This is honestly one of the few truly serious Swedish-related videos I have seen in a while. Most other "learn about Swedish" videos are made by hyperactive teens who try to be funny or something and either teach completely incorrect things or just throw around random useless phrases without explaining them or anything, but this video actually gives a professional impression.
I’m Finland swedish and have lived in Sweden since 1981. I never really understood what the acute and grave accents were about. Now I do. A big thank you. 👍
Ja man tänker ju inte direkt så mycket på hur stor impakt betoningen på just en bokstav kan ändra hela innebörden i en hel mening,och hur orden flyter ihop större delen av meningarna. Coolt å se faktiskt.
@@Droglakahn Nej du misunderstood. Jag ver sågäing dät här är a lot of korvpirog i finskaländ. Jag inte sögä du är korvpirog. Komma här och har en korvpirog med mig
@@jedaki1832 Standard Swedish uses both an acute (accent 1) and a grave pitch accent (accent 2). Finland Swedish only uses the acute accent. Native Swedes will therefore pronounce “anden” in two ways, depending on what we mean. Swedish-speaking Finns read both words the same way. They can’t distinguish between the two without context.
Taaaack så jättemycket! I've honestly been looking for this video for a while now: no swede could explain this to me haha! And as a French speaker, I needed to understand what the helvete was going on with those pitches! Nu förstår jag!
I'm Russian and I learn Swedish in my free time because I like Sweden and Scandinavien culture. You, Swedes, have so nice, beautiful and curious language. That's a great tutorial! Very understandable, but sometimes it's really hard to feel difference between accent 1 and accent 2.:) Tack!
In fact, some of the words he mentioned are basically the same, like for instance "tomten" as in "the Santa clause" and "tomten" as in "the garden", as I can't hear a difference between them even though I'm from Sweden
I'm also Russian I have no idea why my fellow countryman is struggling with the pitch, the stress and the accent because we probably have it all in Russian as well, may be, except for "Accent 2", we pronounce all the words with "Accent 1" and sometimes also exclude any accent until the end of a sentence
Cause its not the accent, its the glottal stop in the second type that makes it particular. The dude has missed this crucial detail. Take the Russian "mama" , one word, you start blowing air at the beginning and never stop till you're finished. Swedes will say "MAM-[stop air in the throat for a tiny moment]-ma"
@@bramblebop1904 that's kind of clear when you hear a Swedish-speaking person, and it's really easy to repeat. I have more troubles understanding and reading the vowel sounds in Swedish, that's what I personally struggle with. And, I believe, the above commentator rather struggles with determining where to use each accent, not pronouncing them. It is rather so, because I personally have some troubles with it also
I guess this is why we Swedes sometimes have a really hard time understanding what non-Swedish people say even though other non-Swedish people understand it perfectly.
Same with other languages. I fluently speak Spanish and can understand what other Spanish speakers are trying to say when they speak English when other English speakers cannot understand.
Five really nailed it. Although he only had to say a few words. I think the Handler managed to reverse the accent on every damn word. Props that they actually had them do it though, as it was kinda skitroligt.
Fascinating. As a bilingual Finn I didn't realize this was a thing in "Sweden Swedish." My English-speaking fiancé will be happy to know that this is something he will not have to learn in his Swedish studies as we're planning on living in Finland :'D
I signed into TH-cam specifically so I could leave a comment about how helpful and well-done this was. It is more difficult than one might expect to find this information on the internet; this was both full of useful information and presented in a helpful way. Thank you.
Who knew that speaking Chinese would eventually help me with Swedish! Accent one is very similar to a second tone followed by a neutral tone, and accent two is just like having consecutive fourth tones in Mandarin.
This is so interesting! I'm Swedish and I also speak Chinese. I think I say accent one more like first tone, neutral tone. If it's second tone, neutral tone it would sound more like a Dala accent haha! (Which is also totally legit)
This was so incredibly helpful. I'm a little over a month into learning Swedish on Duolingo. I'm a musician, so these accent differences stood out to me immediately. But since I'm a new learner, I didn't realize there was reason for it....I thought there might have been inconsistencies in the Duolingo word recordings because none of this was explained. Thanks for helping my pronunciation!
Better and more thoroughly explained than when I studied at Nordiska Språk at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I was very confused at the time since the illustrations did not fit at all with how I pronounce with my West Swedish accent. Then I took a Norwegian class at the same department, and then they showed the Norwegian versions of the same thing. Turns out my West Swedish accent looked like Norwegian, not the Stockholm version in this video. We go up at the end while the Stockholm people go down. This video touches on the fact that the pitch looks different in other accents, something I wasn't really told when I was in college. Great job!
There is an unfortunate tendency in Sweden to overlook other dialects than the one spoken in eastern Mälardalen, as you describe in your comment. You may be interested in the sequel to this video, where I talk about the regional variation of the pitch accent! th-cam.com/video/6_60Oec-8pg/w-d-xo.html
I've always struggled with my accent. Swedes always tell me that I sound "too french" when I speak. This is a game changer. Seriously. You've earned a new subscriber.
It is almost like swedish has alot to do with "melody" almost. Like singing. Or spesking poetry. Very interesting. How you pronounce and speak the words changes the whole meaning and it also makes you more present with / in the words you speak kind of if you are aware of all of these subtle nuances. :)
Totally agree. I'm Lithuanian myself. I speak Swedish as a professional language. All my customers ask me if I come from Finland. The fun thing is that I hear finlandssvenska quite often and I don't think I sound anything like it :)
@@blueeyedbaer finlandssvenska is spoken by people that have Swedish as their native language in Finland. I guess that your pronunciation is much closer to people native to Finnish that speaks Swedish.
The Finish accent is a lot more than not using the Pitch accent. So not getting the Pitch accent correctly won't make one sound like one is from Finland, but rather just a non native speaker. Unless one gets everything else in the Finish accent correct, but this isn't a trivial feat. Since it's practically using Finish pronunciation and rhythm but Swedish grammar and words. (And Finish is a rather unique language that is mainly related to Estonian, Sami and Hungarian.)
Unknownety a little bit too easy, since there are so many dialects of Finland Swedish ... many of them very far from Finnish pronunciation. It’s basically only the “big city” ie Helsinki and Turku dialects that sound “like Finnish”, in the Vaasa area they’d be quite close to Västerbotten dialects. And many of the Turku archipelago dialects sound a bit like Gutemål on Gotland. And in Västra Nyland many of the dialects actually do have the pitch accent ...
This video is very helpful for me! I am from Holland and I'm trying to learn the Swedish language. The pitch accent is very difficult , but In this video you make it a lot easier to understand. Thank you!
I found a Swedish-Finn vlogger once (Cat Peterson) and when she posted her first video in Swedish she had a lot of Swedish people telling her that her Swedish sucked. From the little Swedish I knew I could understand her just fine and she told me that Finnish-Swedish (the kind she speaks) only has a few word differences from Sweden-Swedish. Now I understand why people thought her Swedish sucked...Finnish Swedish doesn't use the accents!
Ignorance is a thing - also in Sweden. So many Swedes don't even know that 'finlandssvenska' is a dialect. They don't know what a 'finlandssvensk' is, and the history behind it. From ignorance comes the hating. However, since the hating has no bearing on reality, it's mostly a burden for the haters to carry around. Double burdens: Ignorance and hate. Such poverty. Poor people...
@RoMMeL1337ak47 she has a british husband and they communicate in english so it might just be that she uses so much english that she momentarily forgot some of the swedish words. Happens to me all the time with my finnish, sometimes i only remember the english words for things
I have had a lot of people in Stockholm making fun of me (on the verge of bullying) for pronouncing some words differently. I'm from Stockholm but I have a grandmother from the North so I say mormor quite normally but I pronounce farmor in dialect and the same with using han instead of honom, lyste - lös etc. I think people in general are very judgmental in bigger cities mostly because they rarely come in contact with other dialects?
@@beorlingo It's kinda stupid that people aren't aware of that dialect, because we have celebrities like Mark Levengood and Marko "Markolioo" Lehtosalo, who are both originally from Finland. Although the latter can speak both types of Swedish just fine. I really like the way Mark Levengood speaks though. He sounds so kind and soothing. (I just realised both have "Mark" in their names lol) Although there are many people who know "finlandssvenska" simply as "tala som Mumin" (speaking like Moomin). Apparently people just don't bother to look up stuff that aren't relevant to them personally. I find that really boring.
I was telling a Swede that I stayed in Solna (suburb northwest of Stockholm) and I pronounced it with accent 1 and she did not quickly recognize the name. A few seconds later, she realized what I was trying to say and pronounced Solna with accent 2.
Yeah, this may seem ridiculous. But it actually happens that you just don't understand, cuz to a Swede it actually sounds very different in some words if the accent is wrong. In this case I bet she initially was thinking if Sollna might be somewhere around Sollentuna.
