How Many People Speak Swedish Worldwide
Swedish is a Scandinavian language, the national language of Sweden, and the first language of roughly 8 million people. In terms of speakers, it is ranked fifth in Europe and eleventh in the world.
It’s one of few national languages that is not an Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic language. More than 2/3 of the population speaks English to some degree, which has encouraged English speakers to learn Swedish as well.
In fact, just over 1% of Americans speak Swedish on a daily basis according to recent research. The Swedish culture developed primarily in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. The language was also heavily influenced by Greek during the 15th century with Christianization.
It shares a lot of similarities with other Nordic languages like Danish and Norwegian because of their proximity to each other geographically. Minority languages such as Finnish, Sami (Lapp), Yiddish (Jiddisch) are also spoken throughout the country alongside many others like Icelandic, Welsh, Serbian and Lithuanian.
A small percentage of Swedes live outside Scandinavia mainly in Canada where there are approximately 13,000 Swedes living today due to immigration from both World Wars for economic opportunities as well as escaping wars back home.