Swedish

Swedish is spoken by more than 8 million native speakers. Most of them live in Sweden, but there is also a Swedish population of 300,000 native speakers in Finland. In addition, there are Swedish-speaking persons in other countries, for instance, descendants of about 1,400,000 Swedish emigrants from the turn of the century onwards (1870–1930), mostly in the United States and Canada, but very few of them have Swedish as their first language today. Swedish populations have existed in Estonia on some of the islands and the Ukraine (Gammalsvenskby), but they are now almost extinct. Swedish is to some extent studied abroad as a foreign language, especially in Finland, where all pupils in the comprehensive schools learn some Swedish. Finland belonged to the Swedish kingdom before 1809 and is still officially bilingual between Finnish and Swedish. The Swedish population (6 per cent, with roots from the twelfth century) lives along the southern and western coast, and has strong minority rights in the constitution.