Both German and Swedish are Germanic languages hailing from countries that are but a narrow stretch of the North Sea apart from each other. At first blush, many Swedish words bear a striking resemblance to their German counterparts, too.
This has gotten plenty of German learners (including yours truly) curious about whether their skills in one language easily transfer over to the other.
Intuition would say that the close relationship between German and Swedish would be enough – but how much do those assumptions hold up?
Today, let’s try to answer that question by taking a good look at the key differences between German and Swedish!
1. German and Swedish derive from different families
Stop the presses, I can explain myself! I know I began this article by saying very clearly that Swedish and German share a language family, the Germanic one.
I wasn’t trying to mislead – the situation is just a bit more complicated than a first glance would suggest.
While it’s true that both German and Swedish are Germanic, and thus Indo-European as well, they belong to different branches of that family. Namely, Swedish is considered North Germanic (a category that also includes Icelandic and Norwegian) whereas German is West Germanic.
That makes German much closer to languages like Dutch, not to mention the English that I am using to communicate this comparison to you!
In simple terms, all this is to say that while Swedish and German do share an ancient linguistic ancestor, their evolutionary paths split up a long time ago.
That happened somewhere between 2,500 and 1,800 years in the past, meaning that German and Swedish have spent pretty much all of their modern histories as entirely separate languages with very little in terms of direct interaction.
Ultimately, it is this North Germanic-West Germanic divide that is the root cause for many, if not all of the major differences between German and Swedish. Let’s take a look at some of those, shall we?
2. Gender works differently
One of the things that clearly draw a line between all North Germanic languages like Swedish and West Germanic ones like German is how they handle the concept of gender.
In German, gender works in an infamously complicated manner, as a plethora of frustrated students can readily attest. In brief, every noun must appear in one of three possible genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter, which is neither.
The way to tell which gender a word belongs to is to look at its article. In the singular, it’s der for masculine nouns, die for feminine ones, and das for the neuter.
Unfortunately, there is no way to guess a word’s gender as there is no relationship between the spelling or sounds of a word and its gender. It’s the article alone that decides!
Compared to that, Swedish genders work in a highly unique fashion that is not quite like any of its other Germanic relatives, Northern or Western!
Swedish has a neuter gender and a so-called “common gender”. The common gender represents the idea of both masculine and feminine at once, sharing all the same inflections and verb forms with no clear distinction between them.
The two articles that determine gender in Swedish are en and ett.
En is the common gender pronoun, so the words for “boy” and “girl” are both “en-words”.
And yup – just like in German, the assignment of which noun gets which gender is random and unpredictable.
3. Definite articles are a whole different ball game, too
It’s not just the grammatical genders that make for a huge difference between German and Swedish. The two also have wildly different ideas about how to make a word definite (what you do by adding “the” in English) or indefinite (corresponding to “a” or “an”).
In German, things work pretty much the same way as in English, a testament to those shared West Germanic roots. The indefinite article in the singular is ein or eine depending on gender (the former works for both masculine and neuter).
Contrasting that, you have the definite articles of der, die, and das that I already mentioned above when talking about gender. That’s it!
In Swedish, you think about the definiteness of nouns the other way around. Instead of adding an article like en or ett to make a word definite – adding it to the front of the word actually makes it indefinite!
There is no corresponding definite article to swap en or ett out with though, and just leaving the article out is also not considered correct.
What you do instead is to attach en or ett to the back of the word! Hence, ett Hus (a house) becomes Huset (the house).
Note the small change in spelling as we move from indefinite to definite; that’s very common in Swedish!
4. Swedish phonology is more complex
Swedish and German do share most of their fundamental sounds, both vowels and consonants. That also applies to the Germanic system of diphthongs, where certain combinations of two letters in a row create new, totally unique sounds.
Just like German, Swedish also distinguishes between short and long vowels. They all sound a bit different side-by-side, but the principle is the same.
In terms of consistency, Swedish wins in one important area by not really assigning more than one or two sounds to any one letter. German likes to break that rule (looking at you, letter G).
On the other hand, Swedish phonology is a lot more uneven than German’s (at least if you’re only talking about Hochdeutsch, the standard language) when it comes to individual differences in pronunciation between people from different regions.
It seems that Swedish is a lot laxer with some phonemes (especially the vowels), and there are many ways to pronounce certain sounds depending on the speaker. That can definitely lead to confusion among learners!
5. False friends are plentiful
If you’ve been learning languages for a while now, you must know of one timeless recipe.
Take two languages from the same sub-family, add a few centuries of low contact and interaction, and – poof, you got yourself two sets of vocabularies with tons of false friends!
This is absolutely what happened between German and Swedish. A lot of words from both look stunningly similar, or even identical, at first glance.
That is until you discover that a Swedish gift (a married person) is absolutely unrelated to the German Gift (poison)! By the way: yup, the English word is a cognate of both of those and somehow manages to express a meaning that’s still entirely unrelated to either of them.
