Modern Swedish has two genders and no longer conjugates verbs based on person or number.
Its nouns have lost the morphological distinction between nominative and accusative cases that denoted grammatical subject and object in Old Norse in favor of marking by word order.
Though the three-gender system is preserved in many dialects and traces of it still exist in certain expressions, masculine and feminine nouns have today merged into the common gender in the standard language.
A remnant of the masculine gender can still be expressed in the singular definite form of adjectives according to natural gender (male humans), in the same way as personal pronouns, han and hon, are chosen for representing nouns in contemporary Swedish (male/female human beings and optionally animals).
This -s genitive functions more like a clitic than a proper case and is nearly identical to the possessive suffix used in English.
Note, however, that in Swedish orthography this genitive -s is appended directly to the word and is not preceded by an apostrophe.
They exhibit the following morpheme order: Nouns form the plural in a variety of ways.
The definite article in the plural is -na for the first three declensions, -a for the fourth, and -en for the fifth: for example flaskorna ("the bottles"), bina ("the bees"), breven ("the letters").
The five declension classes may be named -or, -ar, -er, -n, and null after their respective plural indefinite endings.
The invisible genitive suffix may however optionally be represented with an apostrophe in writing: hus’.
This use of -s as a clitic rather than a suffix has traditionally been regarded as ungrammatical, but is today dominant to the point where putting an -s on the head noun is considered old fashioned.
The Swedish Language Council sanctions putting the ending after fixed, non-arbitrary phrases (e.g. Konungen av Danmarks bröstkarameller, "the King of Denmark's cough drops"); but otherwise they recommend to reformulate in order to avoid the construction altogether.
First declension: -or (common gender) (a) bottle bottles the bottle the bottles Second declension: -ar (common gender) a chair chairs the chair the chairs (an) old man old men the old man the old men Third declension: -er, -r (mostly common gender nouns, some neuter nouns) (a) thing things the thing the things (a) pastry pastries the pastry the pastries (a) political party political parties the political party the political parties The set of words taking only -r as a marker for plural is regarded as a declension of its own by some scholars.
Swedish differs, inter alia, in having a separate third-person reflexive pronoun sig ("oneself"/"himself"/"herself"/"itself"/"themselves" – analogous to Latin se and Slavic sę), and distinct 2nd-person singular forms du ("thou") and ni ("you", formal/respectful), and their objective forms, which have all merged to you in English, while the third-person plurals are becoming merged in Swedish instead (see below the table).
), resulting in min gula bil (my yellow car) and ditt stora hus (your large house).
The sole exception to this -a suffix occurs when nouns can be replaced with "he" or "him" (in Swedish han or honom).
Adverbs of direction in Swedish show a distinction that is often lacking in English: some have different forms depending on whether one is heading that way, or already there.
The Swedish numbers from 13 to 19 are: The form aderton is archaic, and is nowadays only used in poetry and some official documents.
Numbers between 21–99 are written in the following format: For example: The ett preceding hundra (100) and tusen (1000) is optional, but in compounds it is usually required.
Ordinals from "first" to "twelfth": Those from "thirteenth" to "nineteenth", as well as "hundredth" and "thousandth", are formed from cardinal numerals with the suffix -de, e.g. trettonde (13:e), fjortonde (14:e), hundrade (100:e), tusende (1000:e).
Ordinals for the multiples of ten ("twentieth" to "ninetieth") are formed from cardinal numerals with the suffix -nde, e.g. tjugonde (20:e), trettionde (30:e).
Ordinals for higher numbers are formed from cardinal numerals with the suffix -te, e.g. miljonte ("millionth").
For those ordinal numbers that are three syllables or longer and end in -de, that suffix is usually dropped in favour of -del(ar).
In total there are six spoken active-voice forms for each verb: infinitive, imperative, present, preterite/past, supine, and past participle.
Swenglish variants that may be used but are not considered standard Swedish include maila/mejla ([ˈmɛ̂jla], "to email" or "mail") and savea/sejva ([ˈsɛ̂jva], "to save").
Clear pan-Swedish rules for the distinction in use of the -et and -it verbal suffixes were codified with the first official Swedish Bible translation, completed 1541.
In less formal Swedish the verbs started to lose their inflection regarding person already during the 16th century.
However, modern Swedish does not inflect verbs (except for tense), and the plural forms are archaic.
Common fundaments are an adverb or object, but it is also possible to topicalize basically any constituent, including constituents lifted from a subordinate clause into the fundament position of the main clause: honom vill jag inte att du träffar (lit.