Language Overview: Swedish

[@vignotum132]

Nice video! Just a small note, we don’t call things that you’re not “allowed” to do “illegal” unlike what you showed once; in Swedish, “olaglig” is reserved for things breaking the law or as an exaggeration. Instead, “otillåten” is used, best translate as ”not allowed”. Exemple: “Illegal robbery” = “olagligt rån” ”Illegal tackle” = ”otillåten tackling” I don’t remember exactly where in the video this happened, but I believe it was when you talked about it being ungrammatical to drop subjects.

[@vignotum132]

18:19 small correction: in Swedish, we don’t “know” concepts as in “att känna”, rather we “know of” or ”can” concepts. The sentence should be: ”Jag känner bara till …” or ”Jag kan bara …”

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

This is great timing, I actually just went on a Wikipedia deep dive into north Germanic languages and Swedish folkmål/sockenmål just an hour ago. Loving the additional nerdery

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

Great video 👍 A few points: Different dialects and sociolects have wildly different phonologies, but nothing new there. There used to be several distinct languages (also nothing new there), and to some extent different swedishes are still mutually unintelligible, such as närpesmål, norsjömål, and some skånska dialects/folkmål Also, Elfdalian (älvdalska) and Gutnish (gutamål) are separate languages, on separate branches of the Nordic language family tree, Gutnish forming its own branch, and Elfdalian as a part of the west Nordic languages. That being said, mutual intelligibility says that Norwegian and Gutnish are too similar to Swedish and Danish to be classified as distinct anymore (Norwegian was replaced by Danish as lingua Franca in Norway for centuries, that's why Norwegian/Danish/Swedish are all so similar, though Elfdalian and "non-standard" Norwegian, along with the other insular Nordic languages retain their distinctiveness) Keep in mind many languages are still natively spoken here too, such as Elfdalian, Meänkieli, various Sami languages, Tornedalian Finnish, "regular" Finnish, Scandoromani, and Gutnish (of those I know), not to mention the endemic languages of myriad immigrant ethnic communities, and myriad folkmål that were well on their way to being separate languages before the homogenisation That being said: Swedish is one of the more homogeneous languages in western Europe, from what I gather. Similar to Denmark, our period of homogenisation in the 1800's was part of a people's movement, and not a landowner's one, and so there isn't the same aspect of class in dialects that there is in say English or French, since education wasn't gentrified in that way

[@dan74695]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 Elfdalian East Norse with some West Norse features. Also, it's not that different from the other dialects in Ovansiljan, so I don't understand why only it gets any attention.

[@dan74695]

I have a lot of the other Ovansiljan dialects here: kzbin.info/aero/PLqiZ-ikph3Mn4biHT3XqM8XTPC3S-IQZ3 Orsamål and Våmhusmål are the closest to Elfdalian, especially Våmhusmål, which is considered a variant of Elfdalian by some people.

[@ambiguousi9075]

It's hilarious how you use "anti-drop" as if it's the opposite of "pro-drop". I don't care if it's intentional; it's awesome.

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

Eh it started out just bc I misinterpreted what the “pro” meant years ago, but I like “anti-drop” better personally 🤷🏻‍♂️

[@danorott]

Thank you so much! There are no Swedish speakers, nor teachers in my area, so I have to learn though online resources and books. Videos like these make the process so much easier.

[@higorribeiro8318]

I don't speak swedish but i love those languages overviews ❤️. Hope to see an Portuguese and Hindi overview one day.

