Swedish
The Swedish language is currently that spoken by the people of Sweden and Finland. It has also moved to other parts of the world, but dominates only in these areas of Scandinavia. Swedish as a language is a member of the northern or Scandinavian branch of the Germanic, which is in turn part of the Indo-European group of languages. It developed from the language known as Donsk tunga (“Danish tongue”), which was spoken not only in Denmark but in all of Scandinavia before the early Middle Ages.
The earliest roots of the Swedish language can be traced back to a family of languages known as the Indo-European Languages. This is the most widely spoken family of languages in the world, and contains such sub-families as Albanian, Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (including the Romance languages), Slavic, and two extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite) and Tocharian. If the influence of this group of families is analyzed, more than 1.6 billion people throughout the world speak variations of the Indo-European Language.
Swedish is contained in the Indo-European sub-family referred to as the Germanic Languages. This sub-family itself has influenced the language of more than 480 million in northern and western Europe, North America, South America, and Australia. The Germanic languages themselves evolved along different paths throughout their history into three different branches. These are:
The Western group, containing the Icelandic language, the Norwegian language, and Faroese (a blend of Icelandic and Norwegian)
The written language has descended from the use of an ancient alphabet referred to as runes. The origin of runes is unknown, there are several theories as to its derivation. One theory speculates that runes have been derived from Greek or Latin (or a combination of these). Another suggest that they are derived from a northern Etruscan alphabet used among Italic tribes in the Eastern Alps. At any rate, runes first appeared in Scandinavia around the second century AD and were widely used in one form or another through the twelfth century. Their use even survived in limited use through the seventeenth century. One form of runes was used throughout the Middle Ages by the clergy to augment the Latin alphabet for certain Scandinavian sounds. The number of characters in runes began with 24, and later varied from 16 to 26.
The earliest use of runes would seem to not be so much concerned with communication as with magical purposes. The earliest known Swedish runic inscription was found on a spearhead on the island of Gotland. It consists of the letters s i o a g, and from the bizarre pileup of vowels is assumed to have some magical rather than communication purpose. A more clear-cut example of runic witchcraft is found on a stone dating from around 700 AD near Björketorp in the Swedish province of Blekinge. One side is inscribed with the word u Þ A r A b A S b A which was translated to mean curse, or malediction. The other contained six lines of runes threatening evil to anyone who desecrated the stone. The use of runes began its gradual decay with the advent of Christianity to the region. Missionaries began to infiltrate the area of Sweden by around 800 AD, and as Christianity took hold, so did the written languages of the clergy. The church, however, was not a stable element in this region until 1521, with the establishment of Swedish Lutheranism as the official language of the region. This is one reason for the continued (albeit limited) use of runes throughout the seventeenth century.
Resources
1. Gustafson, Alrik, A History of Swedish Literature, American-Scandinavian Foundation, Minneapolis, Minn., 1961.
2.Olsson, Nils, Ph.D., Some Notes on the Swedish Language http//:genealogi.se/sprakeng.htm, October 22, 1997.
3.“Swedish Language,” Microsoft Encartahttp://encarta.msn.com/, 1997-2000