@@beorlingo Except "Sollna" would also be different from both "Solna" in accent 1 and "Solna" in accent 2, the latter of which would presumably sound like "Sol" followed by "natt" but without the t:s.
I watched this after about 20 days of learning Swedish and I was very confused by the concept. I am now 100 days into learning Swedish and find myself using the pitch accent correctly even in words I haven’t read/heard before which is very interesting! It’s something that you begin to pick up very quickly when you know how standard suffixes modify the pitch in most cases 😁
I'm an American, with a finnoswede fiancee in Sweden, and I'm moving there as soon as the EU lets me. (Covid) I've been learning Swedish since November 2019 but this has been an eye opener for sure. Thanks for the info!!
This is a very very very important thing to learn actually. And most people miss thongs likr these. It makes the language more rich and makes you be ablr to deliver the words with more presence in the words you could say..
I think this is what my Swedish teacher was referring to, when she said "there is one thing I won't teach you, because if I teach it, you'll never get it right"
@@EterPuralis the video makes pretty clear that listening and practising is an essential part of what you need to do to crack this. Just listening, without any idea of what you are listening out for, is unlikely to assist people whose native language has not exposed them to the sort of pitch accents that Swedish has. This video provides a really clear and useful framework in which to do the listening.
@@davidloveday8473 Your reply is cringy as fuck. For me, I wish they'd never taught me German grammar in school, I could speak German fluently before we got there. This is the same kind of reason.
Thank you so much. This is one perfect example of something seeming really complicated until somebody just takes the time to explain it to you. For example, the difference between anden and anden (ALWAYS quoted in books as an example) seems confusing until somebody just points out the words are 'and+en' and 'ande+n' and suddenly it's not so scary.
I've been told by my Swedish niece that I do the accent 2 quite well, but I add it to words where it doesn't belong. The rules (mostly) don't make a lot of sense, so I'm trying to just learn which do and don't have them. However, you answered at the end the thing she couldn't explain...why so many words sound different on their own vs. in a sentence. Just the word "jag" messes me up. Thinking of the accents in a sentence as a whole has blown my mind! We probably do the same of running words together in English, but you often don't think about it in your native language. Thank you!!
For me as a foreigner non-Swedish speaker (I'm Polish) this type 2 accent *makes* the distinctive sound of the language. But when I talked about it with my Swedish friends (they're Poles, but live in Sweden almost all their lives) I didn't exactly refer to it as an accent or a pitch, but for me it was always something like choking in the middle of the word; because there is always very explicit stop between two syllables. This was always Swedish for me: half of the words are said smoothly, the other half - chokingly. I don't want to offend the language (especially speaking language which sounds like autumn leaves being squashed myself), I like it. I also like how many consonant clusters at the begining of the word make simple 'sh' sound.
Hahaha the Wi-Fi password language has a second name now: squashed autumn leaves language 😂 But yeah, the second accent is really what makes the Swedish sound. And while Mazurek folk type of song is to imitate the Polish language, i think your hambo folk songs imitate the pulsating sound of your Swedish language.
There is an app called Duolingo which offers a course in Swedish (for free). I'm using Duolingo to learn Italian right now and I think it's pretty good :)
As far as I'm concerned (as a Swede, mind you), Norwegian is superior for foreigners who want to learn a Scandinavian language. It's basically spoken Swedish and written Danish all at once. You more or less get three languages at the price of one :)
I first thought that Swedish would not be so beautiful, but then I found a female singer Veronica Maggio a couple of weeks ago, try this and you'll probably will love Swedish as well: "Ayahuaska", "Svart sommar", "Den första är alltid gratis". I almost never heard a singing Swedish except for one of my favorit bands "Katatonia", they made a song in Swedish. But recently I even started to think of singing in Swedish myself after listening for Veronica :D (even though I can't even speak it) There is no surprise that they have so many musicians in Sweden
Ah very interesting! A Finn here who has been studying Swedish for years now, but I don't remember any teacher ever teaching this explicitly. I used to presume the accent 2 is just how Swedish dialects are as opposed to Swedish speaking Finns :D. I had no idea you shouldn't just randomly wiggle all words like that (also I agree with the tilde being more clear indicator here).
I've actually encountered this hypercorrection numerous time from proficient L2 speakers, with accent 2 being interpreted as a "Swedish accent", and then overapplied :)
I guess people already struggle enough with the vocabulary, so focusing on accents would be kind of useless - it's a bit of an advanced concept for people who feel like they are forced to learn a language that they don't even want to learn (and sadly, this seems to be a lot of people's attitude towards Swedish)... Also, I think people were most often taught the "Finnish" pronunciation of the words any way. For example when it comes to numbers, I remember that we learned to pronounce "sju" more like "schu", probably because we don't have the "sj" sound in Finnish language. Also, the Swedish vowels are pronounced a bit differently than in Finnish. So, there are many nuances about the pronunciation of Swedish, and people simply don't have time to dive that deep into the "correct pronunciation". And since the Finnish way of pronouncing the words is also valid, and it's the pronunciation that you will most likely hear in Finland, it just makes more sense to learn that, and spend the time that would have otherwise been spent on learning the more native pronunciation of the words on more "useful" stuff. This is only stuff that you need to worry about if you want to "perfect" your Swedish. But most people in school are far from that level, so to most people, it would simply be a waste of time.
@@paulingvar Bruh I didn't even know we had two accents. I didn't even know what a pitch dialect was until I tried learning japanese and learned it was so easy to pronounce the words because swedish and japanese have pitch dialects. Learned this like 3 weeks ago. Fucking cool.
As a fennoswedish speaker, this is very interesting, as I’ve always wondered what it is that makes somebody sound “rikssvensk” compared to “finlandssvensk”, and this is a large part of it now that I think about it. It’s also the first change I implement to how I speak if a Swede has trouble following my fennoswedish accent.
Learning Swedish on duolingo and knew I was missing some info about pronunciation, including the pitch of words. I also feel vindicated bc I knew the person speaking was leaving off letters when saying sentences (the prosody thing mentioned) but the app doesn’t really address that stuff. Thank you!
Thanks, Adam. This is really useful and demystifies what's happening in between my Swedish lesson and struggling to hear "real" Swedish effectively. Tack så mycket!
Lol I was researching about Japanese and found out about pitch accent. I got interested in the concept because I though it was weird, but then I find out about this video, realizing that my native language was a pitch accent language all along.
This is mind blowing. I am learning Finn-Swe but the book is from Sweden. Every time I am asked about the difference about Finn-Swe and Swe-Swe, I always say that Swe-Swe (riksvenska) is more difficult because its is spoken with melody. Now I got it, it's pitch accent.
TACK !! Now I finally get the difference between anden and anden which my friends have made fun of me about ! I'm a Swiss living in Sweden, I speak fluent swedish and have a general good ear thanks to music, but this one was still impossible for me, because I was focussing on the first syllable instead of the second one. And it's not like I didn't know about the "second bubble" in some words, which I've practiced for years already, but just that example was still having me puzzled. Now I see I should practice my pronounciation a bit again, to mark a bit of a clearer difference between the two types of accent.
I actually clicked on the video since I wanted to find out why there is Estonian flag in the picture of this video. Instead of finding that out I learned something pretty interesting. I've been learning Swedish here in Finland like everyone else so I haven't really needed this info but surprisingly it was pretty easy to connect these things to the little I've heard Swedes speak.
I'm happy to hear that! And it's certainly useful to understand such a feature of the language, even if it's not used in the dialect that you're personally learning! (Btw, for an explanation of the Estonian flag, see the video called _Introduction to the Swedish Language_ :) )
Academia Cervena Thank you for answering, I actually realised later on that watching the video would get me the answer and learned something new again! Should have realised it had a history-related background :D
Thank you very much. I could definitely hear it, but never really focused on what it was and why it happened. Going to watch the rest of your videos as well. Also, I have a degree in linguistics and had no idea that so many modern languages had a pitch accent. Seriously questioning my education right now :)
i am really glad that he also points out without mentioning that we pronounce things differently than how they are written, like kvinnor-kvinner and rolig-roli. i always do that, its just slang.
Thank you, this video was great! I found it because I wanted to explain these differences for a friend who's interested in swedish but who has had a lot of issues with understanding this (and I wasn't very good at explaining it) and it was very clear and helpful :)
This is some great information for people learning Swedish, and as is apparent from the comments, few native speakers know about this on a conscious level. I tried to check the difference in pitch using my piano. Accent 1 (e.g. ánden in your notation) pronounced naturally drops about a fifth in pitch - so from C down to about F, whereas accent 2 (ãnden) goes up about a second, so roughly from C up to E. If I imagine the word pronounced with a pitch relation somewhere in between those, it is not quite clear which one is right, but the closer you get to the intervals, the more it sounds like the closest one. Also, the tone exactly between the two (pitch C down to B), is the most confusing one. But the best way is probably just to be aware and listen to the prosody and imitate a native speaker, without asking them to explain the theory. :-)
One of the most well-explained and cleverly tutored lessons on Swedish language. I am a linguist who is trying to speak proper Swedish, and your video has opened the door to a lot I was trying to decode! Any more material by you?
