Introduction

Like English, Swedish has many irregularities in how the spelling of words and their pronunciation correspond to each other. Of course, Swedish spelling is a lot more consistent than English, but there are still plenty of surprises even after you learn the basic rules.

This section is an attempt to present a reasonably complete list of these surprises, as far as consonants are concerned.

The morphemic principle

One tricky thing common to both languages, as members of the Germanic language family, is that a vowel’s pronunciation in a specific word depends on the letters that come after it.

Compare:

🇺🇸 back (short) vs. bake (long)
🇸🇪 back (short) vs. tillbaka (long)

Also, as Germanic languages, another thing both languages have in common is that when words or parts of words are combined to form inflections or compound words, each part (morpheme) maintains its original pronunciation.

Consider how 🇺🇸 foothold is pronounced foot•hold and not ❌ foo•thold. Likewise, 🇸🇪 solsken (sol•sken) is pronounced sol•sjen while risken (risk•en) is pronounced risk•en and not ❌ ris•sjen.

This is important because it overrides “Swedish 101” pronunciation rules, such as the one about k and g being “soft” before e, i, y, ä, ö and “hard” before a, o, u, å. For example, the final k or g of a noun keeps its original hard or soft pronunciation even when a change in the following vowel would ordinarily make it hard or soft:

sak -> sak•er (❌ sa•tjer)
galge -> ga•lgar (❌ gal•gar)

Moreover, this principle means that exceptional pronunciations are properties of specific words rather than simply resulting from specific sequences of letters.

For that reason, this list only contains the base forms of the relevant words, since all of a word’s inflections will have the same irregularities in pronunciation as the base form—no more and no fewer.

What about vowels?

The vowel o in particular is very tricky. The “Swedish 101” expectation is:

gjorde , hos (short)
skola , bolag (long)

However, o is also very commonly pronounced like å:

jobb , lopp (short)
symbol , son (long)

In fact, short o pronounced as /ɔ/ (jobb, lopp) is more common than short o pronounced as /ʊ/ (gjort, hos). Since there’s no reliable spelling rule to predict which pronunciation applies, this is best looked up on a word-by-word basis — which is beyond the scope of this guide.

Other surprises

This guide does not cover cases like the typical/colloquial pronunciation of very common words like jag, dig, och, de, det, since they are few enough in number that they can easily be learned by heart. Meanwhile, silent d and g at the end of a syllable, as in verklighet and tidning, occur regularly enough that they are not particularly surprising.

Data sources

For this anaylsis, pronunciation data from the Braxen dataset was combined with Swedish headword entries in English Wiktionary (using the preprocessed data on kaikki.org). Only words present in both datasets were considered. Some disambiguation was done in the merging of the datasets; while this disambiguation was not complete, it was enough for the purposes of this guide.