Laravel localization in Swedish Svenska

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, Swedish commonly uses: sv_SE, sv_FI

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'sv',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('sv');

Plural rules: what Swedish actually needs

CLDR defines 2 cardinal categories for Swedish. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 2 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/sv/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for Swedish (sv locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('sv');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "lördag, 21 mars 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "lördag 21 mars 2026 kl. 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "2026-03-21"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "för 3 månader sedan"

What to watch out for in Swedish

• Definite article is a suffix (boken = "the book"), so "the {noun}" patterns do not map one-to-one.
• Two grammatical genders (en/ett words) affect articles and adjective endings.
• Informal du is universal in modern Swedish, including UI copy.
• Decimal comma with space as thousands separator (1 234,56); dates are commonly written yyyy-mm-dd.

Sweden writes dates the ISO way

Sweden is the one European market that has genuinely adopted the ISO date format in everyday use. Dates are written year first — 2026-03-21 — on receipts, in newspapers, on forms and in ordinary correspondence, not only in technical contexts.

This is unusually convenient, because it removes the day-first versus month-first ambiguity that plagues every other market. It also means a Swedish user shown 21/03/2026 or 03/21/2026 registers the format as foreign, even though both are unambiguous to them in context.

Week numbers deserve a mention of their own. Swedes refer to calendar weeks in ordinary conversation — meetings are scheduled in week 34, holidays are taken in weeks 28 to 31 — to an extent that has no English equivalent. Interfaces dealing with scheduling benefit noticeably from displaying ISO week numbers, and their absence is a small but real gap.

Sweden is in the European Union and uses the krona rather than the euro, which billing code written for a generic European market regularly gets wrong. The decimal comma produces the familiar numeric-input hazard where floatval() discards the öre.

Compounds, and the error Swedes have a name for

Swedish compounds nouns without spaces, and writing a compound as separate words — särskrivning — is treated as a genuine error rather than a variant. It is common enough in careless writing to be a running national complaint, and it sometimes changes the meaning outright.

For software this reinforces the general rule against assembling text from fragments: a compound built by joining two translated words with a space is not merely inelegant, it is wrong and occasionally says something else. Compounds must be translated as single terms.

The layout consequence is the German-family one. Compounds arrive as single unbreakable tokens, so a container sized for English overflows rather than wraps, and Swedish expands roughly twenty to thirty per cent over English overall.

Let compounds hyphenate

<span class="hyphens-auto break-words" lang="sv">
    Användarkontoinställningar
</span>

<!-- lang="sv" gives the browser a dictionary;
     without it, hyphens:auto does nothing. -->

Two genders, and definiteness as a suffix

Swedish nouns are either common gender, taking en, or neuter, taking ett, and which one applies is not predictable from meaning. Roughly three quarters are common gender and the rest must be learned per word, as in Danish and Dutch.

Definiteness is marked by a suffix rather than by an article, so there is no word for a template to concatenate — the grammar is inside the noun. And as in Norwegian, an adjective triggers double definiteness: den nya filen uses both a free-standing article and the suffix.

Gender also controls adjective endings, so a shared adjective string will be wrong for roughly a quarter of nouns: en ny fil but ett nytt projekt. Between the gender, the suffix and double definiteness, Swedish noun phrases are effectively impossible to assemble correctly in code.

The du reform, and why formality is settled

Swedish had a formal address system and abandoned it. The du-reformen of the late 1960s replaced formal titles and the pronoun ni with universal informal du, and the change was thorough enough that formal address now reads as either archaic or faintly sarcastic.

Everything addresses users as du: banks, tax authorities, healthcare, enterprise software. This is one of the few languages where the register decision genuinely requires no thought, and where getting it wrong in the formal direction is worse than getting it wrong in the informal one.

A caveat: ni is still the ordinary plural, so it appears when addressing a group or a company. Some younger service staff have begun using ni as a formal singular again, which older Swedes find odd. For software, singular du is correct.

Swedish also has no grammatical gender in pronouns beyond han and hon, and has an established neutral third-person pronoun, hen, which entered the official dictionary in 2015. It is widely accepted and useful where a product must refer to a user of unknown gender, which is a cleaner solution than most languages offer.