[@eljestLiv]

Minor corrections (not trying to be mean, trying to help you improve) 1:44 Åland takes acute accent, FYI. With grave accent, you’re saying åland (å-land), as in a river landscape. Or possibly ål-and; eel duck. 2:43 Behöva takes acute accent. 3:20 I don’t think any southerner would pronounce the R in örn. 5:50 Centrum takes acute accent. 6:27 Skift means shift as in a work shift. Skifte (with grave accent) is the word for a shift as in a change. 6:46 The dots over ä and ö are neither diaresis or trema, it’s an umlaut. See K Klein’s video for a more in-depth explanation. 8:18 Not necessarily an error, but as someone who speaks a dialect with ä and e unmerged, seeing äter transcribed as /ɛːtɛr/ rather than /æːtɛr/ is really strange! But of course, ä and e are merged in the Stockholm dialect so I can understand why. 10:19 This ending is more commonly pronounced /ɛr/ rather than /ʊr/ despite the spelling. 11:03 Not really a correction, just an addendum again. Surprisingly many dialects actually have remnants of a different definite plural article. Saying bena instead of benen, barna instead of barnen, et cetera, is common in a majority of dialects in Sweden (including my own) but this is considered non-standard since it fell out of use in Stockholm. 12:00 Golv is pronounced as if the o was an å. This sound is often written ô in western dialects that has a separate tenth vowel /ɤ/ where the rest of Swedish has a letter that looks like o but sounds like å. There’s a really interesting Wikipedia article on this in Swedish called “Svenskans tionde vokal” but unfortunately the English article for Swedish phonology hardly even mentions this sound. 12:56 Another addendum; these words were really close to being written mej, dej, and sej. This spelling reform was really popular in the 70s-90s but died out with the rise of computer spellcheck. 14:18 I’m continually impressed by your pronounciation of long i, but that long y made me gasp because I’ve never heard a non-native absolutely nail that pronounciation. Well done! 15:21 Större takes acute accent. 15:38 These words are just apocopes of existing infinitives that end with -a, so the system is actually still regular if you just imagine those sounds are still there but silent. It depends on when the sounds were merged though. Words like bli and va are quite obviously forms of bliva and vara with sounds dropped, while stå and tro had their sounds merged way further back, making their “true” forms standa and trova seem completely alien. 19:16 Ska and skall are definitely related words (they both were different present tense form of the now rather dated verb skola) but they have slightly different meanings. I’d translate “jag skall” as “I shall”, and “jag ska” as “I will”. 19:48 I don’t think lyckandes is a word. I understand what it’s supposed to mean but lyckas doesn’t seem to really have a present participle form. The form misslyckas (to fail, literally mis-succeed) has the present participle form misslyckande, but that has been noun-ified into a word meaning failure. Same thing with boende, which has morphed into a noun meaning residence or resident. 19:52 Inte has initial stress and grave accent, not final stress. Accents are weird in IPA, I’d definitely have mispronounced that too if I was just reading the IPA. 20:22 You technically pronounced tillsammans correctly, but the Ls are silent in like 99% of contexts, even in quite formal speech. Same thing at 20:43, the pronounciation of “ska du” is technically correct but almost always pronounced as if it was spelt “skaru”. It’s kinda like how Icelandic does it by adding -ðu to the verb, but it’s not reflected in the orthography of Swedish at all. 21:11 Förbli is a really dated word and there’s exactly one context I’ve ever heard this word ever said in my entire life, and that’s when singing the national anthem. And even then, many newer lyric sheets of the national anthem changes “…och förblir vad du var…” to “…och du blir vad du var…” because basically no one has ever heard of this word.

[@mr.flibblessumeriantransla5417]

Interesting, and I always love your style of explanation: both thorough yet with a lighthearted tone, which makes the video not only for informative, but fun to watch.

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

Thanks! That’s exactly what I intend

[@dansugardude2655]

2:43 this Swedish word reminds me of “behoove” in English. Even the middle sound is said almost the same as in English, so this behooves me to believe that these words were born together!

[@TheForeignersNetwork]

It means "need" in Swedish and "to be appropriate" in English. Definitely the same etymological root word

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Just discovered your channel. I love how comprehensive this is.

[@frasenp8411]

14:25 Actually I would say for animate masculine singular nouns it would take -e not -a like "Den starke mannen" but "Den starka kvinnan".

