Didn't you? Admit it!ĭid you know that the letters of the alphabet can be divided into two different categories? It's true! What are we talking about? Vowels and consonants, of course! You need to round your lips, but also make them into a trumpet-shape.Īnd finally, the graduation test is to fully master the following Swedish tongue twister: Flyg fula fluga flyg, och den fula flugan flög (Fly, ugly fly, fly, and the ugly fly flew.).A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z! Now you've read your ABCs…and we bet you also sang them to the tune of the familiar song we all learn growing up.

The only thing to remember is that the mouth is actually quite wide, a bit more of a smile than when saying ‘pair’.įinally, the Ö is similar to the English sound ‘i’ in the word ‘bird’. You can think of this letter as the English ‘ai’ in ‘pair’, or ‘hair’. The sound is long, as in a long ‘Pååål’, or ‘poor’. Indeed, some Swedish Pauls actually spell their names Pål. You can think of the Å as the ‘au’ sound in (British accent) ‘Paul’. The challenge is to really distinguish them as separate vowels, and not just muddled versions of A and O. Here is the first one of the three extra vowels in Swedish (they come in the end of the alphabet by the way, in this order: å, ä, ö).

Instructions in English with Swedish example words.

Teacher: Swedish Teacher Dr Anneli Beronius Haake.

Teacher: opera singer/voice coach Stefan Holmström.

3 actionable workshops on Swedish vowel pronunciation.Learn the missing piece from SFI, Folkuniversitetet, Duolingo and other Swedish courses

You get 6 months access to 3 actionable workshops on Swedish vowels pronunciation. We’ve created a Swedish Vowels Workshop Bundle that will help you with precisely this. When you’ve learnt how to work with your lips, tongue and larynx, you will begin to FEEL (not just hear) how Swedish actually sounds. What you need is a system for how the Swedish sounds are actually created. If you don’t, you can easily be misunderstood. It’s really important to get these sounds right. And all our 9 vowels have two sounds each a long and a short sound. Swedish has 9 vowels in the alphabet! Apart from the ‘extra’ letters Å Ä Ö, we also consider Y as a vowel. Would you like to learn or improve how to actually say those last three confusing letters in the Swedish alphabet? We’re talking about the Swedish vowels Å Ä Ö.

What are the vowels in the alphabet