Official Status
Swedish became Sweden's main official language on 1 July 2009, when a new language law was implemented. The issue of whether Swedish should be declared the official language has been raised in the past, and the parliament voted on the matter in 2005—but the proposal narrowly failed. The Swedish language also has official status in Finland (including the autonomous region of Åland), but no officially sanctioned standard actually exists. However, the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has the purpose of language planning and dictionary compilation.
In Sweden, the Swedish Language Council is similarly funded by the Swedish government and may be said to have a semi-official status as a regulatory body being a joint effort that includes the Swedish Academy, Swedish Radio, Swedish Broadcasting Corporation and several other organizations representing journalists, teachers, actors, writers and translators. The recommendations of these bodies are not legally binding, though they are generally respected.
It may be argued that singing and acting instructors at the theater academies in Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg, and Luleå all teach the Central Swedish Standard; although on scenes outside of Stockholm–Uppsala, adherence to this standard may appear less strict. The theater academy of Finland teaches in Finnish and Finland Swedish.
Read more about this topic: Standard Swedish
Famous quotes containing the words official and/or status:
“We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)