[@jasminekaram880]

I can also add, I wish you would have added the distinction Swedish makes between directional adverbs because that does not exist in English. When you are heading home, it is hem, but if you are already home it is hemma. If I am going away I am going bort, but if I am already away in the destination of travel I am där borta.

[@herghamoo3242]

I think it's interesting that the two verbs that get an unexpected "-ck" in past tense (gå and få), originally were part of a larger pattern, but it's impossible to spot in Swedish because the endings are shortened. In Old Norse, the word for "to go/walk" was "ganga", but this was shortened to "gå" in the Scandinavian languages, presumably influenced by Low German. "Få", comes from Germanic "fanhana" or something like that, but "h"-sounds in the middle of words were lost early on, and already in Old Norse it was just "fá". But more verbs that had roots ending in -ng or -nh came to have past tense forms in -kk. If you look at Icelandic for example, "hanga" (to hang) becomes "hekk" in past tense, while "springa" (to run) becomes "sprakk". What is even more fun is that in the Scandinavian languages, "sprakk" was repurposed as a whole new verb with the meaning of "to burst" or "to crack". Thus you get Swedish "spricka", which is "sprack" in past tense.

[@gnvinternationalambassador925]

overall a pretty cool conlang imo

[@roomcayz]

so many vowels... I can not force my slavic-native tongue to twist that much...

[@simontollin2004]

I think it's something like 41 vowals in älvdalska 😅, which is more vowal phonyms then the total phonym count in many languages

[@roomcayz]

@@simontollin2004 and natives can really tell the difference between them?

[@vignotum132]

@@roomcayzjust like how you can understand soft vs hard consonants, and similarly to the Russian vowel allophones, there is the additional allophonic gemination to help tell the difference.

[@roomcayz]

@@vignotum132 that's actually a helpful comparison

[@vignotum132]

@@roomcayz Good. Also, fuck palatalisation, it is cool as fuck but it fries my brain

[@hevconsume2504]

Subtitled in Swedish, as if not literally every swede was fluent in English

[@chrischris5337]

I’ve been studying Swedish with Rosetta Stone (75% complete) and there are no translations or grammar whatsoever, and on top of that I never ever researched about it. I didn’t know that ett and en were genders, but I know how to use them haha so interesting to learn about this when I intuitively learned plural, verbs, tenses… in love with these vids ❤

[@calleha01]

I would say må/måtte translates better to may/might in english. I think it's cool that swedish has preserved the different conjugations of kunna and skola which mean can and shall, whereas english has replaced the infinitives with the synonyms 'be able to' and 'be going to'.

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

Är det så man böjer "ska"?

[@calleha01]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 ja precis! skola, ska, skulle. men det är i och för sig inte särskilt vanligt att använda "ska" i infinitiv. "Att skola göra" kan ju lika gärna sägas som "att vara på väg att göra", och det är nog vanligare att stöta på denna form av "ska" i gammaldags pluralböjning, som är samma som infinitiv: "vi skola göra".

[@Grankfar]

Jag vet inte om det finns en dialektal skillnad men ja det låter extrem gammeldags med ord som "måtte" och specielt "skola"

[@calleha01]

​@@Grankfar I skolen icke äta af allahanda trä i lustgårdenom

[@Patikolo]

Good video as always, are you planning to do a language overview on Hungarian too? I think it would be interesting.

[@LautloseLebwerwurst3000]

7:46 I'm from Germany and we had to analyse sentence constituents (Satzglieder) not later than 7th grade ( perhaps even earlier). I think it should be taught more widely, since it makes it soooo much easier for me to explain German to foreigners (mainly Americans)

[@katathoombs]

Gud stoff! I'm a bit late to the party, but gotta still say it's always interesting to listen to people outside the circle of Swedish influence speaking of it. I was placed to a _språksbadklass_ at six years old and did my seven first years of schooling mostly (and the three following partly) in Swedish, so now as a language guy I guess I get to count myself lucky. Fun fact: the " /sk/ of certain positions" mentioned in the Germanic video is still pronounced in the Finnish Swedish dialects as [ʃ]. You should also find out about Närpesiska, the supposedly most ancient living form of Swedish.

