ABSTRACT
Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the northern (or Scandinavian) branch of the Germanic family, and ultimately deriving, like the other members of this branch (Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese), from Old Norse. It is spoken by upwards of 8.5 million people in Sweden, where it is the official language, and in Finland, where Swedish speakers constitute around 6% of the population, and where the language is co-official with Finnish. The literary language is based on the central (Stockholm) dialect. Some of the outlying dialects are highly divergent, e.g. that of Dalecarlia.
