L2/01-279

Swedish in Sweden

Administrative information for this specification

Country:
Sweden, Sverige

Two letter code:
SE

Language:
Swedish, svenska

Natural language code:
sv

Character set used for representing cultural data in this specification:
ISO/IEC 8859-1

Organisation:
ITS, Information Technology Standardization

Address:
ITS
SE-118 80 STOCKHOLM

Responsible person:
Bo Viklund

Contact person for cultural data:
Monica Ståhl

E-mail of the contact person:
monica.stahl@its.se

Phone number:
+46 8 555 524 90

Fax number:
+46 8 555 524 91

Source:
N.A.

Date of the data provision:
1998-12-22

Version number of the application:
1.0

Clause 1: Alphanumeric deterministic ordering

Ordering of characters:
A-V normal ordering
X-Z normal ordering
Å  Ä Ö after Z

Short description of the ordering rules:
W is ordered together with V.
Ü and U with double acute are ordered together with Y.
Ø, Õ and O with double acute are ordered together with Ö.
The non-accented letter comes before its accented forms and variant forms.
Small letters before capital letters.
Spaces are sorted as a first letter, before a.

Source
SS 03 81 03 and SS 03 81 04 and Statskontorets Technical Norm 34:1

Clause 2: Classification of characters

Upper and lower case.
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u, y, å, ä, ö; hardvowel: a, o, u, å; softvowel: e, i, y, ä, ö.
Consonants: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, z.

Clause 3: Numeric formatting

Comma as decimal separator.
Groups of 3 digits separated by no-break space.

Clause 4: Monetary formatting

Monetary formatting - name of the currency:
krona (singular), kronor (plural)

International currency code:
SEK

Positive International numeric format:
SEK 125,50

Negative International numeric format:
SEK -125,50

Domestic Currency symbol:
kr or SEK

Positive Domestic numeric format:
125,50 kr or 125:50

Negative Domestic numeric format
-125,50 kr or -125:50

Thousand and decimal separator:
100.125,50 kr or 100 125,50 kr

Clause 5: Date and time conventions

Weekdays:

English name Natural language name Short

Weekday name

Monday måndag (the first day of the week) må or mån
Tuesday tisdag ti or tis
Wednesday onsdag on or ons
Thursday torsdag to or tors
Friday fredag fr or fre
Saturday lördag lö or lör
Sunday söndag sö or sön

Note: lower case for first letter in the Swedish names.

Month names:

English name Natural language name Short

Month name

January januari jan
February februari febr
March mars mars
April april apr
May maj maj
June juni juni
July juli juli
August augusti aug
September september sept
October oktober okt
November november nov
December december dec

Note: lower case for first letter in the Swedish names.

Date in numeric format:
1998-09-07

Time before noon:
10:20 or 10.20

Time after noon:
17:40 or 17.40

Date in non numeric format:
7 september 1998

Time before noon:
"Tjugo över tio" or "tio och tjugo" (In English twenty past ten)

Time after noon:
Sjutton och fyrtio

Clause 6: Affirmative and negative answers

Affirmative expression
Ja J or j

Negative expression
Nej N or n

Clause 9: Character set considerations

Alphabet:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Å Ä Ö

Foreign letters or characters that are allowed by the language orthography:
À, É and Ü. Foreign names may need any other European letter.

Coded character sets used in the country:
Usually 8859-1 but also CP 1252 (MS Windows!), CP 10000 (Macintosh), and the older IR 11 (SS 63 61 27 alt 2), CP 437 (MSDOS) and CP 850 (MSDOS).

Characters missing in the code sets:
N.A.

Clause 12: Character properties

N.A.

Clause 13: Use of special characters

For outer quotes RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK (U+201D) or RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+00BB) is used on both sides (LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK may also be used on the ending side), and for inner quotes RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019).
If these are not available QUOTATION MARK (U+0022) and APOSTROPHE (U+0027) are used instead.
For multiplication the MIDDLE DOT is used. For division the SOLITUS is used.
The SECTION SIGN (§) is common in minutes.
Extra spacing is normally not used after full stop.

Clause 16: Personal name rules

Children can get the name of the father or the mother or both. Normally the name of the father is used.
Children of unmarried couples normally get the name of the mother.
At marriage the man or woman can chose the original name of the other.
Normally they chose the name of the man.
The earlier name can also be kept as a "mellannamn" without hyphen.
Normally the full first name is used, written before the family name.
In names with e.g. von, von is spelled with small letters.

Clause 17: Inflection

Many inflection forms are used in Swedish, for nouns 8, for adjectives typically 6, and for verbs often 14.
For nouns and verbs there are a number of different patterns for forming the inflection forms.
Swedish tends to use compound words, like "lokalstandardiseringsarbete", where English uses stacked nouns and adjectives, like "locale standardisation work".
This increases the need for splitting lines by hyphenation of words, but at the same time makes a simple approach of using a hyphenation dictionary for the most common words less effective.

Clause 31: Paper formats

The dominant paper size is A4. Also A5 is used.
For documents of all sizes a uniform hole pattern is used, 4 holes with distances 21 mm - 70 mm - 21 mm vertically, the centre 11 mm from the paper edge, and hole diameter 5mm.