Language code: sv

Technical information about ISO 639 language code sv

The table below provides technical details for the Swedish language, designated by the sv code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

sv

Name

Official

Swedish

Native

Svenska

Family
Germanic
Scripts
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Norrland dialectsSvealand dialectsGötaland dialectsGotlandicFinland Swedish (East Swedish dialects)
Related languages
DanishNorwegianIcelandicFaroese
Key facts
Uses three additional letters in its alphabet: Å, Ä and ÖEmploys two contrasting pitch accents that can change word meaningIntroduced the gender-neutral pronoun “hen,” now common in formal writingRetains only two grammatical genders after merging the historical masculine and feminineThe 1541 Gustav Vasa Bible greatly influenced the standardization of modern Swedish
Sample phrase

Hej, hur mår du?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-15, Windows 1252, CP 437, CP 865, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Swedish belongs to the Indo-European language family, more specifically to the Germanic subgroup. It is the official language of Sweden, and it is also used by Swedish minority communities in Finland and neighboring countries. It is written using the Latin script (Swedish alphabet). It is estimated that there are around 13 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

9.5M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Swedish speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

sv-AX Swedish (Åland Islands)

sv-FI Swedish (Finland)

sv-SE Swedish (Sweden)

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