As the most spoken language in Sweden, Swedish holds a de-facto national language status but not an official language status. It is spoken by about 9.5 million people worldwide in countries such as, Finland, Norway, Brazil, Argentina, Estonia and the USA. In fact, the US alone accounts for roughly 300,000 speakers of the Scandinavian languages, which includes Swedish as well. Out of the 9.5 million Swedish-speaking people, there are over 7.9 million who access the Internet worldwide in Swedish. The Swedish language belongs to the Scandinavian sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

The Swedish language is also widely spoken in Finland where it holds an official language status, along with Finnish. It is spoken by about 290, 000 people there. Though Swedish is not the official language of Sweden, it is spoken by almost all of its 9 million residents. Due to a position of peace and neutrality throughout the 20th century, Sweden enjoys a fairly stable economy with a skilled work force and a GDP of about 238 billion dollars. Although Sweden is a member of the European Union, the country has still not switched from its currency the Swedish Krona to the Euro. In addition, Sweden ranks the top fifth in the world for providing international aid and exporting weapons. The Swedish-speaking population represents an important factor in the Scandinavian markets, which in turn play a vital role in the European markets.

Swedish search engines directory:
	Altavista in Swedish: http://se.altavista.com Eniro: http://www.eniro.se/ Google in Swedish: http://www.google.com/intl/sv/ MSN in Swedish: http://search.msn.se Punkt aka Spry: http://www.punkt.se Tjohoo: http://www.tjohoo.se Lycos in Swedish: http://lycos.spray.se Walhello: http://www.walhello.com/mainse.html Yahoo in Swedish: http://se.yahoo.com Only websites fully translated into Swedish are eligible for inclusion in the Swedish Yahoo. Lycos.se, Hotbot.se and Spray.se have merged to one search engine; Lycos.spray.se