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.
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.