Funny how that works!
6. German consonants are shifted
It might surprise you to know, but about 1,500 years ago, somewhere between Munich and Frankfurt, a great shift took place. No, not a political revolution or anything like that, but a consonant shift.
In simple terms, this means that after that certain period, the people in the south of Germany began expressing their consonants (especially P, F, G, and K) differently than their other Germanic neighbors.
Eventually, that shift took over all of German through standardization in spelling and pronunciation – but not any of the other Germanic languages from further up north.
That is why, for example, apple in German is Apfel. The double-p got replaced by a pf diphthong. Swedish, just like English, developed too far north to experience the shift, so apple in Swedish is äpple!
In this particular context, Swedish is actually the more intuitive language for English speakers to learn.
One interesting fun fact: if you ever spend much time around the northern regions of Germany, especially those closer to the North Sea and the Danish border, you might still hear some people speaking in a manner influenced by old Low German dialects.
In places like Saxony or Mecklenburg, they do actually still say Appel!
7. German and Swedish interpret cases differently
Ask any German learner about their biggest source of linguistic frustration, and the answer has likely got to do something with the case system. I know that’s true for myself, no doubt!
The way German forces you to intricately decline pronouns, noun endings, and adjectives according to the case of the word (a concept that hardly exists in most spoken languages worldwide) is strange, foreign, and overly complicated to many.
With that said, it should come as a relief to know that Swedish lacks most of the complexities of the German case system completely.
Swedish does feature some vestigial cases (like Romance languages, which have kept “sort-of” accusatives and genitives from Latin), but it’s not considered to have a full-on “case system” because the only way to determine the subject or object of a sentence, for example, is by word order and not by case.
To illustrate how simple the Swedish case system really is: the genitive case, which in German includes a series of inflection for nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives, is formed in Swedish by simply adding a letter s to the end of a noun to indicate possession – just like in English!
8. The subjunctive in Swedish is rarely used
Germanic languages all share one thing with the Romance tongues (particularly French), and that’s a finicky subjunctive mood.
Not exactly a case and not exactly a tense either, the subjunctive changes the inflection of verbs (and sometimes other words) to display some kind of emotional context – usually to underline that a statement is the speaker’s personal opinion, or when placing someone else’s words into doubt.
Whereas in German, the subjunctive remains ubiquitous in print media and on TV (though I will admit that younger Germans are using it less and less these days), the Swedish subjunctive has fallen out of fashion completely and is no longer used in modern language.
Only in explicitly archaic contexts, like in certain kinds of poetry or Swedish translations of the Bible, can you still find many phrases written in the subjunctive.
9. German pulls the switcheroo on word order
Another unique feature of German, and one that sure causes many gripes with students, is the fact that, unlike other Germanic languages, word order in a sentence flips for dependent clauses.
So, for instance, where you would say, “I am going to bed because it is late” in English, in German it’s, “Ich gehe ins Bett, weil es spät ist”.
Note the extra comma (German uses commas to note dependent clauses, but English and Swedish don’t) and the fact that the words seem to be in the wrong order.
It’s essentially saying, “I am going to bed, because it late is!”
This subtle switch of word order is so tricky that I personally know plenty of native German speakers who refuse to do the switch and construct sentences in the English manner instead.
That’s considered incorrect in German, of course – but in Swedish, this syntactical switch never existed in the first place, making it much more straightforward for the rest of us!
10. Adjectives change form more often in Swedish
German is known for its complex inflections and conjugations, but one exception, where all German words are actually extremely stable and refuse to change, is in the case of adjectives.
No matter the gender or number of the subject of a sentence, the corresponding adjectives in German are always the same. However, in Swedish, you have to decline those adjectives just like you do verbs in all the other Germanic tongues.
So, for instance, where sonnig is “sunny” in German no matter whether we’re talking about heute (today) or die letzten paar Monate (the last couple of months), in Swedish you would use different forms depending on the layout of the phrase.
In this example, the possible Swedish inflections of the same word would be solig, soliga, and soligt.
Conclusion
So, in a head-to-head showdown German vs Swedish, are they really that different from each other? In the end, it’s a matter of taste and definitions.
Swedish and German definitely do differ in a lot of significant ways as you have just seen. However, talking all about those can easily make you lose sight of just how much the two languages share, too!
In the end, Swedish and German are both Germanic, share a ton of vocabulary, most grammatical concepts, and overlap a lot even in terms of pronunciation.
Whether you have already studied German and wish to expand your horizons by picking up Swedish, or if you’re a native Swedish speaker and have been wondering how hard it would be to achieve German fluency, or if you’re coming from a totally different background altogether, let me tell you that it’s definitely possible so long as you practice self-discipline and stay motivated!
The house in Swedish is huset not husset
please correct
It’s updated now. Thanks for pointing it out, Alia! 🙂