World Language Map

Where is Swedish spoken?

Swedish (svenska) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Åland and 1 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

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Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
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  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Swedish is spoken

Swedish is spoken in 5 countries: Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Åland and 1 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Sweden95%10,060,310
Finland44%2,475,620
Denmark13%776,508
Åland99%25,938
NorwayNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Swedish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Swedish.

How many people speak Swedish?

Wikidata gives about 9.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). It also lists about 3.1 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Swedish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Swedish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. North Germanic
  6. North Scandinavian
  7. East-Central Swedic
  8. East Swedic
  9. Swedish

Related languages

Other languages in the East Swedic group:

More about Swedish

Codes: ISO 639-3 swe, Glottolog swed1254. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Swedish

Where is Swedish spoken?

Swedish is spoken in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Åland and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 95% of the population of Sweden, which is about 10,060,310 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Swedish?

Wikidata gives about 9.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 3.1 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012).

Which language family is Swedish in?

Glottolog places Swedish in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, North Germanic, North Scandinavian, East-Central Swedic and East Swedic.

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