Swedish as a foreign language

Swedish as a foreign language is learnt by about 40,000 people worldwide at the university level. This is done at over two hundred universities and colleges in 41 countries. Swedish is the Scandinavian language which is most studied abroad.

Svenska Institutet ("Swedish Institute") plays a key role in organising the learning of Swedish abroad. 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".

Language classification

Swedish belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic sub-family of the Indoeuropean languages. As such, it is mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish language. Because most of the loanwords present in Swedish come from English and German (originally Middle Low German, closely related to Dutch), native speakers of Germanic languages usually have an advantage over speakers of other, less related languages.

Difficulties for students

One of the main difficulties encountered by students of Swedish is its phonology. Swedish words have either an acute or a grave accent, usually described as "tonal word accents" by Scandinavian linguists. These accents may vary between dialects and can be difficult for non-native speakers to distinguish. However, the number of words that are only distinguished by their word accents are few and usually easy to tell apart by context.

Several phonemes of Swedish often present difficulties for students. Among the most difficult are the fricatives IPA|s, IPA|ɕ and IPA|ɧ, which are all phonetically close to one another. The difference of /l/ and /r/ can also present difficulties for speakers of languaes that don't distinguish the two, such as Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese. [Garlén (1988), pp. 72, 75]

The two-gender system of Swedish can be a problem as there are few consistent rules that determine which gender a word belongs to and therefore usually has to be learned on a word-by-word basis. Swedish has five different ways to form regular plurals, also determined on a word-by-word basis, in addition to irregular plurals. There are a large number of irregular verbs and plurals similarly to the English, such as ("fot; fötter" "foot; feet") and ("flyga; flög; flugit" "fly; flew; flown").

Proficiency tests

*Swedex consists of two different levels corresponding to the A2 and B1 levels in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. It can be taken in examination centers in sixteen different countries, all of them in Europe save for Thailand and Argentina. Swedex tests the skills of the student in five different areas: reading, vocabulary and grammar, listening, writing and reading.
*TISUS is another certificate, often used as a proof of competence in Swedish to gain access to Swedish universities. The fee amounts to 1,600 SEK (172.75 € or 250.33 USD as of November 2, 2007) if the examination is taken in Sweden or 2,000 SEK (216,46 € or 313,49 USD) if it is taken abroad. It tests the reading, oral and written skills of the student.
*In Finland, there is an official examination in the universities, called "public servant's Swedish", as a part of the policy of bilinguality of the state of Finland.

ee also

* Second language
* Language education
* Second language acquisition

Notes

ources

*Swedish Elert, Claes-Christian (2000) "Allmän och svensk fonetik" Norstedts, Lund

External links

* [http://www.si.se/ Svenska Institutet] sv en de icon es fr
* [http://www.sprakradet.se/ Språkrådet] sv
* [http://www.swedex.info Swedex examinations] sv en de icon pl icon fr