Language Overview: Swedish

Links:

Translations:
0:02: (on the snow) This language; (on the antenna or whatever that is) Us
0:19: *Stockholm dialect* I am inevitable
1:30: Wait, so are you Modern Swedish? “Well yes, but actually no.”
1:39: Formality
2:04: (in front) Swedish consonants; (in back) Swedish vowels
3:27: (on the person) Me; (on the balls) “Uvular” “Retroflex”
4:41: Pitch accent; non-Swedes
6:51: How I, an American, see the letter Å
8:23: Conjunctions; Adverbs
8:54: You thought the genders were masculine and feminine
10:46: What would happen if I explained the articles before the nouns *Visible confusion*
11:15: The singular common article -en; The plural neuter article -en
12:18: (Swedish) Say the suffix in Swedish; (Danish) Don’t say the suffix in Danish; (Both languages) Me
12:35: One does not simply go to someone’s house to ransack the fridge
15:25: (on the golden retriever) Verbs in Swedish; (on the gargoyle-looking thing) Verbs in other languages
15:59: When you learn that the verb classes can’t always be determined by the infinitive
16:09: Gives present tense suffix; Doesn’t say which person it’s for
16:11: Language nerds
16:12: Everyone else
18:18: What is “supine”? I only know “past participle”
18:30: When the past tense form is irregular, but the supine is regular; “See, I pulled a sneaky on ya”
20:14: (in front) Me; The other video; (in back) Me; This video
22:37: where pitch accent

[vignotum]

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.

[jasonlongsworth]

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

[ambiguousi]

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.

[vignotum]

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 …”

[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.

[mr.flibblessumeriantransla]

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.

[higorribeiro]

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

[jasminekaram]

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.

[DaveHuxtableLanguages]

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

[herghamoo]

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.

[hevconsume]

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

[roomcayz]

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

[dansugardude]

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!

[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.

[chrischris]

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 ❤

[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".

[Patikolo]

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

[calleha]

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'.

[Liggliluff]

imagine if all Swedish adjectives was like "liten"

so instead of:

it would be something like:


en röd bil, ett rött tåg, den röda bilen, de joda bilarna, en frutare bil, bilen är frutast, den frutaste bilen

[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.