The Swedish SJ Sound, Part 2: Usage 

Thank you for helping me become a mighty SJ warrior!

Wow, I’m from Helsinki, Finland, and I’m supposed to speak some “standard Finland Swedish”, and I can confirm that our system for this pronunciation is much simpler than it seems to be in at least central Sweden. I teach Finland Swedish to foreigners here, and I always tell them that our sj-sound is the same that they use especially in German and Italian for instance, and I honestly don’t hear too much difference between our sj and sh in English ship. And then we have the kj-sound, which will have its equivalent in German, English, Italian and Spanish as well, the sound with the “t-förslag”, as it’s called in Sweden. So, it’s quite a simple system, and we don’t pay too close attention here to how the sounds are pronounced exactly, as we also have lots of dialects where the sounds may vary a bit, and some little variation still usually keeps the words understandable. I of course always also mention how the sounds differ in Sweden, but only very briefly.

Thank you for this very clear explanation! I became aware of this by watching the series "Äkta människor". The word "människor" is pronounced in both ways by different characters in the series.

5:50 thanks for explaining this! Now I get it why my Swedish teacher encourages us to use this pronunciation rather than the other "dialectal" one. I wonder whether it sounds old-fashioned or just prestigious?

Great stuff as usual. The age-class-gender divide is spot on. My hunch is that the green-colored ch sound has a higher prevalence than the map suggests, and that the number of individuals in the south central regions who go in a full or near-full back sound direction is considerable. I'm from Varberg, marked just on the yellow-green border. I'm middle aged and even back in the 80's we (almost) all pronounced loan French -ge sounds with back sound, while doing the loan German -sch sound frontal, as is the norm everywhere for good reason. "Hyssja" is a word that we, too, often pronounced with a frontal sound since it's a direct derivative of the universal human sshhh frontal warning sound. But a French loan like duscha, we said with a back sj sound despite the frontal pronunciation of the original.

It's one of the sounds that make swedish intresting for me 🇸🇪

Thanks for this awesome video series, I learned so much! I'm a German who's living in Småland for quite a while now, and I was so confused about the people's different pronunciation of kanske when I came here. But nowadays I'm proud of my people here with their funny farmer's accent, makes them super sympathetic :D

So, nail on head... Awesome rundown on this particularity of the Swedish language.

Adam--thank you so mcuh for these videos--the level of detail is incredible and extremely important for approaching nativelike pronunciation in Swedish. I was thinking about your rules for the back and front sj-sounds, and was wondering if it's accurate to collapse the two rules for the back variant by saying it occurs only prevocalically, while the front variant occurs elsewhere. Based on your characterization, I think this is correct. Can you confirm?

That's quite interesting, in Pashto/Pakhto it's the other way around. The letter ښ, as in the name of the language itself, پښتو , is pronounced as "sh" up south and as "kh" down north. Thus the language is called "Pashto" up south and "Pakhto" down north.

Bra gort! Tak ska du ha.

About the age difference i'd say it's the other way around, younger people tend to use the front sj sound more, but maybe that's just where i live. I'm from Småland and i almost only use the back version myself.

The pronunciation of västgötar och östgötar was a total surprise to me, even though I've been listening to audio books (in Swedish) mentioning these people. :o I would probably not have understood if they had been pronounced this way!

This series is very helpful, thanks! Can you explain what happens if there is an r before the SJ sound, e. g. version? My impression is that the r is merged with the back SJ sound (similar to rt/rd/rn). Does it also influence the choice of front or back SJ sound?

Just to be sure: am I right in thinking that when the spelling is as in eg "första" you always get the retroflex /ʂ/ by any speaker?

I'm from the north west and I only use the front sj-sound, but I tend to make it lower in the mouth with more air and less of a hissing noice (if that makes any sense haha). I also realised during this video that I've been pronouncing regissör wrong, I say "resisjör" instead of resjisör

nice.

I guess that may explain why in old Swedish films they tend to use the front sj sound regarding class and older people?

Quite odd how i amost only say the back sj here in Kalix, covered by that lined northeastern dot

Very great video! However, as I'm not advanced in swedish yet it's not clear to me why the sj sound is pronounced in words like 'position' and 'giraff' as they're not written with sj nor with variants?

All these videos are teaching me is that i pronounce some swedish words weirdly, even though i'm a native swede lmao. I would never pronounce some of the words the way you do lmao (i live in Västmanland, Västerås, so pretty central).

Hi, Adam. Is there a pattern on wether to use the single or doubly articulated back sj sound? Based on the following vowels, perhaps?

I am sorry but English is not my first language and I can't make out what you are saying at 2:05 , please help ?

Where did you get all this information? Why are there differences between genders?

Det låter brano konstigt när du säger detdär bakre sj-ljudet Man är ju van att bara höra det främre

I'm Swedish

Det låter konstigt när du säger dusch med bakre ljudet men inte konstigt när du säger sjö med främre. Beror nog på att jag är från Umeå o här använder vi bara det främre.

im an american can you just tell me which i should study plz lol

Which sound is attractive to Swedish girls, front or back?

But not born there