Thank you very much! Always fun to hear that my videos are helping people :) I have a bunch of other videos on Swedish, available here: th-cam.com/play/PL5uGqWoFgvd1SBExRyHuuVxiLiU8u8-PN.html
Despite learning Swedish and living in Sweden for 5 years, I never really understood pitch accents before. At last a coherent explanation! Tack så mycket!
This variation in accent is also one of the reasons why Swedish is one of the most beautiful languages on the face of the earth. These accents give the language when spoken softly a singing almost elven-like quality which is completely soothing to the soul. Bear in mind that this praise is coming from a Dane whose own language is so closely related to Swedish that they are mutually intelligble and I therefore should be more inclined to think thusly of my own language but, alas, it doesn´t work that way. Swedish is simply more softly intonated and softer modulated which gives it this otherworldly character. Beautiful, beautiful language.
Ulf Danielsen: A quote from your comment: "...coming from a Dane whose own language is so closely related to Swedish that they are mutually intelligible..." Here's an interesting (I think) question: If two languages are mutually intelligible, are they different languages? I'm a Swedish speaker and have spoken to many Danes and Norwegians in Swedish. These conversations have gone quite well. Are we then using three distinct languages? I'd say linguistically no but culturally and politically, probably yes. (Contrast: Many English speakers would have plenty of trouble with these two guys ostensibly speaking the same language: th-cam.com/video/f5pCPRYvyis/w-d-xo.html)
@@exessex3522 Swedish, Norwegian and Danish exist on a dialect continuum. They are different languages, there are big differences in vocabulary and spelling. The differences in vocabulary between English accents are mostly slang or local words. There are exceptions, for sure.
And now I feel kinda bad that swedes often say that speaking danish is like speaking swedish, only that you're drunk and have a hot potatoe in your mouth. EööllullAeUuh lalLLallaaah etc.
This is so interesting, as a native Swede, I haven’t though about the fact that all words have pitch accent. The classic examples such as tomten or tomten, sure, but I’ve never considered that it applies to every word. I came into contact with a version of this a few weeks ago when I met a guy from Canada. I pronounced Canada with essentially pitch accent 1, and he pronounced it with 2. I was surprised and asked him about it and he could not hear the difference in the way we pronounced it, even when I said them one after another.
I've never really thought more about it, but i encounter this alot in peoples name. I've never been able to put my finger on it, but there's a distinct difference in how names can be pronounced, and most people have their "own" way to say their names. Like Johan, Jacob, Martin, Anna, and even if you dont realize WHY it sounds wrong sometimes when people say your name, it's probably that they use either accent 1 or 2 :)
To sum up, let's put aside all those rules that have accent 1, and we'll have to remember those with accent 2: 1/ 2 syllable words with swedish endings. 2/ Compound words. Easy to understand since each monosyllable word has 1 accent. 3/ Beware of -el, -en, -er nouns, since they can have 1 or 2 accents. 4/ -el, -en, -er adjectives: Only -en ones have 2 accents. The other ones have just 1. 5/ Present tense -ar. 6/ Plurals without a vowel change (no dieresis/umlaut). Ok, that's easier to remember. ;)
I have learned Swedish for 3 years and am fluent now. I feel like I learned these pitch differences when I learned the words. Thus I just naturally use them without even thinking about it
in finland perkele can mean many things when different tones perkele: when your rent is raised perkele: when you win in a lottery perkele: when your car breaks down perkele: when you stub your toe real bad
Really good video! I'm a native myself and I haven't even thought of these little subtle things that we do when we pronounce words to make them into completely different things.
That gave me one of those "Uh-Ha!" moments. It's actually really helpful. Especially towards the end where he explains how it's not always used and how that applies to sentences and stress. I want to like it more
I've been living with two Swedes for the last 3 months, and we have very many Swedish visitors here. As a beginner learner, I can definitely say that prosody works in the "normal" way almost all the time in their talks as far as I have been able to detect. It is very difficult to pick these two accent types, and have them correct for me. Also, I had no problems hearing the difference when you pronounced the words one by one emphasizing each and every one until you started with the comparison at around minute 5. At that point, they all sounded the same to me unfortunately. I am very glad to learn all these, though. Tack så mycket för videon! :)
Being a native speaker is so strange because you really don’t know anything about the language despite speaking it every day, I finally started learning and understanding Swedish grammar when I started studying Japanese at university and I can finally explain Swedish (and English my second mother tongue) to non native speakers 😋
Have had something similar too. It's amazing what learning more languages reveals to you. Sort of like finding landmarks on a map that is European languages, the more you have, the more you understand about all of them.
Hi, yeah I totally understand from Japan, I'm Japanese native speaker. I start learning English from junior high, and I got interested in several languages like Swedish now. Yeah I realise how Japanese language is isolated, but yeah Japanese also has the accents too. For example, hashi means both 箸（chopstick）and 橋（bridge） words, 箸 has first stress, and 橋 has second stress.
This is the difference between "procedural" knowledge and "declarative" knowledge. The Dutch _still_ lack a definite rule that explains or prescribes explicitly when the perfect tense is used as opposed to them imperfect tense. Even though there "is no rule" every Dutch speaker "applies" the rules many times each day. (The terms perfect and imperfect are by analogy on Latin; but obviously, if the rules that govern perfectum and imperfectum in Latin applied in Dutch, there would not be a conundrum. It would be better to call them the complex (auxiliary-using) and simple past tenses.)
Im a half finn/swede and never got what the swedish speaking finns were going for when attempting to imitate swedish with swedish accent. This is amazing. Thank you.
I started learning Norwegian and Swedish recently, using Duolingo, and nobody told me about this until I watched this video. Especially the part about how a lot of "unimportant" words are not prononuced with a distinct pitch accent but just skimmed over. I always wondered why, when I listened to spoken Swedish, I felt like a few words were being skipped. Very interesting.
As a swede, my mind was blown when you pronounced the word pairs. I have never realized why it is so easy for us to differentiate between the words even though the spelling is the same, but now I do.
Context is a big part too. I mean, you don’t misunderstand when you are reading right? And as he mentions, Finnish doesn’t have it and they manage just fine.
@@somefuckstolemynick I’m a finlandssvensk, and I do approve. I don’t think I ever got any word confused because of the lack of pitch accent … the words do work just fine also with it. The sad thing perhaps being that it will make it harder for people from Sweden to understand us when the accent is not there.
Another pair of examples of pitch changing the meaning: Tomten = The Lawn/Yard Tomten = Santa Claus Banan = Banana Banan = The Track/Level PS the "Á" he shows in many ocations in the video is just to show where the tone differences will occur. It should not be confused with "Å" wich is an actual letter we use. Still its super interesting for me as a swede, to hear the pitch system in depth since its something we dont learn in school but just take for granted in the contexts.
The main difference between "banan" isn't the pitch accent though. In banan (banana) the first A is a short A, while the second A is a long A. In banan (the track/level) it's reversed, the first A is a long A and the second A is a short A.
@@adrianahlz1895 That usually happens here too. If you're lucky you're likely to hear bad pun poems like "Tomten gick på Tomten." (Santa walked on the lawn)
@@FutureChaosTV No, its just a norm you pick up after seeing patterns in different contexts. Maybe we should have a particular letter for a pitch shifted A.
I've never realized that we have a pitch accent.. I don't know how I stumbled upon this video but I'm glad I found it. (Sorry for my bad English). It's really funny hearing you speak Swedish in between your English because you sound so pedagogisk (educational) as soon as you switch to Swedish😂
Just be aware that pitch patterns matter, and use the shadowing technique for a while before speaking in public. Yes, it's OK with sounding like a foreigner, but keep in mind that if you get this down you will sound absolutely amazing. There are foreigners who've been living in Sweden for 10+ years and they don't know pitch accent, so if you manage do get pitch accent down Swedish people will be absolutely amazed and you will basically be accepted as a swede even by the racists.
Swedish is my native language and I found this very interesting and enlightening. Thank you TH-cam for this weird recommendation, and you for making an educational, fun and factual video.
