Swedish is the official language in Sweden and also natively spoken in parts of Finland. It is a Germanic language that is part of the Indo-European language family. According to the eLinguistics.net analysis using specific software modules to assess linguistic relationships, the five languages most similar to Swedish are Danish, Norwegian, German, Swiss German, and Dutch.
- Danish (89.7)
Danish is perhaps the most closely related language to Swedish. Denmark is located in close proximity to Sweden. As a result, many Danish and Swedish words are identical or only one letter different. For example, “book” is “bog” in Danish and “bok” in Swedish. - Norwegian (86.1)
Sweden’s longest border is with Norway, so it is no surprise that their languages are similar as well. Furthermore, Norwegian is quite similar to Danish. Due to their close relationship, speakers of Swedish and Norwegian can often understand each other with little difficulty, especially the written form of Norwegian. - German (81.9)
Over centuries, trade, migration, and cultural exchanges have led to the borrowing of words and phrases between German and Swedish. These languages both belong to the larger Germanic language family. This shared ancestry means they have a significant amount of cognates and similar grammatical structures. - Swiss German (83.7)
Primarily spoken in Switzerland, Swiss German has unique features that set it apart from Standard German. Despite being geographically distant, these languages share a number of similarities. For example, house in Swiss German is huus and in Swedish it is hus. - Dutch (81.9)
Spoken mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium, Dutch is another West Germanic language that is also quite similar to Swedish in several respects. The Dutch language has historically influenced Swedish, especially during periods of trade and cultural exchange.
(to be considered for the list, the language must be spoken by at least one million people, therefore Icelandic did not make the list)