The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark, creating a series of minor dialectal boundaries, or isoglosses, ranging from Zealand in the south to Norrland, Österbotten and northwestern Finland in the north.

[9] Important outside influences during this time came with the firm establishment of the Christian church and various monastic orders, introducing many Greek and Latin loanwords.

[10] Early Old Swedish was markedly different from the modern language in that it had a more complex case structure and also retained the original Germanic three-gender system.

[11] A transitional change of the Latin script in the Nordic countries was to spell the letter combination "ae" as æ – and sometimes as a' – though it varied between persons and regions.

[14] The Vasa Bible is often considered to be a reasonable compromise between old and new; while not adhering to the colloquial spoken language of its day, it was not overly conservative in its use of archaic forms.

It established the use of the vowels "å", "ä", and "ö", and the spelling "ck" in place of "kk", distinguishing it clearly from the Danish Bible, perhaps intentionally, given the ongoing rivalry between the countries.

[18] Some important changes in sound during the Modern Swedish period were the gradual assimilation of several different consonant clusters into the fricative [ʃ] and later into [ɧ].

The growth of a state school system also led to the evolution of so-called boksvenska (literally, "book Swedish"), especially among the working classes, where spelling to some extent influenced pronunciation, particularly in official contexts.

Many scholars, politicians and other public figures had a great influence on the emerging national language, among them prolific authors like the poet Gustaf Fröding, Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf and radical writer and playwright August Strindberg.

The use of herr ("Mr" or "Sir"), fru ("Mrs" or "Ma'am") or fröken ("Miss") was considered the only acceptable way to begin conversation with strangers of unknown occupation, academic title or military rank.

In the early 20th century an unsuccessful attempt was made to replace the insistence on titles with ni—the standard second person plural pronoun)—analogous to the French vous (see T-V distinction).

Ni wound up being used as a slightly less familiar form of du, the second person singular pronoun, used to address people of lower social status.

With the liberalization and radicalization of Swedish society in the 1950s and 1960s, these class distinctions became less important and du became the standard, even in formal and official contexts.

Though the reform was not an act of any centralized political decree but rather the result of sweeping change in social attitudes, it was completed in just a few years, from the late 1960s to early 1970s.

The largest populations were in the United States (up to 100,000), the UK, Spain and Germany (c. 30,000 each) and a large proportion of the remaining 100,000 in the Scandinavian countries, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia.

[32] Due to the close relation between the Scandinavian languages, a considerable proportion of speakers of Danish and especially Norwegian are able to understand Swedish.

[33] There is considerable migration between the Nordic countries, but owing to the similarity between the cultures and languages (with the exception of Finnish), expatriates generally assimilate quickly and do not stand out as a group.

According to the 2000 United States Census, some 67,000 people over the age of five were reported as Swedish speakers, though without any information on the degree of language proficiency.

In Sweden, it has long been used in local and state government, and most of the educational system, but remained only a de facto primary language with no official status in law until 2009.

A bill was proposed in 2005 that would have made Swedish an official language, but failed to pass by the narrowest possible margin (145–147) due to a pairing-off failure.

However, many organizations and agencies require the use of the council's publication Svenska skrivregler in official contexts, with it otherwise being regarded as a de facto orthographic standard.

[55] The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, which means that the finite verb (V) appears in the second position (2) of a declarative main clause.

As in modern German, prepositions formerly determined case in Swedish, but this feature can only be found in certain idiomatic expressions like till fots ("on foot", genitive).

[65] As with many Germanic languages, new words can be formed by compounding, e. g., nouns like nagellackborttagningsmedel ("nail polish remover") or verbs like smyglyssna ("to eavesdrop").

Before the release of the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista in April 2006, ⟨w⟩ was treated as merely a variant of ⟨v⟩ used only in names (such as "Wallenberg") and foreign words ("bowling"), and so was both sorted and pronounced as a ⟨v⟩.

Other diacritics (to use the broader English term usage referenced here) are unusual in Swedish; ⟨é⟩ is sometimes used to indicate that the stress falls on a terminal syllable containing ⟨e⟩, especially when the stress changes the meaning (ide vs. idé, "winter lair" vs. "idea") as well as in some names, like Kastrén; occasionally other acute accents and, less often, grave accents can be seen in names and some foreign words.

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

The differences are today more accurately described by a scale that runs from "standard language" to "rural dialect" where the speech even of the same person may vary from one extreme to the other depending on the situation.

These varieties could alternatively be classified as sociolects, because the immigrant dialects share common traits independent of their geographical spread or the native country of the speakers.

[83] New linguistic practices in multilingual urban contexts in fiction and hip-hop culture and rap lyrics have been introduced that go beyond traditional socio-linguistic domains.