Editing Swedish language (section)

==Classification==
Swedish is an [[Indo-European language]] belonging to the [[North Germanic languages|North Germanic]] branch of the [[Germanic languages]]. In the established classification, it belongs to the [[East Scandinavian languages]], together with [[Danish language|Danish]], separating it from the [[West Scandinavian languages]], consisting of [[Faroese language|Faroese]], [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]], and [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]]. However, more recent analyses divide the North Germanic languages into two groups: ''Insular Scandinavian'' (Faroese and Icelandic), and ''Continental Scandinavian'' (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish), based on mutual intelligibility due to heavy influence of East Scandinavian (particularly Danish) on Norwegian during the last millennium and divergence from both Faroese and Icelandic.<ref name="crystal"/>

By many general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Continental Scandinavian languages could very well be considered [[dialect]]s of a common Scandinavian language. However, because of several hundred years of sometimes quite intense rivalry between [[Denmark]] and Sweden, including a long series of wars from the 16th to 18th centuries, and the [[nationalist]] ideas that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the languages have separate [[Orthography|orthographies]], dictionaries, grammars, and regulatory bodies. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus from a linguistic perspective more accurately described as a [[dialect continuum]] of Scandinavian (North Germanic), and some of the dialects, such as those on the border between Norway and Sweden, especially parts of [[Bohuslän]], [[Dalsland]], western [[Värmland]], western [[Dalarna]], [[Härjedalen]], [[Jämtland]], and [[Scania]], could be described as intermediate dialects of the national standard languages.<ref name="crystal">{{Harvnb|Crystal|1999|loc=''Scandinavian''}}</ref>

Swedish pronunciations also vary greatly from one region to another, a legacy of the vast geographic distances and historical isolation. Even so, the vocabulary is standardized to a level that make dialects within Sweden virtually fully mutually intelligible.

{{North Germanic clade}}