Very good video. It is also more thorough than other sources, and lays out the information extremely pedagogically. Although it's likely a question of definition, I must ask: what *is* the difference between pitch accent and tones? Both are variations in pitch, but considering you made a point of this in the video, there must be something that makes them different, yes? I have thought about some possibilities, but I always manage to find counterarguments: • Tones are confined to single syllables, and pitch accents stretch over several syllables. - Any Scandinavian dialect where the patterns were the same in the syllable following the stressed (tonebearing) syllable would then have to be considered tonal. • It only counts as tones if there are three or more contrasting pitch patterns. - This seems way too random to be the reason. • Every syllable has to have an identifiable tone for a language to be considered tonal. - It's easy to find counterexamples in established tonal languages, like Standard Mandarin 鑰匙 [ˈjɑ̂ʊ̯ʂʂ͡ɨ] 'key', where the second syllable cannot have an identifiable tone. • Every word in a sentence has to have an identifiable tone for a language to be considered tonal. - This is not the case in established tonal languages either, with examples involving pronouns being especially easy to find: Standard Mandarin 我很好 [wɔˈx̞ɤ̌nˈx̞ɑ̀ʊ̯] 'I'm fine'. • Tones are strictly unpredictable. - We find both predictable and unpredictable tones in both Scandinavia and Asia. For example, certain syllables only occur with one tone, others with any. I hope you have a good answer!
Victor Berrjod I think that you're right that it is in many ways a question of definition. The main reason for pointing the difference out was to underline that the Scandinavian pitch accent doesn't function in the same way as Chinese tones, which, in my experience, is the kind of tones Westerners tend to be more familiar with. The main difference between the systems seems to be that tonal languages can assign an individual tone to each syllable, while pitch accent languages keep the distinctive tone to the stressed syllable, making the tones in the unstressed syllables secondary and predictable from the stressed one.
I'm not sure how I stumbled here as a Swede, but this was super interesting to watch. I've never really understood what foreigners (well, mostly people from the US) mean when they say speaking Swedish is like singing. I can see what they mean now! Will send this to all my friends hehe
Brilliant, thank you! I am also a native Swede and the reason I watch this vid was because I was intrigued by the title. We have a very small number of words with accents in writing. So how does he fill 10 minutes with this, I wondered. To those of you who have just started study Swedish, please don’t give up! We will understand what you want to say from the context even if this isn’t pronounced like we do it. (Well, at least most of us will be that generous, there are some “nitpickers” 😕). This class is for people who study the language on a quite advanced level and want to sound exactly like a native Swede.
It is not supposed to be a verb, but the plural form of the noun _gift_ 'poison, venom': ett gift - två gifter. If it were a verb it would have accent 1!
+Academia Cervena Good to know that the plural of gift is gifter. You would think that the plural is just gift. Usually such ett-words stay the same in plural (ett hus, två hus; ett torn, två torn etc.)
Gift (both swedish and english versions) are actually germanic loanwords. There's actually a history of poison as a marriage gift (as in poisoned wine for example) to rivals or people you hate among nobility in ancient germany. The original meaning means to give. But since it was so associated with poison it now means poison in german. So it got implemented in Swedish to mean poison aswell. But the old swedish word for "to give" is "gifva", and marriage was seen to "give someone (the bride) away", add to that the old meaning "to give" and the word for marriage too became gift. Hence the double meaning in Swedish. The english retained the original meaning somewhat by having the word meaning a present.
Very well explained! I would like to add that the pitch accent is also found in the Limburgian dialects as spoken in Flanders and the Netherlands. All the best from Flanders, Belgium!
This is honestly one of the few truly serious Swedish-related videos I have seen in a while.
Most other "learn about Swedish" videos are made by hyperactive teens who try to be funny or something and either teach completely incorrect things or just throw around random useless phrases without explaining them or anything, but this video actually gives a professional impression.
Thank you very much!
+Laurelindo my thoughts exactly
HOW CAN I UPVOTE THIS MORE.
Laurelindo that was really true, even though it's fun to see them try to pronounce the words.
I’m Finland swedish and have lived in Sweden since 1981. I never really understood what the acute and grave accents were about. Now I do. A big thank you. 👍
Comments like this make me really happy! I'm glad to have been of help! :)
Mind blown. Very interesting, even for a Swedish native speaker.
Ja man tänker ju inte direkt så mycket på hur stor impakt betoningen på just en bokstav kan ändra hela innebörden i en hel mening,och hur orden flyter ihop större delen av meningarna. Coolt å se faktiskt.
@@Droglakahn Sorge jag talar inte svenska. Du vänttär en korvpirog. Vi har den i finskaland här alot
@@juhokulmala9358 Va? Är jag en korvpirog? Jo man tackar i wish jag vore en korvpirog men fysikens lagar tillåter mig inte....
@@Droglakahn Nej du misunderstood. Jag ver sågäing dät här är a lot of korvpirog i finskaländ. Jag inte sögä du är korvpirog. Komma här och har en korvpirog med mig
@@juhokulmala9358 Sorry dont understand a word ,exept korvpirog, but i love you non the less, korvpirog for life! Keep it real my mumintroll =)
Whoa, i'm a native swede but i've never realized that i use these pitches :0 You've blown my mind haha
The pitch accent is one of those things that Swedes just know instinctively and never really think about :)
ja vafan
@Tobbe Häggberg förlåt
@Tobbe Häggberg haha de lugnt
techno dove varför förlãt
As a Swedish speaking Finn, I had no idea the Swedes could tell the difference between ducks and spirits without context.
Uh whats the difference?
@@jedaki1832 Standard Swedish uses both an acute (accent 1) and a grave pitch accent (accent 2). Finland Swedish only uses the acute accent. Native Swedes will therefore pronounce “anden” in two ways, depending on what we mean. Swedish-speaking Finns read both words the same way. They can’t distinguish between the two without context.
I also had no idea until I watched this, never thought much about it , I thought all languages had these
hi im a finn too
aaaaaaanden = duck. andenn = spirit
Taaaack så jättemycket! I've honestly been looking for this video for a while now: no swede could explain this to me haha! And as a French speaker, I needed to understand what the helvete was going on with those pitches! Nu förstår jag!
The problem is when you learn a language as a child, you just get theese things naturally. I can't even remember if we were taught this in school 😂
Ye swedes dont think about This at all. It just feels natural
@@janette7330 We were not taught about this in school! I do not believe this is even really mentioned, unless the teacher find this very interesting!
Jeanette Eriksson We just learned it by speaking to each other
Takotak förstår*
I'm Russian and I learn Swedish in my free time because I like Sweden and Scandinavien culture. You, Swedes, have so nice, beautiful and curious language. That's a great tutorial! Very understandable, but sometimes it's really hard to feel difference between accent 1 and accent 2.:) Tack!
Thank you for saying so! I'm glad it helped you :)
In fact, some of the words he mentioned are basically the same, like for instance "tomten" as in "the Santa clause" and "tomten" as in "the garden", as I can't hear a difference between them even though I'm from Sweden
I'm also Russian I have no idea why my fellow countryman is struggling with the pitch, the stress and the accent because we probably have it all in Russian as well, may be, except for "Accent 2", we pronounce all the words with "Accent 1" and sometimes also exclude any accent until the end of a sentence
Cause its not the accent, its the glottal stop in the second type that makes it particular. The dude has missed this crucial detail. Take the Russian "mama" , one word, you start blowing air at the beginning and never stop till you're finished. Swedes will say "MAM-[stop air in the throat for a tiny moment]-ma"
@@bramblebop1904 that's kind of clear when you hear a Swedish-speaking person, and it's really easy to repeat. I have more troubles understanding and reading the vowel sounds in Swedish, that's what I personally struggle with. And, I believe, the above commentator rather struggles with determining where to use each accent, not pronouncing them. It is rather so, because I personally have some troubles with it also
I guess this is why we Swedes sometimes have a really hard time understanding what non-Swedish people say even though other non-Swedish people understand it perfectly.
SWEmanque are you from sweden?
Ranialooli
yupp
Ja e finsk😂
are you talking about Swedish speaking non-Swedish people?
i always assumed i'm bad with accents
Same with other languages. I fluently speak Spanish and can understand what other Spanish speakers are trying to say when they speak English when other English speakers cannot understand.
For someone actually learning Swedish, this was a very enlightening and useful video. Thank you!
The Umbrella Academy cast Who spoke Swedish in season 2 should’ve watched this
God yes, it was so painful to watch 🥴
Omg yes, that was so annoying and weird. Was it really that hard for them to find three Swedish actors?! Fick hjärnblödning av deras uttal... 😂
Yes, I almost didn't understand them and it took me a while to get that they were (trying to) speak swedish.
Vi Ro HAHAHAHA eller hurrrrr, jag fattade inte ens först att dom snackade svenska
Five really nailed it. Although he only had to say a few words. I think the Handler managed to reverse the accent on every damn word. Props that they actually had them do it though, as it was kinda skitroligt.
