Talk:Swedish phrasebook

Can someone who knows Swedish pronunciation well enough go through and clean up the phoneticization using the Project:Pseudo-phoneticization guide? -(WT-en) nick 15:48, 24 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Reference to German language
Is it really good to link to the German language as it is now for ä and ö. Many people don't know German and now there isn't even a link to the text of how to pronounce ä or ö in German. I therefore suggest that we could copy how ä and ö is explained in the German article (if that article is better) or at least give a link to that site. Another way could be to give both an instruction of how to pronounce and also to say it is the same as it is in German. (WT-en) Averater 12:05, 30 March 2010 (EDT)

Some problems
I'm not a native Swedish speaker (and my accent isn't even that amazing, despite the fact that I've been calling Sweden home for the past 4 years), but even I can see some problems with this small phrasebook. Let's take Jag är sjuk (and the proposed phonetics: Yag aer chook). 'ch' for 'sj' is a typical deep, rural Finlandssvenska. You would here it on the Finlandsbåtar, and maybe you would make yourself understood in Stockholm or Umeå, but in Malmö or Göteborg, but in Skåne or Göteborg, you would have problems in people even getting the message. A closer (and easier pronounciation) might be 'hewook'. Or, one can adopt the Norrländska approach (which everybody understands) and pronounce is 'sheook'. Second, God Dag and Adjö. Seriously, now... That's how people spoke in Astrid Lindgren's time, or in black and white Ingmar Bergman movies. You use god dag nowadays only for parody purposes (of course, while making a gesture imitating the removal of a top-hat). Maybe, but I'm not sure, you may use it when you meet the king. Maybe. Hej is used in the most formal occasions (yes, including during the dreaded visit to Migrationsverket or Skatteverket, or, Heaven forbid, Tullverket or Polisen; and yes, including during that meeting with stiff Swedish diplomats). Hej is formal and informal in the same time, and it's NEVER inadequate. After hej comes hejsan, which one cannot use in formal circumstances, then tjena (informal), tja (even more informal) and halloj (slangish). And adjö? It's used in much the same way as the English 'farewell', but with an even deeper meaning. It basically means 'goodbye forever, I hope our paths will meet again someday'. It's much the same as French adieu actually. Unless you're leaving on a steamship for America (third class), one should use hej då. Plus, the phonetic pronunciations are done horribly. Jag is rendered as Yag, Yahg, Yaag... Men, —The preceding comment was added by (WT-en) Xanthar (talk • contribs) 21:57, 16 July 2010‎


 * I'm finlandssvensk (i.e. native speaker from Finland). I haven't wanted to touch the pseudo-pronunciations as I suppose they try to catch the Uppland (Stockholm) speech. On the specifics: "ch" for "sj" is something I often hear from immigrants, but cannot remember hearing in dialects in Finland (but then people seldom speak dialects with me, as city dweller). Here in the phrasebook (and by immigrants) it is probably a try at "hewook". I have always thought it would be better to use Norrbotten pronunciations – which are close to non-dialect finlandssvenska – but if people want to struggle with the difficult official pronunciation, who am I to tell otherwise?


 * Here in Finland we are more conservative, and I would sometimes say "God dag" to strangers (and often half-jokingly to friends), and am often a bit surprised by the "hej"s in Sweden (or would be, I know it by now), not the word by itself, but the very informal voice and a smile that to me would signify a special interest unless between friends. The first few times I took them at face value, and got the Swede equally baffled.


 * I added some commentary.


 * --LPfi (talk) 21:19, 14 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your fixes and comments. I don't know Swedish culture and language.
 * Why would the Norrbotten pronunciations be better?
 * What areas of Sweden have the most non-Swedish-speaking tourists?
 * What phrases and pronunciation reflect the current language usage between strangers, in those areas?
 * If some forms or pronunciation complicate communication in areas with a significant number of tourists, then having the variants listed case-by-case inline in this phrasebook, or gathered together in a dedicated phrasebook, would IMO be allowed by the project's guidelines.
 * Informal communication usually self-heals, when it is clear that a foreigner's knowledge is based on a phrasebook, and I personally couldn't care less about being referred to formally by a friend or customer with a foreign accent, but again, I don't know Swedish habits. --151.70.34.0 14:30, 15 October 2019 (UTC)


 * The Norrbotten or Finland-Swedish pronunciation is easy to understand for all Swedish speakers, they are closer to the written form, and they have fewer phonemes to learn for the foreigner than the Swedish spoken in the capital area.
 * I suppose the capital areas has most visitors, especially among those from farther away.
 * I suppose few foreigners speak Swedish with each other. I suppose I missed the point.
 * Any native pronunciation will be understood by native speakers in all the Swedish speaking regions, although some find the pronunciation in southern Sweden (in this guide: parts of "Götaland") challenging. Dialects are a different issue; some of them additionally differ in vocabulary and grammar. The problem lies in that a stranger using the phrasebook may very well pronounce things unintelligibly; even if our approximations are intelligible, their try at them may not be.
 * Using the formal forms is no problem, and I suppose they are what is taught in most language lessons, but learning the formal greeting when a "hej" would do is unnecessary work. Even if some might be slightly offended by a Swede saying "hej" in a particular context (and those would be few and far between), nobody would if it were a foreigner.
 * --LPfi (talk) 15:36, 15 October 2019 (UTC)


