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Swedish language history: From the viking age to the present day
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When Sweden became a Christian country after the Viking Era, the priests used another language in church. What language?
Yes! We won! Swedish Champs! Congratulations on winning! Can we go on with Language History now?
Do you want to know what the Swedish language looked like in the Viking Age? The rune-stones show us how they wrote in those days. These signs that looks like letters are runes. They were often written like this: in a loop, shaped like a snake. The rune-stones tell short, condensed stories.
In fact, each story uses only about the same number of characters we use today to write one 'Twitter' text. Many of our old words come from the time of rune-stones. They were words for important, everyday things that we needed even that far back. Words about family, weather and food. For example: moder, fader, hus, sten, sol, yxa.
We have inherited these words from our ancestors, in Swedish they are called arvord. Runes had been used in Northern Europe since the second century. And this is the rune alphabet or 'rune row'. The run row is called Futhark because of what the first signs of the row sound like. In the Viking age up here in the north, the runes became fewer: ...
only sixteen. But that was enough because many runes could now represent several sounds. About 900 years ago the Viking age ended and the Middle Ages arrived in Sweden. This is when when we stopped believing in Odin and Thor. Sweden became a Christian country.
In the church, the priests preached in Latin... Pax vobiscum! So the churchgoers probably didn't understand much. With Christianity came - not only incomprehensible priests - but also the Latin alphabet. This is the alphabet we use today.
Because of the Christian church we got a lot of words from Latin, and also from Greek. kyrka, kors, munk. Words that we get from other languages and make our own in this way we call 'loan-words' - curiously... because of course we never return them... During the Middle Ages, numbers of German merchants and craftsmen moved to Sweden.
And from them we 'loaned' many words related to their world: skomakare, snickare, skåp, tröja. We also got this word. Fönster From the German 'venster'. But didn't we already have a word for that? Yes: Vindöga And while we replaced that with the new word; the English 'loaned' the Norse word and turned that into their word: 'window'.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, France was the land most influential to us. If you knew no French you were hopelessly 'out'. In the Swedish royal castle in Stockholm, of course they spoke French... and our language got some new loan-words: paraply, balett, applåd, fåtölj... kalsong In later centuries it's English that has influenced us the most.
During the 19th century the Industrial Revolution came to Sweden from England. This is how we gained many words dealing with business, labour, and politics. jobb, bojkott, strejk, konservativ, intervju, reporter. From the 20th century until today we've 'loaned' many words from the USA: especially words about film, food, technology, and sport. Pop, Hip hop, Hamburgare, popcorn, Smartphone, selfie, airbag, modem, Internet, skateboard, surfa.
In most recent years we've also taken English loan-words from the gaming world. For example LAN, short for Local Area Network. We've made it Swedish by saying that we LAN:ar. And for the most active gamers it's impossible not to use words like Levla, spawna. When new words are added to our language we call them Nyord.
These could be loan-words from English, or from the language of our new Swedes. For example Jalla! And they could be totally new words that fill new needs - because of changes in our society. Like Hen Our language is growing and changing itself all the time. Cool!
But could I be left in peace to play now?