Learning Swedish

Learning Swedish for family research
Here comes a series of lessons to help anyone learn a bit about the Swedish language. This will not make you a linguist but give you a few hints to help you a lot with genealogy activities. These notes target native English speakers. Swedes, do not cringe. I am trying to make it very simple to start.

Overview and Swedish letters – Lesson 1

It is not that hard. Don’t worry.

Compared with English, Swedish has a considerably smaller vocabulary, perhaps a fifth the size. Bigger words are often compounds of smaller words making it easier to look up an unfamiliar word in an Swedish-English dictionary. Swedish uses a word order and sentence structure familiar to English speakers. Verb conjugations are simple as in English.

But what about those letters?

The Swedish alphabet uses the 26 letters we are used to plus three extra vowels Åå, Ää, and Öö. (By the way, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish are similar although the graphics may look different.)

These are separate, distinct letters not modifications or accents on other letters! Do NOT treat them like A or O.

They come at the END of the alphabet after Z. This letter order must be used when you try to look something up in a sorted list like a dictionary, phonebook or gazetteer.

Think A B C D E … X Y Z Å Ä Ö.

When you get documents that have been transcribed by someone unfamiliar with Swedish, they MAY have removed the little marks or used them incorrectly so you may have to put them back to make some sense. It is strongly recommended that you always keep the correct letters in your writings. Just copy Swedish documents faithfully.

You can type these Swedish letters on your Windows PC (sorry MAC users). To do this, install the Swedish keyboard from Windows. You do this from the Control Panel. Windows allows you to temporarily modify your keyboard by software to a standard Swedish keyboard. You can switch back and forth with a click in the task bar area. With the SV keyboard loaded, find Å just to the right of P (where [ is), Ö the key just to the right of L, and Ä the second key to the right of L. You will find all the other letters and numbers in the familiar positions as the English QWERTY keyboard. Note that special characters are in other spots! (I forget that all the time. Ugh.)

A second way to type the extra Swedish letters use ALT codes. To type a letter, this is a multi-click process.
1 Hold down the ALT key (typically near either end of the Space bar).
2 Type the three digit number code using the numerical pad. (I made it work on my laptop only with the number pad, not with the numbers across the top of the keyboard.)

Alt + 134 = å
Alt + 143 = Å
Alt + 132 = ä
Alt + 142 = Ä
Alt + 148 = ö
Alt + 153 = Ö
Alt + 130 = é
Alt + 144 = É

É has been included here. It is not an extra letter but the accent is often used in personal names. It is just an E with an accent and sorts to the same place as E in the alphabet.

Finally, for occasional use, you can also copy the letters from another text on your screen. Windows drag-and-drop works fine. This is a quick way if you only need one letter like for a Google search.

Now that was not so bad. So, stay tuned, more to come.