Swedish · Svenska

About Swedish

Language family

Indo-European, North Germanic

Where it's spoken

Sweden and parts of Finland

Speakers

roughly 10 million speakers

Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian form a dialect continuum close enough that speakers of each can often follow the others in conversation, especially in writing. All three descend from Old Norse, the language of the Viking Age sagas. Swedish retains a pitch-accent system, in which the same word can carry different musical tones to distinguish meaning, a feature it shares with Norwegian but not Danish.