Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree in quantity, making 18 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Another notable feature is the pitch accent, a development which it shares with Norwegian. Swedish pronunciation of most consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages.
There are 18 consonant phonemes, of which and show considerable variation depending on both social and dialectal context.
Finland Swedish has a slightly different phonology.
Swedish has nine vowels that, as in many other Germanic languages, exist in pairs of long and short versions. The length covaries with the quality of the vowels, as shown in the table below (long vowels in the first column, short in the second), with short variants being more centered and lax. The length is generally viewed as the primary distinction, with quality being secondary. No short vowels appear in open stressed syllables. The front vowels appear in rounded-unrounded pairs: âÂÂ, âÂÂ, â and âÂÂ.
There is some variation in the interpretations of vowel length's phonemicity. , for example, treats vowel quantity as its own separate phoneme (a "prosodeme") so that long and short vowels are allophones of a single vowel phoneme. have been suggested to be underspecified for backness to explain the difference with their short counterparts.
One of the varieties of is made with a constriction that is more forward than is usual. Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson describe this vowel as being pronounced "by slightly lowering the body of the tongue while simultaneously raising the blade of the tongue (...) Acoustically this pronunciation is characterized by having a very high F3, and an F2 which is lower than that in ." They suggest that this may be the usual Stockholm pronunciation of .
In many central and eastern areas (including Stockholm), the contrast between short and is lost. The loss of this contrast has the effect that hetta ('heat') and hätta ('cap') are pronounced the same. Around the 1700s, Stockholm accents began undergoing the same merger in the long system; with pairs such as tre ('three') and trä ('wood'), although it started to be seen as a class marker in the 20th century and gradually vanished.
In Central Standard Swedish, unstressed is slightly retracted , but is still a front vowel rather than central . However, the latter pronunciation is commonly found in Southern Swedish. Therefore, begÃÂ¥ 'to commit' is pronounced in Central Standard Swedish and in Southern Swedish. Before , southerners may use a back vowel . In Central Standard Swedish, a true acoustic schwa can be heard in the voiced release of voiced consonnant, as in e.g. bädd 'bed'.
In some pronunciations, traditionally characteristic of the varieties spoken around Gothenburg and in ÃÂstergötland, but today more common e.g. in Stockholm and especially in younger speakers, and merge, most commonly into (especially before and the retroflex consonants). Words like fördömande ('judging', pronounced in Standard Swedish) and fördummande ('dumbing', pronounced in Standard Swedish) are then often pronounced similarly or identically, as .
In final positions, vowels are progressively devoiced. This is illustrated by reasearchers of the 80' focusing on the so called nolla-hallon effect; the word nolla ('(to/a) zero') played backward is unmistakenably perceived as hallon ('raspberry').
, (in stressed syllables), and (with a few exceptions) are lowered to , , and , respectively, when preceding .
Older accounts extend the context to pre- and less often post-.
Another account of varieties lowering shows to be centralised i.e. , ; and to as open as i.e. .
Younger speakers (b. 1980 in Stockholm) have lower realisations of , so that läsa ('to read') and köpa ('to buy') are pronounced and instead of older standard and . These speakers often also pronounce pre-rhotic and even lower, i.e. and . This is especially true for the long allophone.
This lowered pronunciation has spread to an unknown extent onto the country and has been reported from Lund to Stockholm.
suggests the contrast between and their pre- allophone to be mainly carried by formant dynamic and onsets, the qualities gliding more towards the main allophone for pre-s. She also considers reasonable to assume one single allophone due to their significant overlap. Also, is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the long .
This lowering phenomenon probably has phonemic motivations, as, combined with other minor shifts, it makes Swedish go from a language with 4 different height distinction to 3. Here is a synthesis of some provisory anaylses.
Patterns of diphthongs of long vowels occur in three major dialect groups.
In Central Standard Swedish:
In Southern Swedish dialects, particularly in Scania and Blekinge, the diphthongs are preceded by a rising of the tongue from a central position so that and are realized as and respectively.
The third type of distinctive diphthongs occur in the dialects of Gotland. The pattern of diphthongs is more complex than those of southern and eastern Sweden; , and tend to rise while and fall; , , and are not diphthongized at all.
The table below shows the Swedish consonant phonemes in spoken Standard Swedish.
are dental , but can be either dental or alveolar . If is alveolar, then is also alveolar. Dental realization of is the predominant one in Central Standard Swedish.
