Ok, Swedish language history lesson.
More detailed backstory
Old Norse split away from the more southern Germanic languages. Then Old norse slowly developed into a western version and an eastern version. The eastern version later became [name_m]Danish[/name_m], Norweigan and Swedish, and as such we can mostly understand each other. However, we have all evolved as different languages since before we had written languages. Almost all the people who used to be literate in [name_u]Sweden[/name_u] were the nobles and the clergy, and they almoat exclusively wrote in Latin and Greek. Whenever people did need to write in Swedish, there was no clear “right” way to spell stuff.
[name_u]Sweden[/name_u] was also occupied by [name_m]Denmark[/name_m] into a forced union for a couple hundred years or so. Exactly five hundred years ago this year, we drove away the Danes from Stockholm and got a new king: [name_m]Gustaf[/name_m] Eriksson Vasa. (Fun fact, he wasn’t called Vasa at all until 200 years after he was appointed, some people spell it Wasa, and he himself spelled his own name [name_f]Gusta[/name_f] and Gösta sometimes.) He made [name_u]Sweden[/name_u] a protestant country (mostly because he didn’t want the pope to meddle in his affairs and because he wanted to use the church’s silver to pay off a debt to Lübeck, not because of religious resons). This meant we had to get a Bible in Swedish. This was compleated in 1541. It is in this bible the first versions of the letters Å, Ä, and Ö appear. The Bible became the spelling standard.
[name_m]Denmark[/name_m] did the same thing, but chose slightly different letters for those three sounds: Å, Æ, Ø. Norway would be tugged back and fourth between [name_u]Sweden[/name_u] and [name_m]Denmark[/name_m] for hundreds of years. The languages all still seemed to choose mostly the same spellings for words. For the most part, they kept the same spellings from the 1500s until the late 1800s and early 1900s. By that point, pronounciation had drifted a lot. Many people couldn’t understand the other two languages in sound, but they could in writing.
In the 1840s, [name_u]Sweden[/name_u] got a law that said all kids had to go to school for at least six years. By the 1880s, teachers were upset that the kids would take years to learn how to read and write, and some never managed. The left was especially upset, because someone who can’t read will have a hard time engaging in politics and voting, and this was around the same time we had a lot of voting rights movements. The left wanted to simplify the spelling, so that anyone could sound out the letters to understand what the newspapers said. The right, on the other hand, wanted to highlight the heritage and history of the Swedish language. They wanted to keep the old spellings that were similar to the [name_m]Danish[/name_m] and Norweigan ones, so that when kids did learn to read Swedish, they would have learnt to read [name_m]Danish[/name_m] and Norwegian too, which would allow for international communication.
It ended up being a compromise. Some the spelling changes the teachers asked for were implemented, others not. So the word “rödt” (red) changed spelling to “rött”, but “och” (and) did not change spelling to “åkk”. Names already given to people usually did not change unless that person was straight up communist, but old names often got new spellings on newborns. Conservatives took about 20 years to adjust to the changes in their newspapers etc, liberals about 10 years, and leftists started before the decision was official.
This meant that for many years there was one “easy, intuitive, leftist” spelling, and one “historical, patriotic, conservative” spelling, and people did judge you for which you used, both on your newborn and just for writing letters, shopping lists etc. Eventually the newer spelling took over as it was used in all official documents, schools and childrens’ books, and later on all newspapers and books overall.
The names still remain in both forms to this day. But it has been so long, that in many cases people don’t know which spelling is the old one and which is the new one. Then you get discussions like “Is [name_f]Matilda[/name_f] the commie spelling that removed our dear H, or is [name_f]Mathilda[/name_f] a vain attempt of the uneducated to seem historically grounded by throwing in a random letter where it doesn’t belong?”
[name_m]Even[/name_m] more info
There’s currently two Norweigan languages. They’re called Nynorsk and Bokmål. One is more similar to [name_m]Danish[/name_m] and the other is more true to pronounciation but I don’t remember which is which. Both Norweigan and [name_m]Danish[/name_m] have had spelling reforms so the difference between the languages seem bigger now, although about 90 % of words are essentially the same still.
Another thing is that [name_m]Danish[/name_m] and Norwegian girl names tend to end in E more often than Swedish girl names. So you get stuff like [name_f]Lise[/name_f] vs [name_u]Lisa[/name_u], [name_f]Margarethe[/name_f] vs [name_f]Margaretha[/name_f]. And then there’s the ones that used to be really common to the point where there’s several versions within the same country, like [name_m]Olof[/name_m], [name_m]Olov[/name_m], [name_m]Olaf[/name_m], [name_m]Olav[/name_m], [name_u]Ola[/name_u], [name_m]Olle[/name_m], Ulle, Olaus.
The naming reform left a lot of letters obsolete. Letters like Q, W, X, and Z are really not used much at all aside from in names. They used to represent sounds. Now we just use K, S, and V instead in non-name words. Still, we have a lot of sounds with several spellings to make the same noise. For instance, the words
- justera (adjust)
- generad (embrarrassed)
- chaufför (chauffeur)
- sjö (lake)
- skjorta (button up shirt)
- stjärna (star)
- skepp (ship)
- schack (chess)
… all start with the same sound. So we have five letters whose sounds could be spelled with other letters (C, Q, W, X, Z can be replaced with S, K, and V or combinations of them, since they don’t make their own sounds anymore), but a sound that we use all the time doesn’t have a dedicated letter and we just have to learn if this specific word is spelled with j, g, ch, sj, skj, stj, sk, or sch? I’ve been annoyed about this since I was six.
for the information, and that you were willing to take time to write this (I imagine it took a while). [name_f]My[/name_f] inner history nerd finds this incredibly interesting, as it shows how everything in culture (whether it be politics, language, religion or names) is linked. I love finding out the historical backstories of countries and their cultures, and it shows how our social and political beliefs influence our decisions, especially when it comes to naming.