Sociology: A Study of Swedish Language's Historical Influences

This sociology essay delves into the historical evolution of the Swedish language, tracing its origins and influences from other languages and cultures. The paper begins by examining the impact of Urgerman, a language spoken in Northern Europe around 2000 years ago, and its subsequent influence on the development of the language. It then explores the emergence of Urnordiskan, considered the oldest language in the Nordic region, and its impact on the Swedish language. The essay further discusses the emergence of run Swedish in the 8th century and its evolution into Old Swedish. The influence of German and English is also explored, highlighting how these languages have shaped the vocabulary and structure of the Swedish language. The essay concludes by emphasizing the ongoing evolution of the Swedish language and its connections to various Nordic and Indo-European languages.

Running head: SOCIOLOGY
Sociology
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Swedish history is one of those that has been influenced by other cultures and languages
over the times. This paper will look to engage in the ways how Sweden had been given the
influence. The origins and developments of the Swedish languages from the other languages will
be the main topic for discussion here. The current Swedish language has derived from Old Norse
language with the continuation from Low Saxony of Netherlands. Such concepts will be gone
through in this paper.
Swedish is an European country in the northern part of the country. Other countries in
Northern Europe used to speak in the language Urgerman around 2000 years ago. This is one of
the languages belonging to the Indo-European language family (Freywald et al. 2015). Many
countries like Sweden, Norway. Netherlands, England and Germany were able to speak in this
language because this was a common matter in these countries. So, it was evident that this
language had been a huge influence on Swedish people. After some 200 years, another language
named Urnordiskan began to shed an impact among the natives of Sweden. This language is
believed to be the oldest one among the countries of the Nordic region. Experts of linguistics
think that this language is quite similar to that of Urgerman in form, tone and sound. Therefore,
the later language is some kind of continuation of the former language. The inscriptions in runic
have been the main source to prove the influence this Urnordiskan language had in both Norway
and Sweden. This language is also common in Denmark since some artifacts have been found
there with inscriptions written in the Urnordiskan language (Hallin and Van Lancker Sidtis
2017).
In the later times in 8th century, a new language had emerged named run Swedish. This
language had left an indelible mark on the Swedish linguistic history. On the contrary, some
people believed that this language was Danish in nature but there were many controversies

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regarding this (Freywald et al. 2015). After some time, this language had been divided into
branches named East Nordic and West Nordic. The Old Swedish language had begun to get the
shape from the time when Older West Göteborg Act had been implemented in 1225 (Kuteeva
2014). It was a time when Kingdom of Sweden did not have any existence. This was a time of
the language epoch and it took place in the middle ages.
One of most crucial feature of this language was it had no rules for spelling. Rather
different writers of the language different types of rules for spelling. So, it was a big confusion
for everyone following it. Some loan words had been used in these languages that were taken
from original German language (Kontio and Sylvén 2015). Therefore, it is clear that German
language also had a huge influence on Swedish language. The term ‘Swedish language’ had been
used in the 1300s for the first ever time. According to the Germans, their words had been
borrowed by Swedish people by changing the spelling and pronunciation. These sentences in
new Swedish language were very long and complicated as well. The German influence on this
language had made its consonants softer (Kuteeva 2014).
After 1526, two important cities Stockholm and Copenhagen had been dissolved.
Previously this was known as the Kalmar Union. This was the era from where people of Sweden
began to speak the Swedish language officially. This Swdeish language had been used in
different areas like science and teaching. Soo, Swedish language became the most common
language in the country. The Nordic languages and Indo-European languages were the most
important languages that had their influences on Swedish language. Linguistic experts have
found this language to be accompanied with French expressions (Kilman et al. 2014). Thus the
mixture of Swedish and French also became a popular form in various contexts. Many
researchers had also been encouraged to write their research papers in Swedish language. The

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spellings used in the Swedish language in today’s context had been introduced after 1900. Some
words such as ‘delete’ and ‘default’ had been loaned from English so it could be used in contexts
of using in computer usage (Forrester and Rodriguez 2015). Thus, the evolution of Swedish
language has come a long way from the beginning and influences have been recorded from
several ancient European Nordic languages.
In the concluding section, it can be mentioned that the Swedish language has been one of
the widely spoken languages in the Northern Europe. The influences from other languages have
been discussed in this paper so with some examples from modern Swedish language. It has gone
through periodical evolutions and influences have been gathered from several Nordic and Indo-
European languages.

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References
Forrester, G.S. and Rodriguez, A., 2015. Slip of the tongue: Implications for evolution and
language development. Cognition, 141, pp.103-111.
Freywald, U., Cornips, L., Ganuza, N., Nistov, I. and Opsahl, T., 2015. Beyond verb second–a
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Hallin, A.E. and Van Lancker Sidtis, D., 2017. A closer look at formulaic language: Prosodic
characteristics of Swedish proverbs. Applied Linguistics, 38(1), pp.68-89.
Kilman, L., Zekveld, A., Hällgren, M. and Rönnberg, J., 2014. The influence of non-native
language proficiency on speech perception performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, p.651.
Kontio, J. and Sylvén, L.K., 2015. Language alternation and language norm in vocational content
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Kuteeva, M., 2014. The parallel language use of Swedish and English: the question of
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