Fascinating. As a bilingual Finn I didn't realize this was a thing in "Sweden Swedish." My English-speaking fiancé will be happy to know that this is something he will not have to learn in his Swedish studies as we're planning on living in Finland :'D
I signed into TH-cam specifically so I could leave a comment about how helpful and well-done this was. It is more difficult than one might expect to find this information on the internet; this was both full of useful information and presented in a helpful way. Thank you.
Thank you! I'm very happy to hear that.
Who knew that speaking Chinese would eventually help me with Swedish! Accent one is very similar to a second tone followed by a neutral tone, and accent two is just like having consecutive fourth tones in Mandarin.
This is so interesting! I'm Swedish and I also speak Chinese. I think I say accent one more like first tone, neutral tone.
If it's second tone, neutral tone it would sound more like a Dala accent haha! (Which is also totally legit)
This was so incredibly helpful. I'm a little over a month into learning Swedish on Duolingo. I'm a musician, so these accent differences stood out to me immediately. But since I'm a new learner, I didn't realize there was reason for it....I thought there might have been inconsistencies in the Duolingo word recordings because none of this was explained. Thanks for helping my pronunciation!
Better and more thoroughly explained than when I studied at Nordiska Språk at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I was very confused at the time since the illustrations did not fit at all with how I pronounce with my West Swedish accent. Then I took a Norwegian class at the same department, and then they showed the Norwegian versions of the same thing. Turns out my West Swedish accent looked like Norwegian, not the Stockholm version in this video. We go up at the end while the Stockholm people go down. This video touches on the fact that the pitch looks different in other accents, something I wasn't really told when I was in college. Great job!
There is an unfortunate tendency in Sweden to overlook other dialects than the one spoken in eastern Mälardalen, as you describe in your comment. You may be interested in the sequel to this video, where I talk about the regional variation of the pitch accent! th-cam.com/video/6_60Oec-8pg/w-d-xo.html
I’m a Swedish speeking Finn and I say that the duck is the spirit
The father, the son and the holy duck, ftw.
Ruotsi voimakkaalla aksentilla kuullostaa kyllä todella kauheelta
@@oahc1052 that's exactly what I mean, and isnt it the truth
@@sttonep242 joo
Yes
“Ey gurl. Are you Accent 1? Because I think you’re acute”
Yeah u did!
Aaah! That’s hilarious! 😂
Her response was definitely grave 😐🙃
Mr. Al are you sarcastic lol?
@@Simon-xl1yz nope. Höhö might not be in the dictionary, but its definetly a way to chuckle
Definitely the BEST tone class I have ever seen all around!!! Tack så mycket!!!
I've always struggled with my accent. Swedes always tell me that I sound "too french" when I speak. This is a game changer. Seriously. You've earned a new subscriber.
It is almost like swedish has alot to do with "melody" almost. Like singing. Or spesking poetry. Very interesting. How you pronounce and speak the words changes the whole meaning and it also makes you more present with / in the words you speak kind of if you are aware of all of these subtle nuances. :)
Thank you sir, I've been in Sweden for two years and no-one could explain this as plainly as you just did
Detta är fantastiskt! Tack! Native here, this is incredible, especially the part about stressing key words
"unless we get it right we'll sound like foreigners"
more like
"unless we get it right we'll sound like Finns"
Nothing wrong in that ;) In fact, preferable.
Totally agree. I'm Lithuanian myself. I speak Swedish as a professional language. All my customers ask me if I come from Finland. The fun thing is that I hear finlandssvenska quite often and I don't think I sound anything like it :)
@@blueeyedbaer finlandssvenska is spoken by people that have Swedish as their native language in Finland. I guess that your pronunciation is much closer to people native to Finnish that speaks Swedish.
The Finish accent is a lot more than not using the Pitch accent.
So not getting the Pitch accent correctly won't make one sound like one is from Finland, but rather just a non native speaker.
Unless one gets everything else in the Finish accent correct, but this isn't a trivial feat. Since it's practically using Finish pronunciation and rhythm but Swedish grammar and words. (And Finish is a rather unique language that is mainly related to Estonian, Sami and Hungarian.)
Unknownety a little bit too easy, since there are so many dialects of Finland Swedish ... many of them very far from Finnish pronunciation. It’s basically only the “big city” ie Helsinki and Turku dialects that sound “like Finnish”, in the Vaasa area they’d be quite close to Västerbotten dialects. And many of the Turku archipelago dialects sound a bit like Gutemål on Gotland. And in Västra Nyland many of the dialects actually do have the pitch accent ...
This video is very helpful for me! I am from Holland and I'm trying to learn the Swedish language. The pitch accent is very difficult , but In this video you make it a lot easier to understand. Thank you!
You're welcome! I'm glad that it's helping you!
Please come back and make more videos. This is incredibly high quality content!
I found a Swedish-Finn vlogger once (Cat Peterson) and when she posted her first video in Swedish she had a lot of Swedish people telling her that her Swedish sucked. From the little Swedish I knew I could understand her just fine and she told me that Finnish-Swedish (the kind she speaks) only has a few word differences from Sweden-Swedish. Now I understand why people thought her Swedish sucked...Finnish Swedish doesn't use the accents!
Ignorance is a thing - also in Sweden. So many Swedes don't even know that 'finlandssvenska' is a dialect. They don't know what a 'finlandssvensk' is, and the history behind it. From ignorance comes the hating. However, since the hating has no bearing on reality, it's mostly a burden for the haters to carry around. Double burdens: Ignorance and hate. Such poverty. Poor people...
@RoMMeL1337ak47 she has a british husband and they communicate in english so it might just be that she uses so much english that she momentarily forgot some of the swedish words. Happens to me all the time with my finnish, sometimes i only remember the english words for things
I have had a lot of people in Stockholm making fun of me (on the verge of bullying) for pronouncing some words differently. I'm from Stockholm but I have a grandmother from the North so I say mormor quite normally but I pronounce farmor in dialect and the same with using han instead of honom, lyste - lös etc. I think people in general are very judgmental in bigger cities mostly because they rarely come in contact with other dialects?
@@beorlingo It's kinda stupid that people aren't aware of that dialect, because we have celebrities like Mark Levengood and Marko "Markolioo" Lehtosalo, who are both originally from Finland. Although the latter can speak both types of Swedish just fine. I really like the way Mark Levengood speaks though. He sounds so kind and soothing. (I just realised both have "Mark" in their names lol)
Although there are many people who know "finlandssvenska" simply as "tala som Mumin" (speaking like Moomin). Apparently people just don't bother to look up stuff that aren't relevant to them personally. I find that really boring.
@@ankaplanka Mark Levengood is finlandssvensk. Lehtosalo is not.
I was telling a Swede that I stayed in Solna (suburb northwest of Stockholm) and I pronounced it with accent 1 and she did not quickly recognize the name. A few seconds later, she realized what I was trying to say and pronounced Solna with accent 2.
Yeah, this may seem ridiculous. But it actually happens that you just don't understand, cuz to a Swede it actually sounds very different in some words if the accent is wrong. In this case I bet she initially was thinking if Sollna might be somewhere around Sollentuna.
@@beorlingo Except "Sollna" would also be different from both "Solna" in accent 1 and "Solna" in accent 2, the latter of which would presumably sound like "Sol" followed by "natt" but without the t:s.
@@Sjilaj "Sollna" seemed to me the best way to spell out the sound of accent 1. Not 100% accurate for sure.
@@Sjilaj Sólna for accent 1, and Sólnà for accent 2 might be closer to reality.
Tack, jag prövar att lära mig svenska och den här videon var väldigt hjälpsam!
I just started learning swedish and your videos are really helping me out, thanks !
Eva-Luna Tholance You're very welcome! I'm glad it's helping you out!
I watched this after about 20 days of learning Swedish and I was very confused by the concept. I am now 100 days into learning Swedish and find myself using the pitch accent correctly even in words I haven’t read/heard before which is very interesting! It’s something that you begin to pick up very quickly when you know how standard suffixes modify the pitch in most cases 😁
I'm an American, with a finnoswede fiancee in Sweden, and I'm moving there as soon as the EU lets me. (Covid) I've been learning Swedish since November 2019 but this has been an eye opener for sure. Thanks for the info!!
Hoppas ni kan flytta snart😀
This is a very very very important thing to learn actually. And most people miss thongs likr these. It makes the language more rich and makes you be ablr to deliver the words with more presence in the words you could say..
Inga problem 👍xD
Welcome to Sweden later on!
Lucky bastard
I think this is what my Swedish teacher was referring to, when she said "there is one thing I won't teach you, because if I teach it, you'll never get it right"
What a depressing, uninspiring and limiting approach from your teacher. Follow this video and surprise them.
damn what a lousy fucking teacher
Guys, some things you have to learn by hearing it, because trying to get it by following rules is pointless.