That said, hen is still the marked choice rather than the default, and Swedish interface copy mostly avoids third-person reference to the user altogether, addressing them directly as du instead. Reach for hen where a sentence genuinely must refer to a third party of unknown gender, not as a blanket replacement.

Sorting, and the letters Sweden orders differently

The Swedish alphabet ends with å, ä and ö, in that order, after z. This differs from Norwegian and Danish, which end with æ, ø and å — different letters in a different sequence. A single Nordic collation does not exist, and using the wrong one produces a list the user reads as unsorted at the end.

Swedish collation

<?php

$collator = new Collator('sv_SE');
$collator->sort($words);

// Correct Swedish order: ... x, y, z, å, ä, ö
// Norwegian/Danish would give:  ... z, æ, ø, å
// German would put ä with a — wrong for Swedish.

The German comparison matters because ä and ö exist in both languages and sort completely differently: German treats them as variants of a and o, while Swedish treats them as separate letters at the end of the alphabet. A collator chosen for one is actively wrong for the other.

Swedish also traditionally sorts v and w together, treating them as the same letter, though modern practice increasingly separates them. Standard Swedish collation follows the modern rule; if you are matching an existing dataset, check which convention it used.

Search should fold diacritics for matching while preserving them for display, as in any accented language. Swedish keyboards make å, ä and ö easy to type, but users on foreign layouts and phones frequently substitute a and o, and requiring an exact match turns working search into frustrating search.

Be careful to fold rather than strip. Removing the diacritic entirely turns är into ar and öl into ol, which are different words, so the folded form belongs in a separate search column while the display value keeps its original spelling.

Getting Swedish into the application

Swedish poses no unusual demands on infrastructure — Latin script, straightforward encoding, two plural forms — so the work concentrates in a few specific places where Swedish conventions differ from the European defaults your code probably assumes.

Set the full locale for formatting rather than a bare language code, and check the date output specifically. ISO ordering is the one convention most likely to be overridden by a shared European date helper written for day-first markets, and it is the difference Swedish users notice fastest.

Configure the collator explicitly rather than relying on a database default. Swedish sorting differs from German for the same characters and from Norwegian for the adjacent ones, so a generic Unicode collation will be wrong at the end of the alphabet — where surnames beginning with Ö and Å live, which is exactly where users look to check whether a list is sorted.

Parse numeric input explicitly. The decimal comma means floatval() silently discards everything after it, and prices in krona run to four or five digits before the decimal, so the truncation removes a meaningful amount rather than rounding error.

Consider exposing ISO week numbers anywhere your product deals with scheduling or reporting periods. It is a small addition that maps onto how Swedes actually talk about time, and its absence is one of the quieter signals that a product was designed elsewhere.

What ships broken most often

• Day-first or month-first dates. Sweden expects ISO order, and anything else reads as foreign.
• German or Norwegian collation applied to Swedish. ä sorted with a, or å ä ö in the wrong sequence.
• Compounds split into separate words. A recognised error that occasionally changes the meaning.
• Truncated compounds. Single long tokens overflowing buttons and table headers.
• Formal address. Ni where du belongs reads as archaic or sarcastic.
• Wrong gender on adjectives and definite suffixes. Ett ny projekt rather than ett nytt projekt.
• Euro assumed. Sweden is in the EU and uses the krona.

Swedes read English fluently, so missing translations produce no complaints and survive indefinitely. Verify coverage with a key-parity check in CI rather than waiting for reports that will not come, and install the Laravel-Lang Swedish files for framework strings rather than translating validation messages yourself.

Keep Swedish, Danish, Bokmål and Nynorsk as four separate locales with separate translation memories. Mutual intelligibility makes them tempting to merge and guarantees vocabulary from each will leak into the others if you do.

Finland Swedish is a fifth variety worth knowing about. It is an official language of Finland with its own vocabulary for administrative and everyday concepts, and shipping Sweden Swedish into Finland reads as foreign in the same way shipping France French into Quebec does. If Finland is a target market, treat it as its own locale rather than assuming the Swedish translation covers it.

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in Swedish by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add sv
php artisan lang:update