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.
Swedes (Germanic tribe)
In modern North Germanic languages, the adjectival form "svensk" and its plural "svenskar" have replaced the name "svear" and is, today, used to denote all the citizens of Sweden. The distinction between the tribal Swedes ("svear") and modern Swedes ("svenskar") appears to have been in effect by the early 20th century, when "Nordisk familjebok" noted that "svenskar" had almost replaced "svear" as a name for the Swedish people. Although this distinction is convention in modern Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese do not distinguish between "svíar" (Icelandic) or "sviar" (Faroese) and "sænskir" (Icelandic) or "svenskarar" (Faroese) as words for modern Swedes.