Date and time notation in Sweden

Date

In Sweden, the ISO 8601 standard is closely followed in most written Swedish^{[citation needed]}. Dates are generally and officially^{[citation needed]} written for example "2006-12-31", but the older forms "31/12 2006" or "31/12 -06" are frequently seen informally. The long form as in "den 31 december 2006" is also sometimes used in writing and almost always in speech (although the date is pronounced as an ordinal number). Both in the older short forms and the long form, written and spoken, the year is often left out. Numbering of weeks are frequently used in companies and schools, and are simply expressed as in "(vecka) 32" ((week) 32) in both writing and speech. On labels and in computers' notation, the year may also be included, as in "2006W32". As in the ISO standard, the week begins with a Monday and week 1 is the week containing the year's first Thursday.

Time

Times are written without notable exceptions with the 24-hour clock, with colons as separators (although periods are sometimes used instead of colons, especially in hand written text, as it was an older Swedish standard), however seconds are usually left out if the additional precision is not required. Example: 23:59, or sometimes 23:59:00. To use leading zeros is much more common than not to use them but in speech they are often left out. Example: 04:00 is more common than 4:00. In spoken Swedish however, the 12-hour clock is much more common. Usually time is expressed in 5-minute intervals (rounded so that it can be evenly divided by 5) like this: <the hour>, <5, 10 or 20 [minutes]> <past, to> <the hour/the following hour>, a quarter <past, to> <the hour/following hour>, half <the following hour> or five <past, to> half <the following hour>. More accurately like this: <1-29 [minutes]> past <the hour>, half <the following hour> or <29-1 [minutes]> to <the following hour>. In these styles, the word for "minutes" is usually but not always left out. Finally the written notation can be pronounced as is: <the hour> <the minute>, although this isn't very common in everyday conversation. The 24-hour time is always applied on the last form, may be applied to the second form and is never used with rounded time as in the first form. Seconds are very seldom expressed at all in speech. Example: 14:27 may be pronounced as "tre minuter i halv tre" (three minutes to half three), "tjugosju (minuter) över två/fjorton" (twenty seven (minutes) past two/fourteen), or, most commonly: "fjorton och tjugosju" (fourteen and twenty seven). 16:00 may be pronounced as "fyra" (four) or "sexton" (sixteen).

References