

[edit] Yiddish

Yiddish is an Germanic language with signifigant Hebrew influence, written with a variant of the Hebrew Alphabet (see Yiddish orthography) and, formerly, spoken by most Ashkenazic Jews(although most now speak the language of the country in which they live). Although the Jewish population of Sweden was traditonally Sephardic, after the 18th century, Ashkenazic immigration began, and the immigrants brought with them their Yiddish language (See History of the Jews in Sweden). There are around 18,000 Jews in Sweden, and of that number, roughly 4,000 are estimated to have enough knowledge of Yiddish to be speakers of it. Like Romani, it is seen by the government to be of historical importance.

[edit] Learned languages

Like many industrialized nations, the citizens of Sweden often have a good understanding of English, due to trade between Sweden and the United States. English became a compulsory subject for secondary school students studying natural sciences as early as 1849 and has been a compulsory subject for all Swedish students since the late 1940s. Other languages taught in Swedeish schools include Spanish, German, and French.

[edit] Reference

• http://www3.lu.se/info/lum/LUM_07_99/01_engelska.html
• Sveriges officiella minoritetsspråk, Svenska språknämnden 2003. (In Swedish)
• http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=swe
• http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=US
• http://romani.uni-graz.at/rombase/cd/data/lang/gen/data/numbers.en.pdf

[edit] See Also

• Swedish Language
• Finnish Language
• Meänkieli
• Romani language
• Yiddish Language
• History of the Jews in Sweden
• Languages of the European Union
• Minority language