[@SvartaSnuten]

As a Swede the question has always been on my mind if there is any sort of reason to it or way to try and alleviate some struggle for anyone trying to learn. While it's true that the gender of words is quite random, as a VERY loose rule of thumb I think that "common" words (-en) tend to refer to natural concrete things and "neuter" (-et) is more abstract. Virtually all animals end in -en, the only exception I can even think of is lejonet or "ett boskap", which is more the abstract idea of animals you keep for livelihood (mostly refers to cattle these days). "Det" is what we use to describe any abstract situation like in "det är bra" or "det hade varit". Take for instance the sentence "fisken är kall" vs "fisken har det kallt".

[@gdzephyriac2766]

yeah and then children are neuter. Ett barn

[@BurnBird1]

Most animals, except for the word animal itself and any animals whose name includes it, which is a couple. I personally think that it's too loose of a rule of thumb to be at all useful.

[@GeckoAccount]

Was just linked your video by a friend. It's an interesting video, well done. As for the translation of must. I've never heard of the "Må and Måtte" versions. I grew up only knowing of one word which "Must" is translated into, the word "Måste". Btw, I am curious how a foreigner would consider the Gothenburg dialect, since while there's an overlap, it'll have the complexity of normal Swedish, but would have so much slang that changes how you speak it. I never really thought about the complexity of Swedish though, since I grew up with it.

[@_loss_]

Måtte is old school

[@SynthwaveDuck]

Pitch-perfect delivery

[@GooberedON]

Goatade videon

[@Liggliluff]

imagine if all Swedish adjectives was like "liten" liten/litet/lilla/små/mindre/minst/minsta so instead of: röd/rött/röda/röda/rödare/rödast/rödaste it would be something like: röd/rött/röda/joda/frutare/frutast/frutaste en röd bil, ett rött tåg, den röda bilen, de joda bilarna, en frutare bil, bilen är frutast, den frutaste bilen

[@Liggliluff]

(0:00) Did you just read "hallå" as "hella"? And the second word I got no clue ... "redda"?

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

I said “hej alla, hur är det”

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

I feel like there's a lot to be said about how used to it [van in Swedish? Heh] you are to hearing that specific person speak. When children learn language, at first the only people who understand them are their parents, and being more open-minded in this way is the best way to get people, however big or small, to use their language

[@lahagemo]

he seems to speak a bit faster than necessary in swedish, so his words kinda mesh together in a way that makes it hard to pick out what's actually being said; but tbf as a norwegian even i understood him after giving it another listen + using my context clues. i just thought he misspoke and said "hur är du" instead of "det" lol (which, looking back at it, doesn't make as much sense).

[@szilveszterforgo8776]

Can we have a video on Norwegian too?🥺

[@joelandersson8504]

Jag trodde jag kunde mitt modersmål. men nu verkar det komplicerat... 😆

[@n1ngnuo]

Swedish is so hard. I studied it for 3 years some time ago and forgot everything.

[@PerfectBrEAThER]

1:48 Slightly low estimate.:-/ "More than nine out of 10 adults in Finland speak at least one other language in addition to their mother tongue. The most widely spoken second languages were English, Swedish and German. About 90 percent of respondents surveyed said they spoke some English, while seven out of 10 spoke Swedish - not counting the approximately 5.5 percent of Finns [Population 5,56 million, 2022] who speak Swedish as their native tongue". (Yleisradio/Rundradion) 🕵 Mandatory Swedish and 🇬🇧.

[@chill-ified2913]

Here’s a mistake, övdalsk, or the Dalecarlian branch in general is actually west Scandinavian

[@miki3uwu]

I would love to see a video on Polish

[@floosh1730]

SWEDISH HAS PITCH ACCENTS?? -a Swede

[@jasminekaram880]

Some dialects have 18 or more vowels. The merger of short e and ä are common but not universal across dialects. :)

[@BurnBird1]

The text during the introduction is full of grammatical errors.