@@EterPuralis the video makes pretty clear that listening and practising is an essential part of what you need to do to crack this. Just listening, without any idea of what you are listening out for, is unlikely to assist people whose native language has not exposed them to the sort of pitch accents that Swedish has. This video provides a really clear and useful framework in which to do the listening.
@@davidloveday8473 Your reply is cringy as fuck. For me, I wish they'd never taught me German grammar in school, I could speak German fluently before we got there. This is the same kind of reason.
Thank you, this is a very clear presentation which largely demystifies the subject.
Thank you so much. This is one perfect example of something seeming really complicated until somebody just takes the time to explain it to you. For example, the difference between anden and anden (ALWAYS quoted in books as an example) seems confusing until somebody just points out the words are 'and+en' and 'ande+n' and suddenly it's not so scary.
I've been told by my Swedish niece that I do the accent 2 quite well, but I add it to words where it doesn't belong. The rules (mostly) don't make a lot of sense, so I'm trying to just learn which do and don't have them. However, you answered at the end the thing she couldn't explain...why so many words sound different on their own vs. in a sentence. Just the word "jag" messes me up. Thinking of the accents in a sentence as a whole has blown my mind! We probably do the same of running words together in English, but you often don't think about it in your native language. Thank you!!
For me as a foreigner non-Swedish speaker (I'm Polish) this type 2 accent *makes* the distinctive sound of the language. But when I talked about it with my Swedish friends (they're Poles, but live in Sweden almost all their lives) I didn't exactly refer to it as an accent or a pitch, but for me it was always something like choking in the middle of the word; because there is always very explicit stop between two syllables.
This was always Swedish for me: half of the words are said smoothly, the other half - chokingly. I don't want to offend the language (especially speaking language which sounds like autumn leaves being squashed myself), I like it. I also like how many consonant clusters at the begining of the word make simple 'sh' sound.
I like to think of accent 2 as "staccato".
Hahaha the Wi-Fi password language has a second name now: squashed autumn leaves language 😂
But yeah, the second accent is really what makes the Swedish sound. And while Mazurek folk type of song is to imitate the Polish language, i think your hambo folk songs imitate the pulsating sound of your Swedish language.
I work as a language teacher in Sweden, and I approve of this video.
why does the word kyckling use the second pitch? what rule does it fit in?
A very fascinating lanfguage, I always wanted to learn a foreign language. Now I'm sure. It's Swedish. It's perfect,
Yeah! We only conjugate the verbs after time, never after pronouns.
There is an app called Duolingo which offers a course in Swedish (for free). I'm using Duolingo to learn Italian right now and I think it's pretty good :)
As far as I'm concerned (as a Swede, mind you), Norwegian is superior for foreigners who want to learn a Scandinavian language. It's basically spoken Swedish and written Danish all at once. You more or less get three languages at the price of one :)
Rodolf Nordmadr
Yeah, except Norwegian is bad and Swedish is good. Not biased.
I first thought that Swedish would not be so beautiful, but then I found a female singer Veronica Maggio a couple of weeks ago, try this and you'll probably will love Swedish as well: "Ayahuaska", "Svart sommar", "Den första är alltid gratis".
I almost never heard a singing Swedish except for one of my favorit bands "Katatonia", they made a song in Swedish. But recently I even started to think of singing in Swedish myself after listening for Veronica :D (even though I can't even speak it)
There is no surprise that they have so many musicians in Sweden
Ah very interesting! A Finn here who has been studying Swedish for years now, but I don't remember any teacher ever teaching this explicitly. I used to presume the accent 2 is just how Swedish dialects are as opposed to Swedish speaking Finns :D. I had no idea you shouldn't just randomly wiggle all words like that (also I agree with the tilde being more clear indicator here).
I've actually encountered this hypercorrection numerous time from proficient L2 speakers, with accent 2 being interpreted as a "Swedish accent", and then overapplied :)
Yeah, but you were taught "högsvenska" in Finland, the prestige dialect of Finland-Swedish.
I guess people already struggle enough with the vocabulary, so focusing on accents would be kind of useless - it's a bit of an advanced concept for people who feel like they are forced to learn a language that they don't even want to learn (and sadly, this seems to be a lot of people's attitude towards Swedish)... Also, I think people were most often taught the "Finnish" pronunciation of the words any way. For example when it comes to numbers, I remember that we learned to pronounce "sju" more like "schu", probably because we don't have the "sj" sound in Finnish language. Also, the Swedish vowels are pronounced a bit differently than in Finnish.
So, there are many nuances about the pronunciation of Swedish, and people simply don't have time to dive that deep into the "correct pronunciation". And since the Finnish way of pronouncing the words is also valid, and it's the pronunciation that you will most likely hear in Finland, it just makes more sense to learn that, and spend the time that would have otherwise been spent on learning the more native pronunciation of the words on more "useful" stuff. This is only stuff that you need to worry about if you want to "perfect" your Swedish. But most people in school are far from that level, so to most people, it would simply be a waste of time.
I'm Swedish myself and I never noticed this. The difference in Tomten (The Plot) and Tomten (The Gnome, or The Santa) was mind blowing.
Same here, I knew we had two accents and could not tell which was which. But this did not matter to learn the language as child
@@paulingvar Bruh I didn't even know we had two accents. I didn't even know what a pitch dialect was until I tried learning japanese and learned it was so easy to pronounce the words because swedish and japanese have pitch dialects. Learned this like 3 weeks ago. Fucking cool.
What a plot twist! 😉
Most useful advice I've come across about Swedish
As a fennoswedish speaker, this is very interesting, as I’ve always wondered what it is that makes somebody sound “rikssvensk” compared to “finlandssvensk”, and this is a large part of it now that I think about it. It’s also the first change I implement to how I speak if a Swede has trouble following my fennoswedish accent.
Where in Finland?
Toss in the Scanian region. Some of these words he said to me just sounds wrong. But thats mixing in very very very regional and unique dialects.
@@beorlingo doesn’t matter, I can’t think of a single dialect that uses that accent.
@@sstorholm oh my gosh, no needto reply with such a hurry!
@@sstorholm no, in parts of Raseborg in Västnyland they actually do use the pitch accent …
Learning Swedish on duolingo and knew I was missing some info about pronunciation, including the pitch of words. I also feel vindicated bc I knew the person speaking was leaving off letters when saying sentences (the prosody thing mentioned) but the app doesn’t really address that stuff. Thank you!
TIL gifter means either 'marries' or 'poisons' depending on the accent. Magic language!
Married and poison are pretty much synonyms anyways
This is litteraly my boyfriend's favourite Swedish word because he finds it hillarious lol
Hey! I resemble that remark!
So funny😂 In german we have a similar thing. "Umfahren" can either mean to drive around something or to run over something when pronounced diffrently.
just an FYI: gifter in this case is the plural form of poison, not the action of poisoning someone.
but yeah, gift = married, but also poison.
I am just starting to study Svenska ...this Is really helpful, confusing but helpful. Tack!
Thanks, Adam. This is really useful and demystifies what's happening in between my Swedish lesson and struggling to hear "real" Swedish effectively. Tack så mycket!
Thank you for your kind comment. I'm happy to have helped!
This is the easiest , and the first one to understand Swedish accent for me.
Tack så mycket, så mycket......
Lol I was researching about Japanese and found out about pitch accent. I got interested in the concept because I though it was weird, but then I find out about this video, realizing that my native language was a pitch accent language all along.
答えて、日本語上手？
@@apt1313 いいえ、違います
This is mind blowing. I am learning Finn-Swe but the book is from Sweden. Every time I am asked about the difference about Finn-Swe and Swe-Swe, I always say that Swe-Swe (riksvenska) is more difficult because its is spoken with melody. Now I got it, it's pitch accent.
TACK !! Now I finally get the difference between anden and anden which my friends have made fun of me about ! I'm a Swiss living in Sweden, I speak fluent swedish and have a general good ear thanks to music, but this one was still impossible for me, because I was focussing on the first syllable instead of the second one. And it's not like I didn't know about the "second bubble" in some words, which I've practiced for years already, but just that example was still having me puzzled. Now I see I should practice my pronounciation a bit again, to mark a bit of a clearer difference between the two types of accent.
Why the fuck am I watching this?? I am from Sweden xD
+TheSmartman14 its cool man, i am from america and i watch english learning videos all the time just to see what else i can learn.
TheSmartman14 jag gjorde de för att somna😂😂😂😂
wtf the duck in swedish is ankan
anden kan användas som synonym med ankan :)
I actually clicked on the video since I wanted to find out why there is Estonian flag in the picture of this video.
Instead of finding that out I learned something pretty interesting. I've been learning Swedish here in Finland like everyone else so I haven't really needed this info but surprisingly it was pretty easy to connect these things to the little I've heard Swedes speak.
I'm happy to hear that! And it's certainly useful to understand such a feature of the language, even if it's not used in the dialect that you're personally learning!
