Capitalisation in Swedish

KOM HEM NU. MATEN ÄR KLAR - I have to hurry home, mum is shouting. - Shouting? How? - She wrote it all in big letters. - In the alphabet we use for writing Swedish, the Latin alphabet, the letters come in two versions. One larger, uppercase version, and one smaller, lowercase version. They often look a little different from each other: A B C D E F...

Look at these words: Sverige, katt, Röda rummet, Michael, karusell, troll, Europa Notice how some of them are written with the first letter uppercase? This is called a capital letter. They are capitalised. There are rules about which words should be capitalised. It partly depends on where in a sentence the word is placed: The first word of a new sentence is always written with a capital letter.

This way we can easily see when a new sentence begins. Kom hem nu. Maten är klar. But certain words are capitalised no matter where in the sentence they are: Names, both first names and family names, are always written with a capital first letter. Michael läser en bok av J.

K. Rowling. Den heter “Harry Potter och de vises sten”. Lina läser en bok som heter “Kosmos, en kort historik” av Stephen Hawking. Names of books, movies and so on – titles – are also capitalised but only the first word, and possible names in the title.

The same goes for headlines and other types of titles in papers and other printed works. Place names are also capitalised, for example cities, regions, countries, rivers, mountains, and buildings. Bretagne i Frankrike Gangesfloden i Indien, Mount Everest i Nepal, och Empire State Building i New York. ...this also includes many places in space, such as planets and galaxies: Jupiter, Venus, Andromedagalaxen There are some exceptions among the most common celestial bodies: jorden, månen, solen, universum These are written with small first letters. Remember that only place names are written with a capital, but not words that describe that someone or something is from a place. Such as: Amerika - en amerikan Irland - irländsk musik In Swedish such words are always written with a small first letter.

Han är kanadensare på fransk mark. Hon är en berömd sydafrikansk sångare. The same goes for languages, which are always written with a small first letter in Swedish: Jag talar japanska, finska, och xhosa. In Swedish you write weekdays, months, and festivals with a small first letter. På måndag den 24:e december, är det julafton.

Religions are also written with a small letter, ...but names of gods are of course written with a capital letter as with all names: Vishnu, Krishna Also the word ‘God’ if used about the only god: jag tror på Gud In brief, you could say that in Swedish only names (of people and organisations), titles of for example books or movies, and names of places are written with a first capital letter no matter where in a sentence they are. ....and when someone is writing in all capitals, it is typically understood as...SHOUTING! Oj, ursäkta, jag vet inte varför det bara blev stora bokstäver. Vi ses snart, hjärtat, och hälsa Michael från mig.