UCL CENTRE FOR LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION (CLIE)

Welcome to the Self-Access Centre materials database

The SAC is here to pro­vide you with op­por­tu­ni­ties to study Swedish out­side class time. If you need ad­vice and guid­ance on what to study, you should talk to your class tu­tor, who will help you iden­tify your strengths and weak­nesses and make rec­om­men­da­tions on what to study.

A bit about the language

Swedish (svenska) is a North Ger­manic lan­guage, spo­ken by ap­prox­i­mately 10 mil­lion peo­ple, pre­dom­i­nantly in Swe­den and parts of Fin­land, es­pe­cially along the coast and on the Åland is­lands. It is to a con­sid­er­able ex­tent mu­tu­ally in­tel­li­gi­ble with Nor­we­gian and to a lesser ex­tent with Dan­ish. Along with the other North Ger­manic lan­guages, Swedish is a de­scen­dant of Old Norse, the com­mon lan­guage of the Ger­manic peo­ples liv­ing in Scan­di­navia dur­ing the Viking Era. Stan­dard Swedish, used by most Swedish peo­ple, is the na­tional lan­guage that evolved from the Cen­tral Swedish di­alects in the 19th cen­tury and was well es­tab­lished by the be­gin­ning of the 20th cen­tury. While dis­tinct re­gional va­ri­eties de­scended from the older rural di­alects still ex­ist, the spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guage is uni­form and stan­dard­ized. Some di­alects dif­fer con­sid­er­ably from the stan­dard lan­guage in gram­mar and vo­cab­u­lary and are not al­ways mu­tu­ally in­tel­li­gi­ble with Stan­dard Swedish. These di­alects are con­fined to rural ar­eas and are spo­ken pri­mar­ily by small num­bers of peo­ple with low so­cial mo­bil­ity. Though not fac­ing im­mi­nent ex­tinc­tion, such di­alects have been in de­cline dur­ing the past cen­tury, de­spite the fact that they are well re­searched and their use is of­ten en­cour­aged by lo­cal au­thor­i­ties.