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

Can you please do a video on Frisian languages?

[@Leofwine]

West Frisian, Saterland Frisian or Northern Frisian?

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

@@Leofwine all of the above. They're from the same language family and origin, from what I understand, but they have migrated away from each other quite a bit and now just sound like dialects of their nation's languages

[@Leofwine]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 oops, I didn't see the plural.

[@ketchup901]

5:00 The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters. You are missing Q, W and Z. As far as I know Q and Z have always been considered part of the alphabet and idk why you would exclude them. W used to be considered a variant of V but since 2006 it is considered its own letter.

[@bluehouse9363]

The pitch accent thing reminded me of something So Ge'ez, Amharic's ancestor language, also has pitch accent but Amharic and Tigrinya (another language that descends from Ge'ez) do not have pitch accent also pitch accent for a semetic language seems off for me I don't think there are any other semetic languages that have pitch accent I could be wrong though Also, Amharic overview when?

[@TheLappin]

Good job on the video! There are some small mistakes and your pronunciation isn't perfect, but overall it's very good. But obviously there's a lot to nit-pick. For example, here's a small correction: The adjective "god" does not have irregular comparative/superlative forms, you got it mixed up with "bra" (which is more or less a synonym to "god"). So "god, bättre, bäst" is wrong, instead it should be two separate words "bra, bättre, bäst" and "god, godare, godast". Regarding /ɧ/, yeah that phoneme is controversial. But that's because it's not really a single sound, but rather a bunch of different realizations that are grouped together as the same phoneme. In my dialect it's (pretty much) always [ʂ] but in some dialects it's sometimes more like [x] (maybe even a soft [χ] with lip-rounding? idk) (in finlandssvenska it can go all the way in the other direction to [ʃ] or even [ɕ], but there the regular /ɕ/ instead becomes an affricative [tɕ] so there's no confusion between the two).

[@videnobuoka3475]

3:e person utrum singular possesiv är "dens", inte "dess". Båda pronomina är mycket sällsynta och modersmålstalare undviker helst att använda dem. Samma gäller för denna, detta och dessa som istället gärna blir "den här", "det här" eller "de här" (kan också bli "de där" beroende på avstånd från talaren (likt japanska この、その、あの))

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

Dess är väl för inanimate nouns (vad det nu kan heta på svenska), eller?

[@videnobuoka3475]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 Precis! Dess används nästan bara i skrift

[@videnobuoka3475]

Samma sak med de andra liknande pronomina

[@Liggliluff]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 animacy = animacitet animate = animat inanimate = inanimat

[@ketchup901]

Ja, i talspråk. För vissa talare. Det är fortfarande dess på "korrekt" svenska.

[@videnobuoka3475]

Älvdalska är ett västnordiskt språk, inte östnordiskt. Institutet för språk och folkminnen, Sveriges språkmyndighet, säger att älvdalska endast är en dialekt/folkmål och därför är det svårt att hålla språket vid liv i dagsläget

[@falkkiwiben]

Källa på det förstnämnda påståendet? Finns det verkligen konsensus bakom det?

[@videnobuoka3475]

@@falkkiwiben Jag skriver faktiskt mitt gymnasiearbete om detta :D Professor Henrik Rosenkvist mfl skrev i språktidningen "Språkforskare: Regeringen bör erkänna älvdalska". Dessutom har Älvdalens kommun en sida om älvdalska under "uppleva och göra" på deras hemsida som jag använt som källa.

[@Pracedru]

You could also have mentioned the different way that swedish handles "Skal/Vil" compared to the other germanic languages.

