Standard Swedish - Regional Standards and Rural Dialects

Regional Standards and Rural Dialects

Swedish linguists reserve the term "dialect" for rural dialects with roots that can be traced back to Old Swedish. However, among Swedish speakers in general, other regional standards are considered to be "dialects".

Although Swedish phonology is in principle uniform, its phonetic realizations are not. Contrary to the situation in German, Danish, and Finnish, there is no uniform spoken Standard Swedish. Instead, there are (at least) three regional standard varieties (acrolects or prestige dialects), i.e. the most intelligible or prestigious forms of spoken Swedish, each within their area. No commonly accepted terms exist, not even in Swedish, but they will be designated in the following manner in this article (listed in order of the number of speakers):

• Central Swedish (5-7 million speakers)
• South Swedish (2-4 million)
• Finland Swedish (300 000)

These standard varieties are primarily used for communication with people from distant towns and regions as well as in more formal contexts such as public speeches, artists' performances, and in broadcast media. They are signified by differences in prosody as well as phonetics.

A Westcoast variety, centered in Gothenburg, has a prosody that is close to that of southern Norwegian dialects and may be considered a separate standard variety, Western Swedish, with 2 million speakers. Although the regional dialects of the area are more closely related to those of Southern Sweden, the prestige dialect is closer to the Central Swedish Standard variety (although with a typically western intonation). The boundary of the area goes in the South through Northern Halland, Northwestern Småland and follows Lake Vättern in the East. Its northern boundary goes through Värmland. An exception is the island of Gotland (50 000 people), which has its own dialect with roots in Old Gutnish.

The boundary for the South Swedish Standard goes, unless the Westcoast variety is included, through Northern Halland and Northern Småland approximately at the latitude of Jönköping at the southern tip of Lake Vättern across the Scandinavian Peninsula.