Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10.23 million inhabitants of the country.

At its height in 1658, the Swedish Empire spread across what is currently Finland and Estonia and into parts of Poland, Russia, Latvia, Germany, Denmark, and Norway.

As in most of Europe, Latin remained the lingua franca and scholarly language of the educated communities for centuries in Sweden.

For instance, Carl Linnaeus's most famous work, Systema Naturae, published in 1735, was written in Latin.

The Swedish King Gustav III was a true Francophile and French was the common language at his court.

Sweden largely lost its overseas possessions over time, with Swedish Pomerania being ceded to Denmark in exchange for Norway and Guadeloupe was returned to France in 1814.

During the same period and until the 1970s, Sweden applied a Swedification policy that limited schooling to Swedish-language instruction and actively discouraged the use of other languages.

[6] The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people and as such the national language is held in high regard.

[8][9] Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns.

In western Sweden, many local dialects, such as Jämtlandic and Dalecarlian, show greater influence from the West Scandinavian branch of Old Norse and Norwegian.

Spoken mainly in Jämtland, but with a scattered speaker population throughout the rest of Sweden, Jämtlandic or Jämska is a West Scandinavian language and part of the Norrland sockenmål with 95% lexical similarity to Norwegian and Swedish, but is generally more archaic.

Historically, Bornholmsk and Scanian split after Denmark ceded Scania to Sweden in 1658, and was heavily influenced by the Swedish language.

Ethnic Finns (mainly first- and second-generation immigrants) constitute up to 5% of the population of Sweden.

Meänkieli is mainly used in the municipalities of Gällivare, Haparanda, Kiruna, Pajala and Övertorneå, all of which lie in the Torne Valley.

In Sweden, the largest concentrations of Sámi-language speakers are found in the municipalities of Arjeplog, Gällivare, Jokkmokk, Kiruna, and other parts of Norrbotten.

[16] Because of this, the Swedish government has helped develop and publish a significant number of books and educational materials in Romani.

Since the Middle Ages until the end of World War II, Germany was usually the country outside Scandinavia with the closest cultural, commercial and political relations with Sweden.

This changed after the end of the Second World War, when it was no longer acceptable to emphasise a closer link with defeated Germany.

A majority of Swedes, especially those born after World War II, are able to understand and speak English thanks to trade links, the popularity of overseas travel, a strong American influence, especially in regards to arts and culture, and the tradition of subtitling rather than dubbing foreign television shows and films.

English, whether in American, Commonwealth (Australian, Canadian, and Kiwi) or British dialects, has been a compulsory subject for secondary school students studying natural sciences as early as 1849 and has been a compulsory subject for all Swedish students since 1952, when it replaced German.

Second- and third-generation Swedes of Southern European or Middle Eastern descent have adopted Swedish as their main tongue or in addition to their immigrant languages, such as Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, Italian, Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, and Turkish.