Annotated Text: A Formal Letter/Email

This page is the mirror image of Annotated Text: An Informal Message. There, casual Swedish imported the sounds of speech — dom, nån, ba. Here, in a formal email to an organisation, every one of those reductions is switched back off. De and dem are written in full and kept distinct; sade replaces spoken sa; the asking is done by the polite conditional rather than a blunt request; and the whole thing is framed by fixed formal conventions. Reading the two pages side by side is the fastest way to internalise that Swedish operates two registers with sharply different surface forms, and that fluency means controlling the switch. Below is the email in full, then the annotation.

The email

A tenant, Karin Lundqvist, writes to her housing company about a recurring problem.

What makes it formal

The full written forms: de/dem, not dom — and sade, not sa

The clearest grammatical signal of formal Swedish is the refusal to write spoken reductions. Compare the informal page directly:

• The case officer sade ("said"), not spoken sa. Sade is the full written preterite of säga; sa is universal in speech and fine in a text message, but in a formal letter you write sade.
• Where the informal message used dom for both "they" and "them," a formal letter keeps de (subject) and dem (object) separate and spells them in full. This email happens to use the second-person plural er/ni throughout, but the principle is the same family of choices — the de/dem/dom split is decided entirely by register, and that decision is the subject of De, Dem and Dom.

The polite conditional does the asking

Formal Swedish almost never makes a bare request. Instead of Jag vill att ni åtgärdar läckan ("I want you to repair the leak"), the letter reaches for the conditional with skulle:

Jag skulle vilja... ("I would like to...") is the standard polite frame — the conditional skulle + the infinitive vilja distances the request, exactly as English "I would like" softens "I want." It is the workhorse of formal asking, and it is detailed on The Conditional with skulle.

One notch more formal still is the subjunctive-flavoured vore ("would be"), the conditional of vara:

Jag vore tacksam om... ("I would be grateful if...") is a fixed, slightly elevated courtesy formula. The everyday spoken equivalent would be Jag skulle vara tacksam or simply Det vore kul om...; vore itself is one of the last living traces of the old subjunctive in Swedish, surviving mainly in this kind of polite formula and in om jag vore du ("if I were you").

Passives and nominalisations

Formal Swedish prefers to describe events without naming the doer, and to package actions as nouns. Both moves appear here:

Har anmälts ("has been reported") and har vidtagits ("has been taken") are s-passives in the perfect — the agent (whoever should have acted) is left unstated, which is both diplomatically convenient and characteristic of the register. Alongside them sit nominalisations: åtgärd ("measure / action"), vattenläckage ("water leakage"), besök ("visit") turn verbs into abstract nouns, the hallmark of administrative prose. Formal Swedish loves long noun-heavy compounds — vattenläckage, kundtjänst ("customer service"), handläggare ("case officer") — where speech would use a verb and a few short words.

denna/detta and emellertid

Two more written-register words to flag. Detta ("this") in Detta har emellertid inte skett is the formal demonstrative; in speech you would far more often hear det or det här. The denna/detta/dessa series ("this / these") is markedly more written than den här/det här/de här. And emellertid ("however") is a formal sentence adverb where speech would use men ("but") — note that, fronted like this, it triggers V2 inversion: Detta har emellertid inte skett keeps the verb second.

The formal frame: subject lines and Med vänliga hälsningar

The envelope around a formal message is as conventionalised as the informal one, only entirely different. A formal email typically carries a Till ("To") line and an Ärende ("Subject / Matter") line. The greeting can be the neutral Hej, (now standard even in fairly formal Swedish email — Swedish formality is less stiff than German or French), or the more traditional Bästa... ("Dear..."). The closing is the fixed Med vänliga hälsningar ("Kind regards," literally "with friendly greetings"), routinely abbreviated Mvh in less ceremonial mail. There is no Kram, no wave, no first-name-only sign-off — you give your full name.

Klarspråk: formal but not ornate

Sweden has an official klarspråk ("plain language") policy: authorities are legally encouraged to write clearly, in plain words, with active verbs and short sentences. So formal Swedish is not the place to pile on archaic or convoluted constructions. The email above is formal — full forms, conditional politeness, passives — but it is also plain: short sentences, ordinary vocabulary, no flourishes. The skill is to hit the register's conventions (sade, skulle vilja, Med vänliga hälsningar) without drifting into stilted officialese like härmed får jag vördsamt anhålla om ("hereby I respectfully petition for"), which is archaic and, by the klarspråk standard, simply bad writing. The full register treatment is on Formal Written Swedish.

Common Mistakes

What to notice

• Formal Swedish reverses every reduction from the informal page: write de/dem (not dom), sade (not sa), någon (not nån). The register decides the spelling of the very same word.
• Requests use the polite conditional: Jag skulle vilja... and the elevated Jag vore tacksam om... (with the rare surviving subjunctive vore). A bare indicative demand is too blunt.
• The register favours s-passives (har anmälts, har vidtagits) that hide the agent, nominalisations and long compounds (vattenläckage, kundtjänst), and the formal demonstrative detta and adverb emellertid.
• The frame is fixed and formal: Till / Ärende lines, a neutral Hej, or Bästa..., and the closing Med vänliga hälsningar (abbrev. Mvh) with your full name — never Kram or Ha det.
• The Swedish ideal is klarspråk: be formal and correct, but plain and clear. Hit the conventions without sliding into archaic, ornate officialese — that is the genuine mark of a skilled formal writer.