Like English, German and Dutch, Swedish is a Germanic language. It belongs to the North Germanic group which also includes Danish, the two varieties of Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Faroese and Icelandic. Finnish, the neighbour of Swedish in the East, is on the other hand, not a Germanic language and is therefore quite unrelated to Swedish.

In the Viking age (800–1066 A.D.) the ‘Danish tongue’, the name given to the richly inflected language which was the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, was understood by the Angles and the Saxons of England, who spoke a West Germanic language. Hence today, although Swedish and English have developed along different lines, the Englishman will soon recognize the basic kinship of the two languages, with their large number of cognate (i.e. related) words, their similar grammatical forms and word order. Both English and Swedish have borrowed a great deal of vocabulary from Latin and French, and in the last fifty years the number of loan-words adopted into Swedish from British and American English has been so large that for some Swedish purists it is a matter of deep concern. Therefore, the English-speaker will discover that Swedish is comparatively easy to learn, although he may have difficulty in pronouncing some sounds, such as the vowel u [ω:], and the two tone system of pronunciation may sound strange to his ears. A knowledge of German will, however, be a great advantage to anyone wishing to master Swedish quickly.