Uterance finally, voiced obstruents are followed by vocalic release itself smoothing out into a voiceless perdiod. This is illustrated by another backward speech example where the word viv ('wife' (poetic)) and its definite form vivet are both heard as the nonce word heviv.
Medial lenis stops () can turn into fricatives or approximants in casual speech.
Initial fortis stops () are aspirated in stressed position, but unaspirated when preceded by within the same morpheme. In Finland Swedish, aspiration does not occur and initial lenis stops are usually voiced throughout. Word-medial lenis stops are sometimes voiceless in Finland, a likely influence from Finnish.
Plosives are often fricated near fricatives.
Preaspiration of medial and final fortis stops, including the devoicing of preceding sonorants, is common, though its length and normativity varies from dialect to dialect, being optional (and idiolectal) in Central Standard Swedish but obligatory in, for example, the Swedish dialects of Gräsö, Vemdalen and Arjeplog. In Gräsö, preaspiration is blocked in certain environments (such as an following the fortis consonant or a morpheme boundary between the vowel and the consonant), while it is a general feature of fortis medial consonants in Central Standard Swedish. When not preaspirated, medial and final fortis stops are simply unaspirated. In clusters of fortis stops, the second "presonorant" stop is unaspirated and the former patterns with other medial final stops (that is, it is either unaspirated or is preaspirated).
The phonetic attributes of preaspiration also vary. In the Swedish of Stockholm, preaspiration is often realized as a fricative subject to the character of surrounding vowels or consonants so that it may be labial, velar, or dental; it may also surface as extra length of the preceding vowel. In the province of Härjedalen, though, it resembles or . The duration of preaspiration is highest in the dialects of Vemdalen and Arjeplog. Helgason notes that preaspiration is longer after short vowels, in lexically stressed syllables, as well as in pre-pausal position.
is dental in Central Standard Swedish, but retracted alveolar in Blekinge, Bohuslän, Halland and Scania.
The Swedish fricatives and are often considered to be the most difficult aspects of Swedish pronunciation for foreign students. The combination of occasionally similar and rather unusual sounds as well as the large variety of partly overlapping allophones of often presents difficulties for non-natives in telling the two apart. The existence of a third sibilant in the form of tends to confuse matters even more, and in some cases realizations that are labiodental can also be confused with . The historic palatized kj and tj sound , is an affricate or in Finland Swedish.
The Swedish phoneme (the "sj-sound" or voiceless postalveolar-velar fricative) and its alleged coarticulation is a difficult and complex issue debated amongst phoneticians. Though the acoustic properties of its allophones are fairly similar, the realizations can vary considerably according to geography, age, gender as well as social context and are notoriously difficult to describe and transcribe accurately. Most common are various sh-like sounds, with occurring mainly in northern Sweden and in Finland. A voiceless uvular fricative, , can sometimes be used in the varieties influenced by major immigrant languages like Arabic and Kurdish. The different realizations can be divided roughly into the following categories:
See main article for more detail.
Utterance initially, is voiced and gets so progressively, as opposed to vowel onsets which aprubtly start the buzzing. Also the aspiration noise is not an important auditory cue to its presence.
has distinct variations in Standard Swedish. For most speakers, the realization as an alveolar trill occurs only in contexts where emphatic stress is used. In Central Swedish, it is often pronounced as a fricative (transcribed as ) or approximant (transcribed as ), which is especially frequent in weakly articulated positions such as word-finally and somewhat less frequent in stressed syllable onsets, in particular after other consonants. It may also be an apico-alveolar tap. One of the most distinct features of the southern varieties is the uvular realization of , which may be a trill , a fricative or an approximant . In Finland, is usually an apical trill , and may be an approximant postvocalically.
Variations of are not as common, though some phonetic variation exists, such as a retroflex flap that exists as an allophone in proximity to a labial or velar consonant or after most long vowels, the same thing happens for .
In casual speech, the nasals tend to assimilate to the place of articulation of a following obstruent.
and are pronounced with weak friction and function phonotactically with the sonorants.
In most varieties of Swedish that use an alveolar (in particular, the central and northern forms), the combination of with coronal consonants () produces retroflex consonant realizations (), a recursive sandhi process called "retroflexion". The process of retroflexion is not limited to just one coronal and applies to the whole cluster. The combination of and does not uniformly cause retroflexion, so that it may also be pronounced with two separate consonants , and even, occasionally in a few words and expressions, as a mere .
