In addition to collaborating with universities where Swedish is taught, the Institute organises summer courses for students and conferences for teachers, as well as publishing a textbook called Svenska utifrån.
The similarity between Swedish and English is further emphasized by many Old Norse words brought to England by the Vikings during the early Middle Ages.
As in English, there are many irregular verbs and plurals, such as fot; fötter ("foot; feet") and flyga; flög; flugit ("fly; flew; flown"), cf.
Swedish utilizes V2 word order in subclauses, a phenomenon rarely encountered cross-linguistically.
The pronoun de is pronounced /dɔm/ by most speakers, even though it has traditionally distinct written forms in the nominative (as well as used as a plural article) and accusative case.
This situation remains to this day, despite the near-complete switchover to Finnish in practical usage in governmental affairs.
There is compulsory teaching and language testing at all levels of education, and a basic working knowledge of Swedish is required for state government officials.