Swedish/Nationalities

In Swedish, only the name of the country is considered a name, and thus capitalized. Nationalities and languages are written with lower case initials. The same word as that of the language are generally also used when referring to female nationals.

The general rule here is [Root]ien (country), [root] or [root]ier (nationality) and [root]iska (language). For example: Bulgarien, bulgar, bulgariska. Smaller countries outside of Europe often have in Swedish the same name as in English, e.g. Botswana, Costa Rica or Afghanistan. Names ending with -stan are usually the same, although the different way to Latinize Cyrillic letters (kyrilliska bokstäver) to Swedish, alters some of them slightly, e.g. Tadzjikistan.

Notes: 1) For reasons of political correctness, amerikansk is at times switched to a prefix USA-, e.g. "den amerikanska industrin" becomes "USA-industrin". 2) franska refers only to the language, a French woman is called en fransyska. 3) spanska refers only to the language, a Spanish woman is called en spanjorska. 4) finländare refers to all citizens of Finland, those whose native language is Finnish are called finnar (sing. finne), those whose native language is Swedish are called finlandssvenskar. Finska refers to the Finnish language and to a female finne, female finländare are finländskor. 5) Japan the country is pronounced with stress on the first syllable: [ja:pan], japan the nationality is pronounced with stress on the last syllable: [japa:n].