[@linkgrinmbn]

actually it would be wrong to say that swedish has a genitive case, because the possesive "s" is an cliticon and not a suffix, because it can attach itself onto phrases as well as words: e.g: "[pojken i huset]-s [boll]" not "[pojken-s i huset] [boll]" which we would expect from a suffix

[@matshjalmarsson3008]

Pretty good, but some minor misunderstandings. While "The Whales eats fish" is correct, you can also say "the fish is eaten by Whales". Plural of "Hjärta" is "Hjärtor", "Hjärtan" can be used, but it's a bit old fashioned, and can be misunderstood, it's mostly used in old expressions like "Herre hjärtanes" or similar

[@Grankfar]

Är du seriös? Låter "hjärtor" korrekt för dig??

[@matshjalmarsson3008]

@@Grankfar Kan ju vara dialektalt (jag är Stockholmare), och bero på sammanhanget. Ritar man flera hjärtor bredvid varandra, eller arbetar med hjärttransplantationer skulle jag definitivt säga hjärtor

[@TheLappin]

Jag (från Umeå) har i alla fall aldrig hört någon säga "hjärtor" i hela mitt liv, bara "hjärtan".

[@Grankfar]

@@matshjalmarsson3008 Huh ok. Ja där ser man. Jag är från Skåne btw.

[@matshjalmarsson3008]

@@Grankfar I've lived in Blekingr/Skåne for more than ten years, so I'm not totally out of track

[@excancerpoik]

you sound like an arabic immigrant speaking swedish

[@ՆոլանՊետրոսյան]

Armenian would be a funny language is overview because of its uniqueness.

[@davidorndorf306]

You should do Dutch!

[@YugoslavForever]

nice

[@melvinhenryson277]

tack så jävla myuckt jag tror jag är edn enda svenen här men vad är odset jag ska prisis läsa klart en book till min svenska lektion

[@jopeteus]

As a Finn, Swedish is to Finnish what French is to English. Well, there is Russian too

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

Swedish is actually more distant to Finnish than Hindi or Persian are to English. (Finnish is completely separate, the only similarities are some loanwords, such as sauna, which Swedish doesn't even have)

[@jopeteus]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 I was talking about "fanciness"

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

@@jopeteus oh ok i mean really? Why? And where's Russian? Finnish is fairly fancy to my ears, i associate it with old grannies who knit and make good muffins in front of the fire

[@jopeteus]

@@jasonlongsworth4036 Swedish and Russian are to Finnish what French is to English. Also what Chinese is to Japanese and Korean. What Arabic is to Farsi

[@videnobuoka3475]

Hen är lingvistiskt sätt allmänt accepterat, däremot är det inte allmänt accepterat politiskt (konservativa eller folk som tänker att kön exklusivt är binärt tycker inte om ordet). Dessutom är det inte endast icke-binärt, det används även istället för "han/hon" (situationer där könet på personen är okänt eller oviktigt)

[@falkkiwiben]

Fast i praktiken känner jag ändå att man inte riktigt använder 'hen' i den andra kontexten i spontant tal? Tycker mig ofta höra "personen", undvikande av pronomen öht genom opersonliga utryck, eller "den" istället när man inte vet eller inte vill lägga fokus på kön. Har tom hört mig själv använda mig utav någon form av singular-dom i vissa specifika situationer.

[@ketchup901]

För mig är "hen" lika styltigt som "han eller hon", i alla fall i tal. I skrift känns det fortfarande som om ordet är för nytt och jag använder hellre typ "personen", "vederbörande" eller "den". Den nya generationen kommer säkert använda "hen" i alla sammanhang. Logiskt sett är det ju ett väldigt användbart ord.

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

the way you pronounce [ʊ] is kinda weird

[@dan74695]

Old Gutnish was its own thing, it was not Old East Norse. Gutnish is still spoken, but has a lot of influence from Swedish, and some from Danish and West Germanic.

[@josephvizard1668]

Please do romanian my guy 🙏

[@jonasbrown1]

good video, horrible language 👍🏻

[@jasonlongsworth4036]

What was horrible? haha like their pronunciation or the topic language?