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Swedish is notable for having a large vowel inventory, with 17 different monophthongs, and for the unusual consonant sound [ɧ], the voiceless dorso-palatal/velar fricative . Many dialects of Swedish, also common in national broadcasts, assimilates the r-sound to retroflex consonants. Notable exceptions are Finland-Swedish and South-Swedish varieties. One of the Swedish "u"-sounds has no equivalent anywhere in the world except for the Norwegian languages.
A major problem for students of Swedish is what can be perceived as a lack of standardisation of pronunciation. The pronunciation of vowels, and of some consonant sounds (particularly sibilants), demonstrates marked differences in spoken high-prestige varieties. In addition the melodic accent of South-Sweden is strikingly different from that of the capital-region (including Åland), which in turn differs clearly from provincial Dalecarlia and Gotlandia. In Finland-Swedish melodic accent isn't used at all, as is also typical for those parts of northernmost Sweden, where Finnish dominated less than a century ago.
The written language is uniform, with very few exceptions: Adjectives are typically conjugated according to natural gender in Southern Sweden, not at all in high-prestige varieties in the rest of Sweden, but sometimes according to numerus in Finland.
Swedish uses inflection with nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Word order is fairly fixed---generally subject-verb-object is the order of a declarative sentence, while a question sentence is verb-subject-object.
Nouns come in two grammatical genders: common and neuter. Old Swedish formerly had masculine and feminine genders in place of common; some old phrases and ceremonial uses preserve these archaic forms. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memorised.
The definite article in Swedish is a suffix, while the indefinite article is a separate word preceding the noun. This structure of the articles is shared by the Scandinavian languages. Articles differ in form depending on the gender of the noun.
There is a limited grammatical case system: pronouns have distinct nominative, accusative, and genitive forms. Regular nouns are alike in nominative and accusative; the genitive is formed regularly by adding -s (after the definite article, if the noun is definite).
Nouns form the plural in a variety of ways:
It is customary to classify Swedish nouns into five groups: -or, -ar, -er, -n, and unchanging nouns.
There are also some irregular nouns---their number is not great, but they are some of the most commonly used words. Midly irregular nouns are common nouns that are unchanged in the plural, nouns that double a consonant and shorten a vowel in the plural, etc. Certain nouns borrowed from Latin use Latin inflections. A small class of irregular nouns consist of those that mutate a back vowel of the singular form to a front vowel in the plural. Some of these also change the vowel and consonant lengths also, or add some sort of suffix, or both. The cognates of these mutating nouns in other Germanic languages are often similary irregular. Example: gås (goose), gäss (geese); man (man), män (men).
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