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.
Official minority languages of Sweden
Meänkieli or Tornionlaaksonsuomi or Tornedalian language is spoken by a population in northern Sweden. It is closely related to and mutually intelligible with Finnish and often considered a dialect thereof, with many loanwords from Swedish. Especially in Finland the distinction of Meänkieli as a separate language is seen as language politics not based in linguistics (see Kven language for a similar situation in Norway). Meänkieli and Swedish are not mutualy inteligible. The number of speakers amounts to 50,000 or so.