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.
Languages of Sweden
Since the Middle Ages until the end of World War II, Germany was usually the country outside Scandinavia having the closest cultural, commercial and political relations with Sweden. Thus, study of the German language had always been promoted by the Swedish state as the main foreign language. Many of Sweden's administrative and social institutions, including the education system, had also been organised along the German and Prussian model, as a lot of Swedish pioneering intellectuals of the Seventeenth century had been educated in German universities. This changed after the end of the Second World War, when it was no longer acceptable to emphasise a closer link with defeated Germany.
A majority of Swedes, especially those born after World War II, are able to understand and speak English thanks to trade links, the popularity of overseas travel, a strong American influence, especially in regards to arts and culture, and the tradition of subtitling rather than dubbing foreign television shows and films. English, whether in American, Commonwealth (Australian, Canadian, and Kiwi), or British dialects, became a compulsory subject for secondary school students studying natural sciences as early as 1849 and has been a compulsory subject for all Swedish students since 1952, when it replaced German as the compulsory language subject.