Sweden
The official language of Sweden is Swedish, a North Germanic language, related and very similar to Danish and Norwegian, but differing in pronunciation and orthography. Norwegians have little difficulty understanding Swedish, and Danes can also understand it, with slightly more difficulty than Norwegians. The same goes for standard Swedish speakers, who find it far easier to understand Norwegian than Danish. The dialects spoken in Scania, the southernmost part of the country, are influenced by Danish because the region traditionally was a part of Denmark and is nowadays situated closely to it. Sweden Finns are Sweden's largest linguistic minority, comprising about 5% of Sweden's population, and Finnish is recognised as a minority language. Owing to a recent influx of native speakers of Arabic in latter years, the use of Arabic is likely more widespread in the country than that of Finnish. However, no official statistics are kept on language use.
North Germanic languages
Sweden left the Kalmar Union in 1523 due to conflicts with Denmark, leaving two Scandinavian units: The union of Denmark–Norway (ruled from Copenhagen, Denmark) and Sweden (including present-day Finland). The two countries took different sides during several wars until 1814, when the Denmark-Norway unit was disestablished, and made different international contacts. This led to different borrowings from foreign languages (Sweden had a francophone period), for example the Old Swedish word "vindöga" ‘window’ was replaced by "fönster" (from Middle Low German), whereas native "vindue" was kept in Danish. Norwegians, who spoke (and still speak) the Norwegian dialects derived from Old Norse, would say "vindauga" or similar. The written language of Denmark-Norway however, was based on the dialect of Copenhagen and thus had "vindue". On the other hand, the word "begynde" ‘begin’ (now written "begynne" in Norwegian Bokmål) was borrowed into Danish and Norwegian, whereas native "börja" was kept in Swedish. Even though standard Swedish and Danish were moving apart, the dialects were not influenced that much. Thus Norwegian and Swedish remained similar in pronunciation, and words like "børja" were able to survive in some of the Norwegian dialects whereas "vindöga" survived in some of the Swedish dialects. Nynorsk incorporates much of these words, like "byrja" (cf. Swedish "börja", Danish "begynde"), "veke" (cf. Sw "vecka", Dan "uge") and "vatn" (Sw "vatten", Dan "vand") whereas Bokmål has retained the Danish forms ("begynne", "uke", "vann"). As a result, Nynorsk does not conform the above model, since it shares a lot of features with Swedish. According to the Norwegian linguist Arne Torp, the Nynorsk project (which had as a goal to re-establish a written Norwegian language) would have been much harder to carry out if Norway had been in a union with Sweden instead of with Denmark, simply because the differences would have been smaller.