'W' enters mainstream of Swedish language
The letter ’W’ entered the mainstream of the Swedish language this week, when it for the first time was given its own section in the country’s most respected dictionary, published annually by the Swedish Academy.
While W has long been a letter in its own right in other Nordic languages, Swedish linguists have always viewed it as a lesser sibling of the letter V, as the two letters are pronounced identically in Sweden.
The few Swedish words that do use ’W’ have in general been borrowed from other languages – such as “watt,” ”walkie-talkie” and the “World Wide Web” – and have so far always been lumped under the ’V’ section in dictionaries.
But the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature each year and whose members are considered the guardians of the Swedish language, decided that it is time for W to come out of the shadows.
The letter, called “double-v” in Swedish, “can no longer be sorted in under the single V,” the academy said when it introduced the 13th edition of its dictionary this week.
The change means that the Swedish language, according to the academy at least, now has 29 letters instead of 28. In Swedish, as it happens, Sweden is called “Sverige” and its language is named “Svenska".
