Swedish ethnicity

Swedish ethnicity refers to the people who have lived in the country of Sweden for centuries. These are Norse Germanic peoples who are Indo-European in heritage and have been present in Sweden for thousands of years going back to the Iron Age. From an ethnic perspective, the Swedes are almost indistinguishable from Norwegians, although Danes and Finns, the natives of the other two Scandinavian national groups are ethnically distinct. Because of the Swedish expansion out of Sweden in the ninth and tenth centuries CE down the great rivers of Eastern Europe as part of the Viking Migrations, many people in countries today like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States have some Swedish ethnicity stretching back over a millennium. There are also a very significant number of people in the American Midwest with Swedish ethnic heritage as this part of the United States experienced a great amount of Scandinavian settlement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Sweden has historically been an ethnically homogenous country, with little inward migration from other countries, beginning in the 1980s the country has experienced the arrival of many newcomers, often as political refugees from conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East. Thus, the ethnic landscape of Sweden is becoming more complex over time.

Swedish history

Sweden is a country that has only emerged into recorded, written history in the last 1,500 years or so. In ancient times Scandinavia was only dimly known about by the civilizations of the Mediterranean such as those of the Greeks and Romans. Yet towards the end of the Roman era that same Mediterranean world was deeply impacted upon by the migration of Germanic and Asiatic tribes southwards towards Germany and the borders of the Roman Empire in Austria and the Balkans. Many of these groups came from Scandinavia, lured southwards by the possibility of a warmer climate and riches.

King Gustav Vasa of Sweden (r. 1523–1560). He successfully removed Sweden from the Union of Kalmar and Danish dominance, establishing an independent Kingdom of Sweden which soon went on to become one of Europe’s great powers of the seventeenth century

It was the same attractions that led the Norse people to begin expanding out of Norway, Sweden and Denmark in the eighth and ninth centuries, the so-called Viking Age, although there were clear distinctions between the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes. The Swedes primarily headed down the great rivers of Eastern Europe, the Volga, Dnieper and Don towards the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, turning cities like Kyiv into some of the foremost powers of Europe at the time along the way. The Swedish impact on Eastern Europe has been immortalized in the word ‘Russia’, which is derived from the old Finnish word Ruotsi for ‘Swede’.  

Sweden endured differing circumstances in the late medieval period. On the one hand, the Union of Kalmar, which was agreed on in 1397, brought Sweden and Norway under Danish rule. Yet at the same time, Sweden benefited from effectively conquering Finland, a country which it also led the Christianization of from the twelfth century onwards. Eventually, the leader of the Swedish House of Vasa, Gustav Vasa, brought Sweden out of the Union of Kalmar in 1523 and began its ascent as one of the major European powers, one which became the pre-eminent state in Northern Europe between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries.  

Between 1600 and 1800 Sweden remained a powerful country, one which intervened in a very significant way in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) which wracked Central Europe for three decades. But it lost Finland to Russia as a result of its involvement in the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century and thereafter decline precipitously. Modern Sweden emerged as the country industrialized in the second half of the nineteenth century. It avoided involvement in both of the world wars of the twentieth century and today is one of the most affluent countries in the world based on mineral exploitation, extensive forestry and an economy that is largely energy sufficient owing to domestic hydroelectric power.

Swedish culture

ABBA, photographed in 1974

Swedish culture has had a significant impact on European life in the twentieth century. In the middle of the twentieth century the country became an important center of European cinema. This was primarily owing to the influence of Ingmar Bergman, the director of films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957), widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time, along with the work of a number of Swedish actors and actresses, most notably Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo. Swedish pop music, particularly the popularity of ABBA in the 1970s and early 1980s, is worth noting, while Swedish sports stars have also had a major impact since the 1970s, especially in tennis where Bjorn Borg, Matts Wilander and Stefan Edberg won 24 Grand Slams cumulatively between 1974 and 1992. One important aspect of modern Swedculture ish is that its universities, academies and academics choose the Nobel laureates in a wide range of disciplines such as chemistry, physics and literature. This is owing to the fact that Alfred Nobel, the scientist who somewhat paradoxically is known for inventing dynamite and the Nobel Prizes, was Swedish.  

Swedish languages

Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken everywhere in the country. It is a North Germanic language that developed in Scandinavia about 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age. Some other languages have been introduced into Sweden in recent decades owing to the emergence of a minority population of people from the Balkans and the Middle East. Yet the second language of Sweden to an overwhelming degree is English, with nearly 90% of the population speaking it as a second language, a testament to the efficacy of the Swedish education system and its lingual policies. Furthermore, upwards of 40% of people in Sweden speak German, a closely related language in terms of the Germanic language family. Other minority languages include Dutch, Arabic and Greek.

Explore more about ethnicity estimates

• MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
• Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
• What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
• Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base

References

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