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Swedish dialects can be categorized into Traditional Dialects (with no Standard Swedish influence) and Modern Dialects (with various degrees of Standard Swedish influence).

The linguistic definition of a Swedish traditional dialect, in the literature merely called dialect, is a local variant that has not been heavily influenced by the standard language and that can trace a separate development all the way back to Old Norse. Many of the genuine rural dialects have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections. These dialects can be near-incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes, and most of their speakers are also fluent in Standard Swedish. The different dialects are often so localized that they are limited to individual parishes and are referred to by Swedish linguists as sockenmål (lit. "parish speech"). They are generally separated into six major groups, with common characteristics of prosody, grammar and vocabulary (the color represents the core area and the samples are from Svenska Dagbladet's dialect project):

Map showing the Swedish dialects traditionally spoken. (Note that the dialects in Estonia today are extincted in practice.)

Sydsvenska mål (dark blue); Sample (Skåne, Perstorps socken, N. Åsbo härad).

Götamål (red); Sample (Västergötland, Korsberga socken, Vartofta härad, Skaraborgs län).

Sveamål (dark green); Sample (Uppland, Håtuna socken, Håbo härad).

Norrländska mål (light blue); Sample (Västerbotten, Skellefte socken, Löparnäs).

Östvenska mål (orange); Sample (Finland, Österbotten, Sideby socken).

Gotländska mål (light green); Sample (Gotland, Lau Socken, Gotlands södra härad).

The areas with mixed colors as stripes are transitional areas (övergångsområden, following the terminology of Gertrud Pettersson's Svenska under sjuhundra år). The parts in yellow with coloured dots represent various distinct (särpräglade, following the terminology of Gertrud Pettersson's Svenska under sjuhundra år) dialect areas which are not easily defined belonging to any of the six major groups above. The areas west of the core for Norrländska mål, west of Sveamål and north of Göta are related to each of these, respectively, indicated by the colour of the dots. Samples from respecively area: Jämtland, Föllinge socken (related to Norrländska mål), Dalarna, Älvdalens socken (related to Sveamål) and Värmland, Nordmarks härad, Töcksmarks socken (related to Götamål and Sveamål). The dialects of this category have in common that they all show more or less strong Norwegian influences, especially the dialects in Härjedalen, Northwestern Jämtland and Northwestern Dalarna. The grey area does not have any independently developed Swedish dialect.

Below we have a summary (from Svenska språket under sjuhundra år, Gertrud Pettersson) of some of the most important differences between the major groups.

Note that this table does not hold for the distinct (dotted) or transitional (striped) areas.

• Norwegian dialects
• North Germanic languages

• Pettersson, Gertrud (1996) Svenska språket under sjuhundra år ISBN 91-44-48221-3