Swedish
Swedish is a member of the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic
subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the official language
of Sweden and one of the official languages of Finland, and it is spoken by
about 9 million people in Sweden and 500,000 elsewhere, chiefly in Finland,
Norway, and Estonia. A descendant of Old Norse, the Swedish language falls into
two major periods historically: Old Swedish, the early form of the language
(usually dated from the 9th cent. to the early 16th cent.), and New Swedish,
the modern form of the language (since the early 16th cent.). The Swedish language
underwent many changes during the Middle Ages but began to be standardized in
the 16th cent. as a result of such events as the throwing off of Danish domination,
the Reformation, and the translation of the Bible into Swedish. In 1786 the
Swedish Academy was established to oversee the development of the language.
Swedish absorbed a number of words from Low German in the Middle Ages, from
High German in the 16th and 17th cent., from French in the 18th cent., and from
English in the 20th cent. Swedish is noted for its musical quality. This results
partly from the use of pitch accents, which sometimes serve to differentiate
the meanings of homonyms. There is considerable difference between the spoken
and written forms of Swedish. For example, a number of inflections used in literary
Swedish are not employed in the spoken language. Until the early 13th cent.,
runes were used for recording Swedish, but thereafter (as Christianity took
hold in Scandinavia) they began to be replaced by the Roman alphabet, to which
three symbols, å, ä, and ö, have been added.
Sources:
Independent Study Courses Available at UCSD:
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Other Local Resources:
UCSD International Center
Mingei museum of folk art
Balboa Park House
of Pacific Relations
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Landmark
Theaters: foreign films