In Gothenburg and neighbouring areas (such as Mölndal and Kungälv) the retroflex consonants are substituted by alveolar ones, with their effects still remaining. However, does not become but instead .
As the adjacent table shows, this process is not limited by word boundaries, though there is still some sensitivity to the type of boundary between the and the dental in that retroflexion is less likely with boundaries higher up in the prosodic hierarchy. In the southern varieties, which use a uvular , retroflex realizations do not occur. An spelled usually will not trigger retroflexion. Retroflexion also does not usually occur in Finland.
In Swedish, stress is not fixed. Primary stress can fall on one of the last three syllables in a wordâÂÂs stem. This can lead to surface contrasts based solely on difference in position of stress:
Primary stressed syllables are always metrically heavy, i.e. contain either a long vowel or a short vowel followed by a consonant. In phonological analyses of Swedish, stressed syllables in underived forms are assumed to be associated with a basic moraic trochaic foot [ü ü]<sub>à</sub>, e.g. bÃÂil 'car' (stress marked as (ÃÂ)). More whole-word based analyses of metrical structure where affixes are included also assume other foot types, in particular, syllabic trochaic feet [àÃÂ]<sub>Ft</sub>, bÃÂil-ar 'cars'. Affixes affect stress to a considerable degree in the sense that inflectional suffixes can never receive primary stress (bÃÂil-ar-na 'the cars'), whereas many derivational suffixes can tent-ÃÂabel 'examinable'. Disyllabic words with accent 2 like ÃÂandÃÂe âÂÂspiritâÂÂ, kvÃÂinnÃÂa âÂÂwomanâÂÂ, bÃÂilÃÂar 'cars' have secondary stress on the second syllable. In the Swedish Academy's lexicon, these disyllables are transcribed with the stress pattern 3 2, e.g. kvin<sup>3</sup>a<sup>2</sup> where (<sup>3</sup>) stands for primary stressed syllable with accent 2 and (<sup>2</sup>) represents a âÂÂsecondary stressedâ syllable in words with accent 2). This secondary stress is assumed to have existed in Old Norse (see and references therein). Compound words have primary stress on the first element and secondary stress on the last element bÃÂil-dels-butÃÂiken 'car-part shop' (secondary stress marked as (ÃÂ)).
Stressed syllables carry one of two different tones, often described as pitch accents, or tonal word accents. They are called acute and grave accent, accent 1 and accent 2. The actual realization of these two tones varies from dialect to dialect. In the central Swedish dialect of Stockholm, accent 1 is characterized by a low tone at the beginning of the stressed syllable (fìsken 'the fish') and accent 2 by a high tone at the beginning of the stressed syllable (mátta 'mat'). When the word is in a prominent/focused position, a high tone often occurs following the word accent (fìskén). In accent 2 words, this results in two high tones within the word (e.g. máttá), hence the term "two-peaked" for this dialect. In southern Swedish, a "one-peaked" dialect, accent 1 is realized as a high tone at the beginning of the stressed syllable (fÃÂsken) and accent 2, by a low tone (màtta). Generally, the grave accent is characterized by a later timing of the word accent pattern as compared with the acute accent.
The phonemicity of this tonal system is demonstrated in the nearly 300 pairs of two-syllable words differentiated only by their use of either grave or acute accent. Outside of these pairs, the main tendency for tone is that the acute accent appears in monosyllables (since the grave accent cannot appear in monosyllabic words) while the grave accent appears in polysyllabic words. Polysyllabic forms resulting from declension or derivation also tend to have a grave accent except when it is the definite article that is added. This tonal distinction has been present in Scandinavian dialects at least since Old Norse though a greater number of polysyllables now have an acute accent. These are mostly words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, but have subsequently become disyllabic, as have many loanwords. For example, Old Norse kømr ('comes') has become kommer in Swedish (with an acute accent).
The distinction can be shown with the minimal pair anden 'the mallard' (tone 1) and anden 'the spirit' (tone 2).
