Let’s say you’re planning a trip to Sweden, and you’re booking accommodations on a local website because you know that’s a good way to save some money. When it’s time to select the dates of travel, you may run into an issue. As we’ll discuss later in this article, writing the date in Swedish is a little different than you might be used to. Read on to make sure you don’t accidentally book your stay for the wrong year! It’s also useful to know how to write the date for making plans, completing documents, or even checking the expiration date on those Swedish meatballs. Here’s a quick guide to how to write the date in Swedish, starting with the basic words you should know and how to pronounce them.
Days Of The Week In Swedish
Monday — måndag
Tuesday — tisdag
Wednesday — onsdag
Thursday — torsdag
Friday — fredag
Saturday — lördag
Sunday — söndag
Months Of The Year In Swedish
January — januari
February — februari
March — mars
April — april
May — maj
June — juni
July — juli
August — augusti
September — september
October — oktober
November — november
December — december
How To Write The Date In Swedish
Now that you know how to write the days of the week and the months of the year and pronounce them, let’s talk about how to put it all together. The formal way Swedes write out the date is pretty similar to how you’ll see it in other languages: day month year. For example, August 11, 2019 would be 11 augusti 2019.
The informal version is where things get a bit unusual. The standard numeric date format in Swedish is year-month-day, so December 5, 2019 would be 2019-12-05. If there’s no year being mentioned, you would simply write day/month (in this case: 05/12). This can be counterintuitive for Americans, so pay close attention when reading or writing dates or you could end up being very confused.
However, before any of that, you should review our guide to counting in Swedish because you can’t have dates without numbers.