What is the Sentence structure in the Swedish Language?
March 23, 2010 by
Filed under swedish language
I am trying to learn Swedish, but I don’t quite know the order of Words or the Sentence structure. Could you please help me out?!
Thanks to all those that answered!
Well I don’t know any specific rule for it, but I can give you some examples: If you want to say ‘I don’t know’ in swedish it’s like this:
Jag vet inte
I know not
So that’s abit different. Let’s take a longer sentence: ‘Do you want to go shoppin?’ (okey I couldn’t think of anything better lol:))
Vill du gå och shoppa?
Want you go and shopping?
So when it’s like a question it’s alway the verb before the pronom. This occurs in other places too, but I don’t know how to explain that. Okey this got a little confusing, but you know I don’t know the rules I just say what feels right. And I think that if you keep practising you will eventually hear what fits in the context, what ‘feels’ right. Good Luck and hope this helps you!:)
The most common word order is, like in English, subject-verb-object:
“Fåglar äter maskar.” “Birds eat worms.”
Questions are usually verb-subject-object, a construction that is also found in English:
“Var han arg på mig?” “Was he mad at me?”
Swedish does not have a direct counterpart to “do”-subject-verb-object, but instead any verb can start a question:
“Älskar du hundar?” “Do you love dogs?” (“Love you dogs?”)
“Bor hon här?” “Does she live here?” (“Lives she here?”)
Other word orders does exists, but are relatively rare and are mainly used for emphasis, e g object-verb-subject:
“Honom kände jag.” “I knew him.” (“Him knew I.”)
the basic structure of Swedish is the same as English; both are “SVO” (subject-verb-object) languages. both languages also invert the verb and subject when asking questions, but English question forms are actually a little more complicated than in Swedish. also, there are some rules that dictate the placement of prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc., but those are minor details that do not affect basic structure, and just have to be learned.