The exact realization of the tones also depends on the syllable's position in an utterance. For instance, at the beginning of an utterance, the acute accent may have a rising rather than slightly falling pitch on the first syllable. Also, these are word tones that are spread across the syllables of the word. In trisyllabic words with the grave accent, the second fall in pitch is distributed across the second and third syllables:
The position of the tone is dependent upon stress: The first stressed syllable has a high or falling tone, as does the following syllable(s) in grave-accented words.
In most Finland-Swedish varieties, however, the distinction between grave and acute accent is missing.
A reasonably complete list of uncontroversial so-called minimal pairs can be seen below. The two words in each pair are distinguished solely by having different tone (acute vs. grave). In those cases where both words are nouns it would have been possible to list the genitive forms of the words as well, thereby creating another word pair, but this has been avoided. A few word pairs where one of the words is a plural form with the suffix -or have been included. This is due to the fact that many Swedish-speakers in all parts of Sweden pronounce the suffix -or the same way as -er.
Note that karaten/karaten is the only pair with more than two syllables (although we would get a second one if we used the definite forms of the pair perser/pärser, i.e. perserna/pärserna). The word pair länder ('countries', plural of land) and länder ('loins', plural of länd) could have been included, but this one is controversial. For those speakers who have grave accent in the plural of länd, the definite plural forms will also constitute a three-syllable minimal pair: länderna (acute accent, 'the countries') vs. länderna (grave accent, 'the loins'). Although examples with more than two syllables are very few in Standard Swedish, it is possible to find other three-syllable pairs in regional dialects, such as Värmländska: hunnera (acute, 'the Huns') vs. hunnera (grave, 'the dogs'), ändera/ännera (acute, 'the mallards') vs. ändera/ännera (grave, 'the ends'), etc.
Prosody in Swedish often varies substantially between different dialects including the spoken varieties of Standard Swedish. As in most languages, stress can be applied to emphasize certain words in a sentence. To some degree prosody may indicate questions, although less so than in English.
At a minimum, a stressed syllable must consist of either a long vowel or a short vowel and a long consonant. Like many other Germanic languages, Swedish has a tendency for closed syllables with a relatively large number of consonant clusters in initial as well as final position. Though not as complex as that of most Slavic languages, examples of up to 7 consecutive consonants can occur when adding Swedish inflections to some foreign loanwords or names, and especially when combined with the tendency of Swedish to make long compound nouns. The syllable structure of Swedish can therefore be described with the following formula:
This means that a Swedish one-syllable morpheme can have up to three consonants preceding the vowel that forms the nucleus of the syllable, and three consonants following it. Examples: skrämts (verb 'scare' past participle, passive voice) or sprängts (verb 'explode' past participle, passive voice). All but one of the consonant phonemes, , can occur at the beginning of a morpheme, though there are only 6 possible three-consonant combinations, all of which begin with , and a total of 31 initial two-consonant combinations. All consonants except for and can occur finally, and the total number of possible final two-consonant clusters is 62.
In some cases this can result in very complex combinations, such as in västkustskt , consisting of västkust ('west coast') with the adjective suffix -sk and the neuter suffix -t.
Central Standard Swedish and most other Swedish dialects feature a rare "complementary quantity" feature wherein a phonologically short consonant follows a long vowel and a long consonant follows a short vowel; this is true only for stressed syllables and all segments are short in unstressed syllables. This arose from the historical shift away from a system with a four-way contrast (that is, , , and were all possible) inherited from Proto-Germanic to a three-way one (, and ), and finally the present two-way one; certain Swedish dialects have not undergone these shifts and exhibit one of the other two phonotactic systems instead. In literature on Swedish phonology, there are a number of ways to transcribe complementary relationship, including:
With the conventional assumption that medial long consonants are ambisyllabic (that is, penna ('pen'), is syllabified as ), all stressed syllables are thus "heavy". In unstressed syllables, the distinction is lost between and or between . With each successive post-stress syllable, the number of contrasting vowels decreases gradually with distance from the point of stress; at three syllables from stress, only and occur.
Swedish allows a rare type of cluster combining liquids, a consonantal jod and another consonant. Finally this may be simplified by vocalisation or with a svarabhakti vowel.
The sample text is a reading of The North Wind and the Sun. The transcriptions are based on the section on Swedish found in The Handbook on the International Phonetic Association, in which a man in his forties from Stockholm is recorded reading out the traditional fable in a manner typical of Central Standard Swedish as spoken in his area. The broad transcription is phonemic, while the narrow is phonetic.