Understanding the Swedish Pitch Accent

This video lecture presents the Swedish pitch accent—what it is, what it sounds like, and where it occurs!

The pitch accent is one of the most overlooked features of Swedish pronunciation. Here you get all the information you need to start getting it right!

SEQUEL
The Swedish Pitch Accent Revisited: Dialectal Variation
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FOLLOW / SUPPORT
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[Peter_]

This is honestly one of the few truly serious Swedish-related videos I have seen in a while.
Most other "learn about Swedish" videos are made by hyperactive teens who try to be funny or something and either teach completely incorrect things or just throw around random useless phrases without explaining them or anything, but this video actually gives a professional impression.

[joannis]

As a Swedish speaking Finn, I had no idea the Swedes could tell the difference between ducks and spirits without context.

[meridesiree]

Whoa, i'm a native swede but i've never realized that i use these pitches :0 You've blown my mind haha

[kishocho]

Mind blown. Very interesting, even for a Swedish native speaker.

[calbackk]

I’m Finland swedish and have lived in Sweden since 1981. I never really understood what the acute and grave accents were about. Now I do. A big thank you. 👍

[DmitryKotov]

I'm Russian and I learn Swedish in my free time because I like Sweden and Scandinavien culture. You, Swedes, have so nice, beautiful and curious language. That's a great tutorial! Very understandable, but sometimes it's really hard to feel difference between accent 1 and accent 2.:) Tack!

[takotak]

Taaaack så jättemycket! I've honestly been looking for this video for a while now: no swede could explain this to me haha! And as a French speaker, I needed to understand what the helvete was going on with those pitches! Nu förstår jag!

[bingbongjoel]

“Ey gurl. Are you Accent 1? Because I think you’re acute”

[ra-issq]

The Umbrella Academy cast Who spoke Swedish in season 2 should’ve watched this

[SWEmanque]

I guess this is why we Swedes sometimes have a really hard time understanding what non-Swedish people say even though other non-Swedish people understand it perfectly.

[BigBeardBuilds]

For someone actually learning Swedish, this was a very enlightening and useful video. Thank you!

[emmajauernig]

Who knew that speaking Chinese would eventually help me with Swedish! Accent one is very similar to a second tone followed by a neutral tone, and accent two is just like having consecutive fourth tones in Mandarin.

[reformedprescriptivist]

I signed into YouTube specifically so I could leave a comment about how helpful and well-done this was. It is more difficult than one might expect to find this information on the internet; this was both full of useful information and presented in a helpful way. Thank you.

[DepartmentOfYouth]

Fascinating. As a bilingual Finn I didn't realize this was a thing in "Sweden Swedish." My English-speaking fiancé will be happy to know that this is something he will not have to learn in his Swedish studies as we're planning on living in Finland :'D

[esabris]

This was so incredibly helpful. I'm a little over a month into learning Swedish on Duolingo. I'm a musician, so these accent differences stood out to me immediately. But since I'm a new learner, I didn't realize there was reason for it....I thought there might have been inconsistencies in the Duolingo word recordings because none of this was explained. Thanks for helping my pronunciation!

[jojoschauman]

I’m a Swedish speeking Finn and I say that the duck is the spirit

[Dailylilyful]

I've always struggled with my accent. Swedes always tell me that I sound "too french" when I speak. This is a game changer. Seriously. You've earned a new subscriber.

[yere]

"unless we get it right we'll sound like foreigners"
more like
"unless we get it right we'll sound like Finns"

[thgraderfriends]

I found a Swedish-Finn vlogger once (Cat Peterson) and when she posted her first video in Swedish she had a lot of Swedish people telling her that her Swedish sucked. From the little Swedish I knew I could understand her just fine and she told me that Finnish-Swedish (the kind she speaks) only has a few word differences from Sweden-Swedish. Now I understand why people thought her Swedish sucked...Finnish Swedish doesn't use the accents!

[gunillajohnson]

Better and more thoroughly explained than when I studied at Nordiska Språk at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I was very confused at the time since the illustrations did not fit at all with how I pronounce with my West Swedish accent. Then I took a Norwegian class at the same department, and then they showed the Norwegian versions of the same thing. Turns out my West Swedish accent looked like Norwegian, not the Stockholm version in this video. We go up at the end while the Stockholm people go down. This video touches on the fact that the pitch looks different in other accents, something I wasn't really told when I was in college. Great job!