Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What language is spoken in Sweden?
The Language Law of 2009 recognizes Swedish as the main and common language of society as well as being the official language in "international contexts".[4]
A language game (also called secret language, ludling, or argot) is a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear. Language games are used primarily by groups attempting to conceal their conversations from others. Some common examples are Pig Latin; the Gibberish family, prevalent in the United States and Sweden; and Verlan, spoken in France.
Spoken by the Kven people, the Kven language is a Finnic language, closely related to Finnish, and spoken by some five to eight thousand people in northeastern Norway, particularly in Tromsø (in the county of Troms) and Finnmark. Mirroring the situation of Meänkieli in Sweden, Kven is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Finnish, and has a large degree of mutual intelligibility with the language.
Romani chib, the language of Romani people, has been spoken in Sweden since the 16th century. Today about 9,500 people speak it in Sweden. It does not have a geographical center, but is considered to be of historical importance.
The Kingdom of Sweden is a nation-state for the Swedish people, and as such, their national language is held in very high regard. Of Sweden's roughly ten million people, almost all speak Swedish as at least a second language, and the majority as a first language (7,825,000, according to SIL's Ethnologue). Swedish is also an official language in Finland where it is spoken by a large number of Swedish-speaking Finns. The language is also spoken to some degree by ethnic Swedes living outside Sweden, for example, just over half a million people of Swedish descent in the United States speak the language, according to Ethnologue.
Finnish (, or "suomen kieli" ) is a Finnic language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland (the other being the Swedish language); Finnish is also an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both Standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a dialect of Finnish, is spoken in Northern Norway by a minority group of Finnish descent.
Swedish is the official language of Sweden and is spoken by the vast majority of the 10 million inhabitants of the country. It is a North Germanic language and quite similar to its sister Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian, with which it maintains partial mutual intelligibility and forming a dialect continuum. Five national minority languages are also recognized by Swedish law: Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, Romani and Sami.
Meänkieli (literally "our language") is a group of distinct Finnish dialects spoken in the northernmost part of Sweden along the valley of the Torne River. In Sweden it is recognized as one of the country's five minority languages.
Uralic is a language family located in Northern Eurasia, in the countries of Finland, Estonia, Hungary (where Uralic languages are spoken by the majority of the population), in other countries Uralic languages are spoken by a minority of the population, these languages are spoken in far-northern Norway (in most of the Finnmark region and other regions of the far-north), in far-northern Sweden (in some areas of Norrland), and Russia (where Uralic languages are also spoken by a minority of its population, although there is a significant number of speakers in some Federal subjects - republics and autonomous districts or autonomous okrugs of Northern Russia, these languages are spoken in Udmurtia, Komi Republic, Mordvinia, Mari-El, Karelia, in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Taymyr Autonomous Okrug and also in the former Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug, now part of the Perm Krai, other areas where Uralic languages are spoken in Russia are for example the Kola Peninsula). In Latvia, in some of the far-northern coastal areas of Courland (Kurzeme) region, an extinct Uralic language was spoken - Livonian. 
In Finland, a special branch of the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has official status as the regulatory body for Swedish in Finland. Among its highest priorities is to maintain intelligibility with the language spoken in Sweden. It has published "Finlandssvensk ordbok", a dictionary about the differences between Swedish in Finland and Sweden.
Dimensions of language, ethnicity, and origin complicate the terms dividing the populations of Finland and Sweden. In Finland, both Swedish and Finnish are official languages. The Swedish-Finns are Finnish nationals who speak Swedish. The variant of standard Swedish spoken in Finland is called Finland Swedish or Finno-Swedish, and those who speak it are Finland-Swedes. Because of the shared language, Finland-Swedes are overrepresented in the migration of Finnish nationals to Sweden. Swedish-speakers make out 5.3% of the total Finnish population, while around 20% of Finnish immigrants to Sweden were Swedish-speakers according to a 2004 estimation. Sweden-Finns, however (this article), refers rather to Finnish-speaking Finns in Sweden, since Swedish authorities connect the rights of this national minority with the usage of the Finnish language. Using a wider definition, people of Finnish origin, regardless of language, may be Sweden Finns (in the sense of Finnish nationals in Sweden). In Swedish, the term "sverigefinländare" includes both language-groups while "sverigefinnar", and the less common "sverigefinlandssvenskar", refers to the Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking groups respectively.
John H. Fisher, author of "The Emergence of Standard English", observes that in Spanish, Italian, French, and English, the written languages became standardised before the spoken languages, and that these provide frames of reference for what is considered standard speech. He said, in an interview for the Children of the Code project:
I came to the conclusion that all of the discussion of standardisation of language was a discussion of the written forms of language. It had nothing to do with spoken language. We don't have the spoken language standardised yet. When we say that we're speaking Standard English, what we're doing is transferring into our spoken vocabulary and syntax the elements of the written language. What is standard in what you and I are talking now is what we get from our writing.
There are grammatical constructions and words that one uses in speech that one generally avoids in written compositions. Even in the most colloquial of online chats, interjections such as "like" are rarer than in speech. 