 * For the Finland Swedish pronunciation: nicely put. A concise explanation of seemingly hard to dispute points. If you have the time, I'd say, go for it and plunge forward.
 * For the formal phrases: you know what will help the phrasebook reader. Leaving aside the "hej", other phrasebooks have the pattern "How are you (formal)", "How are you (informal)" 1 2 3, maybe for the case of a printed phrasebook to be kept at hand for less common occasions or sentences.
 * For the pronunciation accuracy: the Russian phrasebook links the Pseudo-phoneticization_guide. A phonetic reference is the best that a phrasebook can do: it serves when the reader does not even know the language enough to assemble a sentence. (I think that the guide deserves a mention in every phrasebook and opened a RfC.) The Russian phrasebook has spoken sentences from Wikimedia commons; the closest I could find for Swedish is commons:Category:Swedish_pronunciation, which e.g. has numbers and cities, but I don't know how much they are applicable in this case.
 * --151.70.34.0 19:14, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I think people from Sweden should weight in before such a change were made. On using sound samples, there have been discussions, but my impression was that a broad consensus should be reached before allowing them. I suppose recording of the phrases in the list could be done quite quickly, perhaps even with Göteborg, Stockholm and Helsinki or Turku variants (there are active projects in these cities, and WMF-SE is having a project on making Wikipedia as a whole voice-converted). --LPfi (talk) 19:58, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Yvwv, Martin or Jonte maybe would like to comment. --Ypsilon (talk) 15:37, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't speak the language, but when I've heard Swedish people pronounced certain names, isn't the "g" pronounced like an English "i" in some words? Former football players Fredrik Ljungberg and Olof Mellberg, and climate activist Greta Thunberg are some of the ones I can think of where I've heard the "g" pronounced that way. If there is some rule regarding this, could someone please add it to the pronunciation guide? The dog2 (talk) 16:52, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
 * To me, the pronounciation style sounds Scanian (Skånska ), the dialect used in the very south of Sweden in Scania ( Skåne ) around Malmö. I could redo them in a neutral, I suppose.  84.17.36.146 10:00, 29 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Native speaker here. In those examples, it's actually pronounced more like the y's in English "yoyo". A general rule is that g's are soft (pronounced like yods) when they precede front vowels (ö, e, i, etc.) or follow l's and r's, and hard (just like English hard g's) elsewhere. (This rule is sometimes broken, but almost exclusively in loanwords like Kirgizistan ("Kyrgyzstan").) Glades12 (talk) 07:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The dog2 now added the "after r" (but not "after l"). As native speaker I haven't studied the pronunciation rules too hard, and as non-linguist cannot remind myself of good examples. Anyway, the names in the examples all have the word berg (outcrop hill) in them, which means they say little about general rules. And berg, although pronounced with soft g in official guides, is pronounced with a hard g in many dialects, I think (are all gs?). The "after r" rule seems to be secondary to the vowel rules, as e.g. Margot is pronounced with hard g. –LPfi (talk) 17:20, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I only added what I have heard, but since I don't speak Swedish, if there's anything I'm missing, hopefully someone who actually speaks Swedish can elaborate in the article. The dog2 (talk) 17:36, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Färg (color or paint), märg (bone marrow), arg (angry), sarg (side of an ice hockey rink, boat, or body side of a guitar among others), sargad (lacerated), torg (square) are some other words where the g after r is pronounced like a short 'ee', but Swedish pronunciation can come off as quite illogical to non-native speakers (Finland Swedish perhaps a bit less so). Ypsilon (talk) 19:03, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
 * By the way, when I've listed to Swedish songs, I've noticed that the "g" is hardly pronounced at the end of a word too, like words like "mig" or "dig". And even the pronounciation of the "a" seems to change too in words like "bra" and "glada" (the first "a" in the case of the latter), so it seems to become something like the "aw" in English "awe", while the "u" in "publik" seems to be pronounced something like the "eu" in French. The dog2 (talk) 02:25, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * "Mig" and "dig" are special cases, pronounced as written mainly in old songs and poetry – spelling the "mej" and "sej", as they are pronounced, is nowadays quite common in non-formal text. For the "a" it sounds partly as a dialect issue: Old Norse had diphthongs and they are left in many dialects, and to some extent also in some variants of standard speech. I can also imagine the u=eu: people seldom use canonical pronunciation. –LPfi (talk) 17:26, 8 January 2022 (UTC)