ScriptLookup

Swedish

svenska
sv 10M speakers

Swedish (svenska) is a Indo-European language with approximately 10M speakers speakers. It is written using the Latin script. Its BCP 47 language code is sv.

Swedish (svenska) is a North Germanic language and the official language of Sweden and one of two official languages of Finland. It is spoken by approximately 10 million people as a first language.

Swedish is the largest of the Scandinavian languages and is closely related to Norwegian and Danish. Swedish uses the Latin alphabet augmented with three additional letters: å, ä, ö. Swedish is notable for its pitch accent system, where words can be distinguished by their tonal pattern, and for its contributions to IKEA's global furniture vocabulary.

Writing Systems Used for Swedish

Latin
Primary
Hello World
LTR Latn

Frequently Asked Questions

What alphabet or script does Swedish use?
Swedish is written using the Latin script (ISO 15924 code: Latn). Latin is written left-to-right.
What direction is Swedish written?
Swedish is written Left-to-right. Text runs from left to right, the same direction as most European languages.
How many people speak Swedish?
Swedish has approximately 10M speakers speakers worldwide. It is a member of the Indo-European language family.
What language family does Swedish belong to?
Swedish belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is written with the Latin script.
What is the language code for Swedish?
The BCP 47 language code for Swedish is "sv". This code is used in software, web standards (the HTML lang attribute), and internationalization contexts.

Language Facts

BCP 47 Code
sv
ISO 639-3
swe
Status
living
Speakers
10M speakers
Language Family
Indo-European
Scripts
1
Primary Script
Latin

Other Latin Languages

Acehnese Acoli Adangme Afar Afrikaans Aghem Akan Akoose Alabama Albanian Aleut Anii Ao Naga Aragonese Araona Arapaho Arawak Aromanian Arpitan Asturian

Data sourced from Unicode CLDR and ISO 639-3. Last updated April 20, 2026.