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Swedish has a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree in quantity, making 18 vowel phonemes in most dialects. Another notable feature is the pitch accent, a development which it shares with Norwegian. Swedish pronunciation of most consonants is similar to that of other Germanic languages.
The Sweden pronunciation is based primarily on Central Standard Swedish, and the Finland one on Helsinki pronunciation. Recordings and example transcriptions in this help are in Sweden Swedish, unless otherwise noted. See Swedish phonology and Swedish alphabet § Sound–spelling correspondences for a more thorough look at the sounds of Swedish.
This is a list of English words borrowed from the Swedish language. aquavit, "a clear Scandinavian liquor flavored with caraway seeds" [1] fartlek, "endurance training in which a runner alternates periods of sprinting with periods of jogging" [2] gantelope, "gauntlet" [3]
Note: The pronunciation of the tone accents varies widely between Norwegian dialects; the IPA tone accent transcriptions above reflect South-East Norwegian pronunciation (found e.g. in Oslo). There is usually also high pitch in the last syllable, but it is not transcribed here, because it belongs to the prosody of the phrase rather than the word.
The closest sound found in English, as well as many other languages, is the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] (Swedish words with the sound often correspond to English words with "sh", such as "shield", "shoot"), although usually the closest audible approximation is the voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ] found in some English dialects.
Phonologically oriented (sound-oriented) spelling holds that every phoneme should correspond to a single grapheme. An example of pure phonological spelling is the word har. The word's three graphemes, har , each correspond to a single phoneme, /har/. [4] In Swedish, phonological spelling is used for vowels, with two exceptions.
The Swedish alphabet (Swedish: svenska alfabetet) is a basic element of the Latin writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet ( a to z ) plus å , ä , and ö , in that order.
Other common English-origin profanities used are bitch and fuck. [citation needed] Such words are often rendered in a more-or-less diligent English pronunciation, suggesting code-switching, though more assimilated Swedish approximations, [ɕit:] for shit, [fak:] for fuck, are also common.