Grammar guide: How to know where to put the verb in Swedish sentences

To start off, let’s do a quick grammar explanation of Swedish versus English. 

So, English is what’s known as an SVO language, short for subject-verb-object, which essentially means that the subject goes in first place, then the verb, then the object.

Swedish is what’s called a V2 language, which means that the verb always goes in second position. This means that, in most cases, Swedish sentences have the same word order as English. But crucially, not always.

Let’s use the example sentence “I eat chocolate”. The verb order of this sentence is the same in English and in Swedish:

English:

Swedish:

However, look at what happens if we add the adverb “yesterday”.

In English, this doesn’t change the order of the subject (I) and verb (eat, or in this case, ate):

Many Swedish learners would make the mistake of translating this word-for-word as I går jag åt choklad. So, why is this incorrect?

Well, in Swedish, the verb needs to be in the second position, which means it goes directly after the adverb (i går), so the subject (jag) and the verb (åt) swap places:

Now, as you can see the Swedish word for "yesterday" is actually made up of two words (although many Swedes spell it as one word, igår). Why doesn't åt come after i? Well, the verb being in the second position doesn't mean that it's always the second word in a sentence, because groups of words or entire phrases can take up the first position.

Let's make our example sentence a bit more complicated: "When I was young, I ate chocolate."

Now, this sentence is made up of two clauses. The first clause, "when I was young", is the subordinate or dependent clause. Subordinate clauses usually begin with a conjunction, like "because", "after", "since", "whether", or "while", for example.

The second clause, "I ate chocolate", is a main clause, which to put it simply means it forms a complete sentence, it can stand alone.

In English, it doesn't make much difference to the word order whether a clause is a main clause or not, but in Swedish, it does – if the subordinate clause comes before the main clause, like it does here.

Wait, I hear you ask, why isn't the verb in second position in the subordinate clause?

That's a good question – it's because subordinate clauses have their own, separate, word order rules.

Essentially, the word which starts off the subordinate clause, known in Swedish as a bisatsinledare, literally a "subordinate clause-starter", is always in first position, followed by the subject, then the verb, then any additional information, which can be an object, an adjective, or basically another bit of information.

In Swedish, you can also swap the object and the subject around, if for some reason you wanted to emphasise the fact that you were eating chocolate, rather than something else. The important thing to remember here is that the verb has to be in the second position:

In English, the word order would stay the same: subject-verb-object, and you'd show emphasis by, for example, stressing the word "chocolate" instead of switching up the word order.