Basic Swedish

A Grammar and Workbook

Ian Hinchliffe, Philip Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351169660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Basic Swedish: A Grammar and Workbook combines an accessible basic reference grammar and related exercises in one volume, and covers most of the topics that students might expect to deal with in their first year of learning Swedish.

Each of the 25 units discusses one or more grammar topics, with examples that are subsequently practised in the exercises that follow.

The book introduces the contemporary language against a backdrop of Swedish culture, society, geography, customs and history. Each unit ends with a cultural text that outlines an aspect of Swedish culture and exemplifies and consolidates the grammar topic examined in the unit.

Features include:

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• clear grammatical explanations with examples in Swedish and English

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• vocabulary based on a major corpus of written Swedish in order to guarantee authenticity and relevance

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• cross-references to other units

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• over 100 exercises with a key to all the correct answers

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• full vocabulary list at the end of the book.

The book is suitable both for independent study and for class use. It can be used by absolute beginners and those who have advanced a little further.

p.1

UNIT 1

What makes Swedish familiar? . . . and a few challenges

Introduction

Swedish is spoken by around 10 million people, which means that it is not a major world language. Nevertheless, it is still a language spoken by a relatively large number of people, coming 85th out of about 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Swedish is spoken in a geographically clearly distinct and restricted area; it is the language of more than 90% of people living in Sweden and about 5% of those living in Finland, where it is also an official language. It is also a language that has been cultivated and studied assiduously over the centuries, possessing standardised spelling conventions and reliable reference books in the form of dictionaries and grammars. Swedish has a rich literature and is used in a wide range of literary and technical fields.

English and Swedish are cousin languages; Swedish is a North Germanic language, closely related to Norwegian and Danish, as well as historically to Icelandic and Faeroese. Norwegian and Swedish are regarded as mutually intelligible. Spoken Danish and Swedish are more difficult to understand for their neighbours because of differences that have emerged in pronunciation.

Pronunciation

Generally speaking, Swedish spelling reflects its sounds; it is largely a phonetic language, unlike English or French (see Unit 2).

Swedish has three vowels not found in English: å, ä, ö. There is a major distinction in length between long and short vowels: compare the first a sound in bada ‘bathe’ and badda ‘dab’, respectively (see Unit 2).

The consonants only present one major challenge: g–, k–, sk– are pronounced either ‘hard’ [g], [k], [sk] or ‘soft’ [j], [ç], [ʃ], depending on the vowel that follows:

• ‘hard’ before a, o, u, å in gas ‘gas’; kontrast ‘contrast’; kung ‘king’; gås ‘goose’; skandal ‘scandal’

• ‘soft’ before e, i, y, ä, ö in genetik ‘genetics’; gäst ‘guest’; Kina ‘China’; kyss ‘kiss’; köld ‘cold’; skidlift ‘ski lift’.

p.2

Stress and accent

As in English, an important distinction occurs between stressed and unstressed words in the sentence (all significant words are stressed) and stressed and unstressed syllables in these words. Notice, for example, the unstressed prefixes in be'tala ‘pay’ and för'stå ‘understand’, and the stressed negative prefix in words beginning in o–: 'olycklig ‘unhappy’.

In compound nouns (those made up from two or more nouns), there is stress on both the first and last part of the noun, and in the spoken language in central Sweden this also shows a falling and rising tone:

When two stresses occur in a single word – not a compound, but one with two syllables – they also have a distinctive tone pattern, with a rise at the end of the word that makes Swedes sound as if they are singing. This falling–rising tone pattern is often called Accent 2:

However, many bisyllabic words – including verbs in the present tense and words ending in –er, –el, –en – only have one rising tone, called Accent 1:

This is the same as in monosyllabic words:

Vocabulary

One feature that makes Swedish easy to learn is its vocabulary. English and Swedish share a great deal of their core Germanic vocabulary, thus making many words recognisable: arm, fot, finger, knä, kniv. This includes words for family relationships (broder, dotter, syster, moder, son) and for rural life and nature (fisk ‘fish’; gås ‘goose’;...