SWEDISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Swedish belongs to the northern branch of the Germanic family, within which it is an eastern development of the old donsk tunga, or Danish tongue, a name anciently applied to the language spoken not in Denmark only, but in the rest of Scandinavia as well. It was very much the same in the entire Northland down to about 900, or a little later, when it began to differentiate into an eastern type, ramifying into Danish and Swedish, and a western tvpe, giving rise to Norwegian and Icelandic. From 900 to 1500 the Swedish branch is called Old Swedish. Until after 1200 the only records are runic inscriptions, cut for the most part on gravestones. The use of the Latin alphabet began in the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, when a literary language began to develop out of the Södermanland dialect, the differentiation from Danish proceeded slowly; after this came a period of extensive approximation to Danish, to be followed in time by an archaizing period, which restored original forms. Aside from divergencies of vocabulary, Swedish now differs from Danish especially in its retention, after a vowel, of the old voiceless consonants, k, t, p, which in Danish changed to g, d, b, and in its retention of the vowels a and o in unstressed syllables, where Danish has e or no vowel at all; thus Swedish bok, ‘book,’ mat, ‘meat,’ apa, ‘ape,’ are in Danish bog, mad, abe. Swedish talar ni svenska ‘do you speak Swedish?’ is in Danish taler de svensk; and Swedish flickan liknar sin mor, ‘the girl resembles her mother,’ is in Danish pigen ligner moderen. Under this head it may be added that Swedish has not the ‘glottal catch’ of Danish, and that Danish has not the delicately modulated musical accent of Swedish.
The main body of the Swedish vocabulary is
old Germanic stock, the principal foreign
ingredients being (1) Latin and Greek words that
came in with Christianity or with the growth of
scholarship; (2) Low German words dating from
the time of the Hanseatic League, as arbeta, ‘to
work,’ stövel, ‘boot,’ smaka, ‘taste;’ (3) German
words from the time of the Thirty Years'
War, as tapper, ‘brave,’ prakt, ‘splendor;’ (4) French words borrowed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as affär, ‘business,’ talang, ‘talent,’ charmant, ‘charming.’ Like the other North-Germanic tongues, Swedish has the post-positive definite article (originally a pronominal
affix); thus flicka, ‘girl,’ flickan, ‘the girl.’ As in
English, nouns have but one case (the genitive), which is now distinguished by inflection. The genitive ending is -s, which is appended after the article; thus flickans mor, ‘the girl's mother.’ The plural of nouns is formed by means of the endings -or, -ar, -er, -en, to which the definite article is appended in the forms -na, -ne, according to a feeling for vowel-balance which shows itself as early as the fourteenth century; thus flickorna, ‘the girls,’ but dalarne, ‘the dales.’ A new pronoun of address, ni, taking the place of I, came into the language in the seventeenth century and is now commonly used in books; but in conversation Swedish politeness prefers to avoid it and substitute the title of the person addressed, putting the verb in the third person; thus, ar frun sjuk, ‘is the lady sick?’ = ‘are you sick, madam?’ The verb still retains the old Scandinavian passive in -s, which was originally an affixed reflexive pronoun; thus, kalla, ‘call,’ kallas, ‘to be called.’ A more peculiar feature of conjugation is the differentiation of the perfect passive participle into two forms, one of which, called the supine, is used to inflect the perfect tenses, while the other is declinable and serves as a true participle; thus jag har älskat, ‘I have loved,’ but jag är alskad, ‘I am loved,’ and vi äro älskade, ‘we are loved.’