(Btw, for an explanation of the Estonian flag, see the video called _Introduction to the Swedish Language_ :) )
Academia Cervena Thank you for answering, I actually realised later on that watching the video would get me the answer and learned something new again! Should have realised it had a history-related background :D
THANK you so much for explaining this. I had heard this pitch accent and I wasn't really sure what it was and when to use it. This helps a lot!
Thank you very much. I could definitely hear it, but never really focused on what it was and why it happened. Going to watch the rest of your videos as well.
Also, I have a degree in linguistics and had no idea that so many modern languages had a pitch accent. Seriously questioning my education right now :)
i am really glad that he also points out without mentioning that we pronounce things differently than how they are written, like kvinnor-kvinner and rolig-roli. i always do that, its just slang.
Thank you for noticing this. It's not slang though, but the normal casual pronunciation :)
Thank you, this video was great! I found it because I wanted to explain these differences for a friend who's interested in swedish but who has had a lot of issues with understanding this (and I wasn't very good at explaining it) and it was very clear and helpful :)
This is some great information for people learning Swedish, and as is apparent from the comments, few native speakers know about this on a conscious level.
I tried to check the difference in pitch using my piano. Accent 1 (e.g. ánden in your notation) pronounced naturally drops about a fifth in pitch - so from C down to about F, whereas accent 2 (ãnden) goes up about a second, so roughly from C up to E. If I imagine the word pronounced with a pitch relation somewhere in between those, it is not quite clear which one is right, but the closer you get to the intervals, the more it sounds like the closest one. Also, the tone exactly between the two (pitch C down to B), is the most confusing one.
But the best way is probably just to be aware and listen to the prosody and imitate a native speaker, without asking them to explain the theory. :-)
One of the most well-explained and cleverly tutored lessons on Swedish language. I am a linguist who is trying to speak proper Swedish, and your video has opened the door to a lot I was trying to decode! Any more material by you?
Thank you very much! Always fun to hear that my videos are helping people :)
I have a bunch of other videos on Swedish, available here: th-cam.com/play/PL5uGqWoFgvd1SBExRyHuuVxiLiU8u8-PN.html
Despite learning Swedish and living in Sweden for 5 years, I never really understood pitch accents before. At last a coherent explanation! Tack så mycket!
This variation in accent is also one of the reasons why Swedish is one of the most beautiful languages on the face of the earth.
These accents give the language when spoken softly a singing almost elven-like quality which is completely soothing to the soul.
Bear in mind that this praise is coming from a Dane whose own language is so closely related to Swedish that they are mutually intelligble and I therefore should be more inclined to think thusly of my own language but, alas, it doesn´t work that way.
Swedish is simply more softly intonated and softer modulated which gives it this otherworldly character.
Beautiful, beautiful language.
Ulf Danielsen: A quote from your comment: "...coming from a Dane whose own language is so closely related to Swedish that they are mutually intelligible..." Here's an interesting (I think) question: If two languages are mutually intelligible, are they different languages? I'm a Swedish speaker and have spoken to many Danes and Norwegians in Swedish. These conversations have gone quite well. Are we then using three distinct languages? I'd say linguistically no but culturally and politically, probably yes. (Contrast: Many English speakers would have plenty of trouble with these two guys ostensibly speaking the same language: th-cam.com/video/f5pCPRYvyis/w-d-xo.html)
@@exessex3522 Swedish, Norwegian and Danish exist on a dialect continuum. They are different languages, there are big differences in vocabulary and spelling. The differences in vocabulary between English accents are mostly slang or local words. There are exceptions, for sure.
And now I feel kinda bad that swedes often say that speaking danish is like speaking swedish, only that you're drunk and have a hot potatoe in your mouth. EööllullAeUuh lalLLallaaah etc.
@@EvilTeabags Don´t feel bad, it´s true. Greetings from Finland.
Kamelåså
This is so interesting, as a native Swede, I haven’t though about the fact that all words have pitch accent. The classic examples such as tomten or tomten, sure, but I’ve never considered that it applies to every word. I came into contact with a version of this a few weeks ago when I met a guy from Canada. I pronounced Canada with essentially pitch accent 1, and he pronounced it with 2. I was surprised and asked him about it and he could not hear the difference in the way we pronounced it, even when I said them one after another.
I've never really thought more about it, but i encounter this alot in peoples name. I've never been able to put my finger on it, but there's a distinct difference in how names can be pronounced, and most people have their "own" way to say their names. Like Johan, Jacob, Martin, Anna, and even if you dont realize WHY it sounds wrong sometimes when people say your name, it's probably that they use either accent 1 or 2 :)
To sum up, let's put aside all those rules that have accent 1, and we'll have to remember those with accent 2:
1/ 2 syllable words with swedish endings.
2/ Compound words. Easy to understand since each monosyllable word has 1 accent.
3/ Beware of -el, -en, -er nouns, since they can have 1 or 2 accents.
4/ -el, -en, -er adjectives: Only -en ones have 2 accents. The other ones have just 1.
5/ Present tense -ar.
6/ Plurals without a vowel change (no dieresis/umlaut).
Ok, that's easier to remember. ;)
I have learned Swedish for 3 years and am fluent now. I feel like I learned these pitch differences when I learned the words. Thus I just naturally use them without even thinking about it
in finland perkele can mean many things when different tones
perkele: when your rent is raised
perkele: when you win in a lottery
perkele: when your car breaks down
perkele: when you stub your toe real bad
Or :when you die in fortnite
Haha best comment! 😂😂😂
No Niin!
perkele... scaring the crap out of a wandering bear 🐻 ... also used to exorcise demons and duck-spirits 😆
Herre joumela. Finlands svensk familje but i was born in Sweden and live in the US so no idea how that's spelled
This is very helpful, and I'm sure if I break it down into pieces during later viewings, it'll be even more helpful. Tack så mycket! 👍🇺🇸🇸🇪
Watching this as a Swede because I have no idea what pitch accent is! Haha.
Oh my God, this is so interesting!
Lol
Hahaha jag med
Does He make any sence ?
@@holoholopainen1627 He does! It's really a thing, and I've mentioned this to other Swedes but *no one* knows that we're doing this!
Really good video! I'm a native myself and I haven't even thought of these little subtle things that we do when we pronounce words to make them into completely different things.
That gave me one of those "Uh-Ha!" moments. It's actually really helpful. Especially towards the end where he explains how it's not always used and how that applies to sentences and stress. I want to like it more
I've been living with two Swedes for the last 3 months, and we have very many Swedish visitors here. As a beginner learner, I can definitely say that prosody works in the "normal" way almost all the time in their talks as far as I have been able to detect.
It is very difficult to pick these two accent types, and have them correct for me. Also, I had no problems hearing the difference when you pronounced the words one by one emphasizing each and every one until you started with the comparison at around minute 5. At that point, they all sounded the same to me unfortunately.
I am very glad to learn all these, though. Tack så mycket för videon! :)
Being a native speaker is so strange because you really don’t know anything about the language despite speaking it every day, I finally started learning and understanding Swedish grammar when I started studying Japanese at university and I can finally explain Swedish (and English my second mother tongue) to non native speakers 😋
Have had something similar too. It's amazing what learning more languages reveals to you. Sort of like finding landmarks on a map that is European languages, the more you have, the more you understand about all of them.
Hi, yeah I totally understand from Japan, I'm Japanese native speaker. I start learning English from junior high, and I got interested in several languages like Swedish now.
Yeah I realise how Japanese language is isolated, but yeah Japanese also has the accents too.
For example, hashi means both 箸（chopstick）and 橋（bridge） words, 箸 has first stress, and 橋 has second stress.
This is the difference between "procedural" knowledge and "declarative" knowledge. The Dutch _still_ lack a definite rule that explains or prescribes explicitly when the perfect tense is used as opposed to them imperfect tense. Even though there "is no rule" every Dutch speaker "applies" the rules many times each day.
(The terms perfect and imperfect are by analogy on Latin; but obviously, if the rules that govern perfectum and imperfectum in Latin applied in Dutch, there would not be a conundrum. It would be better to call them the complex (auxiliary-using) and simple past tenses.)
Im a half finn/swede and never got what the swedish speaking finns were going for when attempting to imitate swedish with swedish accent. This is amazing. Thank you.
2nd accent made me learn Swedish- it's just soooo beautiful
yrjistä
@Spacecowboy Eson
Maybe it's ugly, but at least it's unique and not just another boring variation of some average old north Germanic language.
@Spacecowboy Eson i Love Finnish as a swede sounds so nice
I guess a girly girl might think it's beautiful 🙄
@Spacecowboy Eson I used to wonder if Finnish also sounds gay to foreigners, but as it turns out - no, Swedish is just universally gay.
