Languages of Sweden
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forming a dialect continuum. Five "national minority languages" are also recognized by Swedish law: Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, Romani and Sami.
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.