Punctuation and Quotation

Swedish punctuation looks familiar — the same dots, commas and dashes you know — but several conventions are quietly different, and getting them wrong marks a text as foreign immediately. The headline differences: Swedish commas are lighter than English ones (and far lighter than German), with no obligatory comma before att ("that") or som ("who/which"); numbers are written the opposite way round, with a comma for the decimal point (3,14) and a space for thousands (1 000 000); and quotation has its own marks, including the dash for dialogue (talstreck). This page covers each.

The comma: lighter than you expect

The single biggest adjustment for English and German speakers is that Swedish does not set off subordinate clauses with commas the way they do. In particular, there is no comma before att ("that") and no comma before som ("who / which / that") — the places where German always puts one and English often does.

Modern Swedish punctuation is governed by clarity (tydlighetsprincipen) rather than by rigid clause-boundary rules: you add a comma where it genuinely helps the reader follow the sentence, and you leave it out where the structure is already clear. This is why two careful writers can legitimately punctuate the same sentence slightly differently — the comma is a reading aid, not a grammatical obligation.

Where commas are normal:

• Before men ("but") and other contrastive conjunctions joining two main clauses.
• Between two main clauses joined by och / så, optionally, when each is long enough that the comma helps.
• In lists, separating items — but note: no comma before the final och, unlike the optional English "Oxford comma."

Quotation marks: "..." or »...«

Swedish has two accepted styles for quoting speech and titles within running text:

• Raised double quotes — "så här" — the most common style today, identical-looking on both sides (both raised), unlike the English open-low / close-high pair.
• Guillemets pointing inward — »så här« — traditional, still seen in books and many publishers' house styles. Note they point inward (»…«), the opposite of French «…».

For an extended quotation of dialogue, though, Swedish typically does not use quotation marks at all. It uses a dash.

The talstreck: a dash for dialogue

In fiction and reported conversation, each new line of spoken dialogue is introduced by a dash (talstreck) at the start of the line — there are no quotation marks around the speech. This is the standard Scandinavian (and continental) convention, and it is one of the clearest "tells" of a properly typeset Swedish novel.

The narrative tag (frågade hon, svarade jag) follows the speech directly, lower-case, set off by a comma — not capitalised as a new sentence.

The colon in acronym genitives and abbreviations

Swedish uses a colon to attach a grammatical ending to an abbreviation, an acronym, or a figure — most visibly to form the genitive ('s) of an acronym. This has no English parallel.

• Genitive of an acronym: SVT:s ("SVT's"), EU:s ("the EU's"), FN:s ("the UN's").
• Other endings: TV:n ("the TV", definite), 3:e ("3rd", ordinal), n:te ("nth").

The colon also does ordinary work — introducing a list, a quotation, or an explanation, much as in English (Hon sa: …). But the acronym-genitive use is the distinctively Swedish one.

Numbers: the decimal comma and the thousands space

Here Swedish (like most of continental Europe) is the mirror image of English. The roles of the comma and the point are swapped, and large numbers are grouped with a space, not a comma.

• Decimal separator = comma: English "3.14" is Swedish 3,14; "3.5 kg" is 3,5 kg.
• Thousands separator = space (a thin/non-breaking space): English "1,000,000" is Swedish 1 000 000; "10,500" is 10 500.
• The point is not used inside numbers at all (so a Swede reads "3.14" as ambiguous or wrong).

A note on capitalisation and end punctuation

Sentence-final punctuation (., ?, !) works as in English. But Swedish capitalises far less than English: days, months, nationalities and language names are lower-case (måndag, juli, svensk, svenska). That is its own topic — see Capitalization Rules — but it interacts with punctuation in titles and headings, where Swedish capitalises only the first word.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Swedish commas are light: no comma before att or som, no comma before the final och in a list; set commas where they aid reading, with a comma before men and between long main clauses.
• Quotation: raised double quotes "…" or inward guillemets »…«; dialogue uses a dash (talstreck), not quotation marks.
• The colon forms acronym genitives and attaches endings: EU:s, SVT:s, 3:e, TV:n.
• Numbers are mirror-image of English: decimal comma (3,14; 3,5 kg) and thousands space (1 000 000). Never use a point inside a number or commas for thousands.
• Capitalisation is lighter than English (lower-case days, months, nationalities) — see the dedicated capitalisation page.