In certain (mostly Finland-related) contexts, "rikssvenska" has come to mean all Swedish as spoken in Sweden as opposed to the Finland Swedish spoken in Finland or Estonian Swedish spoken in Estonia. For speakers in Sweden, the term, however often, perhaps primarily, indicates "non-dialectal" (spoken) Swedish. The term "Sweden Swedish" ("sverigesvenska") is sometimes used instead, as a parallel to the term Finland Swedish. There is, however, no common agreement on how "rikssvenska" should sound. What appears as "rikssvenska" to one Swede may appear dialectal to another. (Etymologically, ""riks-"" is a compound form that is a cognate of the German "Reich".)
Gällivare dialects are spoken in Sweden in Gällivare and some surrounding villages. Finnish language has been a common language spoken at home in the area but the dialects differ quite much from those spoken on the Finnish side of the border.
In addition to being the official language in Sweden, Swedish is also spoken natively by the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, which is a large part of the population along the coast of western and southern Finland. Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Swedish is also spoken by some people in Estonia.
The Sami people (formerly known as Lapps) are a people indigenous to all of northern Scandinavia (see Sápmi (area)) who speak a closely related group of languages usually grouped together under the name "Sami", but at least three separate Sami languages are spoken in Sweden. They are, like Finnish and Meänkieli, Uralic. Prolonged exposure to Germanic-language-speaking neighbors in Sweden and Norway causes them to have a large number of Germanic loanwords not normally found in other Uralic languages like Finnish, Estonian, or Hungarian. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Sami people live in Sweden of whom 9,000 are Sami-language speakers. Worldwide, between 20,000 and 40,000 people speak Sami languages (most Sami now speak Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, or Russian as their first language, depending on the country in which they reside). In Sweden, the largest concentrations of Sami-language-speaking Sami are found in the municipalities of Arjeplog, Gällivare, Jokkmokk and Kiruna, and its immediate neighbourhood.
Finnish was the majority language of Sweden's eastern parts, though it was used almost exclusively as a spoken language. These areas were also home of a significant Swedish-speaking minority. Finnish became a minority language in the west as well since many Finnish speakers migrated there (mostly for economic reasons).
The Sami languages are actually not one language, even though they are commonly referred to as such. In Sweden, three Sámi languages are spoken, with the other 7 Sámi languages being spoken in Norway, Russia and Finland. The history of the Sami languages can be traced back at least 2,000 years. In total, they are spoken by a minimum of 40,000 people throughout the four countries.
To be accorded official minority status, a language must have been spoken in Sweden for a significant amount of time. A precise figure has not been revealed, but qualified estimations consider 100 years to be reasonable, based on the included and excluded languages. A significant immigration to Sweden did not start until after World War I, and many languages currently spoken by a large number of people in Sweden are excluded, among them Arabic and Persian. 
Tigrinya is the fourth most spoken language in Ethiopia after Amharic, Somali and Oromo, and the most widely spoken language in Eritrea (see Demographics of Eritrea). It is also spoken by large immigrant communities around the world, in countries including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In Australia, Tigrinya is one of the languages broadcast on public radio via the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service.
Romani (also known as the Romani Chib) is the language spoken by the Romani people, a nomadic ethnic group originating in northern India. Due to the geographic origins of its speakers, Romani is an Indo-Aryan language, closely related to languages spoken in modern-day India, and sometimes written with an Indic Script (see Romani writing systems). Around 90% of Sweden's Romani people speak Romani, meaning that there are approximately 9,500 Chib speakers. In Sweden, there is no major geographic center for Romani like there is for Finnish, Sami, or Meänkieli, but it is considered to be of historical importance by the Swedish government, and as such the government is seen as having an obligation to preserve them, a distinction also held by Yiddish.[11]
A wide variety of languages from other parts of the world are spoken by immigrant communities in EU countries. Turkish is spoken as a first language by an estimated 1% of the population in Belgium and the western part of Germany, and by 1% in the Netherlands. Other widely used migrant languages include Berber languages which is spoken by about 1% of the population of both the Netherlands and Belgium and by many Berbers migrants in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Arabic is spoken in many EU countries mainly in its two varieties Maghrebi Arabic and Levantine Arabic. The Maghrebi Arabic is spoken by migrants in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The Levantine Arabic is spoken by migrants in Germany, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Greece. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Punjabi are spoken by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent in the United Kingdom. Languages from former Yugoslavia (Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Albanian, etc.) are spoken in many parts of the EU by migrants and refugees who have left the region as a result of the Yugoslav wars and unrest there.
Karungi is a locality situated in Haparanda Municipality, Norrbotten County, Sweden with 232 inhabitants in 2010. The language most spoken in the village is Meänkieli, which the first of April 2000 officially was declared as a minority language in Sweden.
There are 88 individual languages of Ethiopia according to Ethnologue, with the 1994 Ethiopian census indicating that some 77 tongues were spoken locally. Most of these languages belong to the Afroasiatic family (Semitic and Cushitic languages; Omotic languages are also spoken, though their classification is uncertain). Additionally, Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by what the government calls the "Nilotic" people, though scholars distinguish Nilotic from the Surmic languages, Gumuz languages, and Koman languages and spoken in Ethiopia.
Finnish has been spoken in Sweden ever since the (then provincial) borders were drawn in the 13th century. Sweden has always had a significant migration to and from Finland. As the two languages belong to different language families it is easy to distinguish them, unlike the neighbouring languages Norwegian and Danish. The number of Finnish speakers in Sweden today has been estimated to over 460,000. Even though many current Swedes are of full or mixed Finnish descent, Swedish is the main language in practice for many bilinguals.