I started learning Norwegian and Swedish recently, using Duolingo, and nobody told me about this until I watched this video. Especially the part about how a lot of "unimportant" words are not prononuced with a distinct pitch accent but just skimmed over. I always wondered why, when I listened to spoken Swedish, I felt like a few words were being skipped. Very interesting.
He actually nails it. Bravo!
He is from Sweden. Of course he does.
The best explanation for akut och grav accent thus far. Cheers!
As a swede, my mind was blown when you pronounced the word pairs.
I have never realized why it is so easy for us to differentiate between the words even though the spelling is the same, but now I do.
Context is a big part too. I mean, you don’t misunderstand when you are reading right?
And as he mentions, Finnish doesn’t have it and they manage just fine.
@@somefuckstolemynick I’m a finlandssvensk, and I do approve. I don’t think I ever got any word confused because of the lack of pitch accent … the words do work just fine also with it. The sad thing perhaps being that it will make it harder for people from Sweden to understand us when the accent is not there.
Det var nog den bästa förklaringen jag sett hittills. Vad bra. Tack! 🌼
Another pair of examples of pitch changing the meaning:
Tomten = The Lawn/Yard
Tomten = Santa Claus
Banan = Banana
Banan = The Track/Level
PS the "Á" he shows in many ocations in the video is just to show where the tone differences will occur. It should not be confused with "Å" wich is an actual letter we use.
Still its super interesting for me as a swede, to hear the pitch system in depth since its something we dont learn in school but just take for granted in the contexts.
The main difference between "banan" isn't the pitch accent though. In banan (banana) the first A is a short A, while the second A is a long A. In banan (the track/level) it's reversed, the first A is a long A and the second A is a short A.
Omg my colleagues always make fun of me with the "tomte tomte" thing XD
@@adrianahlz1895 That usually happens here too. If you're lucky you're likely to hear bad pun poems like "Tomten gick på Tomten."
(Santa walked on the lawn)
You don't learn it in grammar lessons?
@@FutureChaosTV No, its just a norm you pick up after seeing patterns in different contexts.
Maybe we should have a particular letter for a pitch shifted A.
Thank you so much! I think I understand pitch accent way better - I additionally love that you mention sentence accent / prosody, too!
The best explanation ever. Thanks a lot!
Thank you!
For you who are learning the swedish language, you are doing a great job! Keep at it and I am sure that you will master it! :)
please upload some more videos, you guys are so professional. ha det sa° bra!
Thank you for your kind words :)
Thank you for this. I now feel I understand it so much better. I only really knew the rules concerning verbs before! Tack så mycket.
Interesting, I noticed we in Skåne have a very different accent 2, and in many cases use accent 1 for most words.
This is absolutely true. In the sequel video I talk more about such variation!
You also combine word endings, like cykelen, nyckelen, etc.
@@hhhhh98764 Don't forget "nyckLen". That's just wierd. It's easier to pronounce, but it sounds like a 3yr old kid.
I've never realized that we have a pitch accent.. I don't know how I stumbled upon this video but I'm glad I found it. (Sorry for my bad English). It's really funny hearing you speak Swedish in between your English because you sound so pedagogisk (educational) as soon as you switch to Swedish😂
The first accent is called „accent 1“, and the second accent is called „accent 2“. Mindblowing! 😂🤣🤪
This is actually very good because it makes you focus more on "how" you deliver something when you speak if u are consious about how you speak it
I think I am OK with sounding like a foreigner.
***** Cool. Accents are a funny thing about languages. Also, Australian accent is awesome.
are u a swedish who sounds like a foreigner or you're learning swedish as a second language?
Me in regards to every language every
Just be aware that pitch patterns matter, and use the shadowing technique for a while before speaking in public.
Yes, it's OK with sounding like a foreigner, but keep in mind that if you get this down you will sound absolutely amazing. There are foreigners who've been living in Sweden for 10+ years and they don't know pitch accent, so if you manage do get pitch accent down Swedish people will be absolutely amazed and you will basically be accepted as a swede even by the racists.
@Melanie Boots Right... cause context wouldn't be enough to know the difference between married and poison?
Swedish is my native language and I found this very interesting and enlightening. Thank you TH-cam for this weird recommendation, and you for making an educational, fun and factual video.
Oh, and “practise” in terms of “rehearse” is spelt “practise”.
I’m Swedish, why did I watch the entire thing...
Same
ja med
y
Haha gjorde exakt samma sak XD
Skulle bli betydlig mer begripligt om han använde pronunciation, för accent eller dialekt har inte mycket med det här att göra.
Very good video. It is also more thorough than other sources, and lays out the information extremely pedagogically.
Although it's likely a question of definition, I must ask: what *is* the difference between pitch accent and tones? Both are variations in pitch, but considering you made a point of this in the video, there must be something that makes them different, yes? I have thought about some possibilities, but I always manage to find counterarguments:
• Tones are confined to single syllables, and pitch accents stretch over several syllables.
- Any Scandinavian dialect where the patterns were the same in the syllable following the stressed (tonebearing) syllable would then have to be considered tonal.
• It only counts as tones if there are three or more contrasting pitch patterns.
- This seems way too random to be the reason.
• Every syllable has to have an identifiable tone for a language to be considered tonal.
- It's easy to find counterexamples in established tonal languages, like Standard Mandarin 鑰匙 [ˈjɑ̂ʊ̯ʂʂ͡ɨ] 'key', where the second syllable cannot have an identifiable tone.
• Every word in a sentence has to have an identifiable tone for a language to be considered tonal.
- This is not the case in established tonal languages either, with examples involving pronouns being especially easy to find: Standard Mandarin 我很好 [wɔˈx̞ɤ̌nˈx̞ɑ̀ʊ̯] 'I'm fine'.
• Tones are strictly unpredictable.
- We find both predictable and unpredictable tones in both Scandinavia and Asia. For example, certain syllables only occur with one tone, others with any.
I hope you have a good answer!
Victor Berrjod I think that you're right that it is in many ways a question of definition. The main reason for pointing the difference out was to underline that the Scandinavian pitch accent doesn't function in the same way as Chinese tones, which, in my experience, is the kind of tones Westerners tend to be more familiar with.
The main difference between the systems seems to be that tonal languages can assign an individual tone to each syllable, while pitch accent languages keep the distinctive tone to the stressed syllable, making the tones in the unstressed syllables secondary and predictable from the stressed one.
I'm not sure how I stumbled here as a Swede, but this was super interesting to watch. I've never really understood what foreigners (well, mostly people from the US) mean when they say speaking Swedish is like singing. I can see what they mean now! Will send this to all my friends hehe
Singing gay songs
@@damiengates7581 yay gay!
Brilliant, thank you! I am also a native Swede and the reason I watch this vid was because I was intrigued by the title. We have a very small number of words with accents in writing. So how does he fill 10 minutes with this, I wondered. To those of you who have just started study Swedish, please don’t give up! We will understand what you want to say from the context even if this isn’t pronounced like we do it. (Well, at least most of us will be that generous, there are some “nitpickers” 😕). This class is for people who study the language on a quite advanced level and want to sound exactly like a native Swede.
Count on the Swedes to make the words 'poisons' and 'marries' sound almost the same. Sounds like the start of a very bad comedy ;)
+TheBaronessIsAwesome As a native swede I strongly disagree with his translation. To poison someone is "förgifta" and not "gifta" as he says.
It is not supposed to be a verb, but the plural form of the noun _gift_ 'poison, venom': ett gift - två gifter. If it were a verb it would have accent 1!
+Academia Cervena Good to know that the plural of gift is gifter. You would think that the plural is just gift. Usually such ett-words stay the same in plural (ett hus, två hus; ett torn, två torn etc.)
Gift (both swedish and english versions) are actually germanic loanwords. There's actually a history of poison as a marriage gift (as in poisoned wine for example) to rivals or people you hate among nobility in ancient germany. The original meaning means to give. But since it was so associated with poison it now means poison in german. So it got implemented in Swedish to mean poison aswell. But the old swedish word for "to give" is "gifva", and marriage was seen to "give someone (the bride) away", add to that the old meaning "to give" and the word for marriage too became gift. Hence the double meaning in Swedish. The english retained the original meaning somewhat by having the word meaning a present.
@@patrickoudejans you can say gift in plural instead of gifter tho, both work
Very well explained! I would like to add that the pitch accent is also found in the Limburgian dialects as spoken in Flanders and the Netherlands. All the best from Flanders, Belgium!
I'm so glad I was born into this so I don't have to think about it. 😂
The final part of this video where you explain the emphasis explains so well why articulated Swedish sounds so awkward.
That explains why I've been told I speak with a finnish accent... even though I'm not finnish
I’m so glad I found this video right when I just starts to learn Swedish! Super helpful!
Very interesting. I didn't realize Swedish had these grammatic rules.
Det regler inte!
This is actually SO HELPFUL