Languages of Sweden
The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly ten million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to SIL's Ethnologue). Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns. The language is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to Ethnologue.
Swedes (Germanic tribe)
In modern North Germanic languages, the adjectival form "svensk" and its plural "svenskar" have replaced the name "svear" and is, today, used to denote all the citizens of Sweden. The distinction between the tribal Swedes ("svear") and modern Swedes ("svenskar") appears to have been in effect by the early 20th century, when "Nordisk familjebok" noted that "svenskar" had almost replaced "svear" as a name for the Swedish people. Although this distinction is convention in modern Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese do not distinguish between "svíar" (Icelandic) or "sviar" (Faroese) and "sænskir" (Icelandic) or "svenskarar" (Faroese) as words for modern Swedes.