Swedish dialects

Many of the genuine rural dialects have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections.

The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål (lit.

They are generally separated into the six traditional dialect groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary.

[2] The parts in yellow with coloured dots represent various distinct dialect areas which are not easily defined as belonging to any of the six major groups above.

Dialects often show similarities along traditional travelling routes such as the great rivers in Northern Sweden, which start in the mountains at the Norwegian border and then follow a South-Easterly path towards the Bothnian Sea.